I just got home from a fantastic tour of Taiwanese food in Arcadia.  Organized by Six Taste, a super cool company that runs outings to six Los Angeles neighborhoods (including Thai Town, Little Tokyo and Santa Monica, to name a few), the tour included stops at local food purveyors along with an excellent tutorial on Taiwanese cuisine, dining traditions and cultural history.  Our tour guide Mike was full of interesting facts, funny stories and upbeat energy.

The highlight of the day was Din Tai Fung, a juggernaut of Taiwanese dumpling deliciousness.

Steamed pork dumplings

The xiao long bao (above) were beautiful little packages of pork in a slightly chewy, al dente (or “Q”, as the Taiwanese like to call it) dough.   Holding the dumpling over a plastic spoon, we were instructed to take a small bite out of the casing, which released a little pool of flavorful broth which you could sip on its own before eating the meat.  A pungent mix of Taiwanese balsamic vinegar and freshly julienned ginger provided a tangy dipping sauce on the side, if you wanted to kick it up a notch.  We also feasted on stir-fried rice cakes, pork & sticky rice shaomai (below) and taro dessert dumplings.

Pork & sticky rice shaomai

All you foodies out there need to check these tours out.  Six Taste just celebrated its one-year anniversary, and as a young company in a tough economic climate, they need all the support they can get.  (Check out Yelp for loads of great reviews of their tours.)  Next on my list is the Financial District, which includes a potpourri of cuisines along with loads of interesting architectural and historical info about downtown L.A.   The guide of that tour, Tracy, was on our tour today, and she is a font of wisdom about Los Angeles and beyond.  Anyone care to join me?

Take the Nestea plunge

When the thermometer blows way past 90 and the air is dry as dirt, I find myself yearning for that perfect, thirst-quenching summer drink.  I imagine a tall sparkling glass, glinting in the sunshine, loaded with ice and filled to the brim with a bracingly cold, smooth beverage that defies the heat. Sweating tiny droplets of condensation, it delivers you from sweaty, sticky, buggy afternoons with a single sip.

While a good old Diet Coke on ice or a bottle of Corona straight out of the cooler will do the trick in a pinch, I occasionally like to aim higher for a more inspired – dare I say sublime? – summer libation.   I have had two excellent cocktails in the past few weeks that fall into that category.  The first was the Summer Margarita at Casa Cocina & Cantina in downtown Los Angeles.  A refreshing concoction of muddled honeydew melon, cucumber and cilantro, mixed with their excellent house tequila, and poured into a martini glass rimmed with salt, it was – as the name promised – summer in a glass.  Pair it with their outrageous pork belly sopes, and you’d swear you were sitting on the beach somewhere on the Mexican Riviera.  Riquísimo.

Does this count as a salad?

On a completely different geographical wavelength, but equally as tasty, is the Basil Cucumber Collins at Roy’s in Pasadena.  Their balmy beverage includes Square One Certified Organic Cucumber Vodka muddled with basil, fresh lime juice and is topped with club soda.  Not too sweet nor overpoweringly alcohol-y, it was a perfect compliment to my sashimi appetizer and fresh fish entree.  It was hard to limit myself to just one.

Given our unseasonably cool summer so far (whoever heard of July gloom?), I hope the folks at Casa and Roy’s extend their summer drink offerings well into the fall, so we can sip these beauties when it’s 100 degrees in October.  Cheers!

The new Panera at the LC Town Center

I recently visited our newest local La Cañada restaurant, Panera Bread, and wrote a review of my lunch experience for thereallacanada.com.  Check it out here.  (And check out the whole website – it has loads of good info about what’s up in LCF.)

Spinach tart w/ snap pea salad

I was invited to a lovely lunch last week with a friend who has scoped out nearby restaurants that use locally grown, sustainable, organic ingredients.  She introduced me to an Eagle Rock eatery called Four Café – named for the seasons that its menu dutifully follows.  At our meal, we chose from a lineup that was bursting forth with vibrant springtime veggies, fragrant cheeses and gorgeous baked goods.

That's a day's worth of veggies right there

I started out with a creamless asparagus soup with a sprinkling of diced red onions and a splash of California olive oil floating on top.  It was flavorful and filling, a bowlful of spring.  My main course was a spinach and goat cheese tart, which was gorgeous in its simplicity.  My friend had a spectacular salad of snap peas, feta cheese and capers, along with a spicy beef brisket chili.  Four Café’s natural drink offerings are refreshingly tasty – I was able to forgo my daily Diet Coke without much grumbling.  I chose a lovely honey iced tea, but am eager to return to try their natural sodas (the peach gingerade on their summer menu is at the top of my list).

Apple & almond heaven

And while the main courses were excellent for their superior flavors, they were all the more appreciated for a pleasingly low calorie count.  I must admit that I planned this lunch out backwards, working from the desserts first.  Offered on this day was an array of cookies, brownies, cakes and pastries that required serious strategic planning, so as to get the appropriate chocolate:fruit:chewy:crispy ratio.  (This was no small feat, let me tell you.)  We went with two cookies (chocolate chip – warm and chewy, fresh out of the oven – and a crumbly lavender shortbread that was nothing short of teatime bliss) and a sublime apple and almond paste tart with a flaky, buttery crust to die for.

It was a perfect little lunch, with a beginning, middle and end.  And like all seasons, my meal has come and gone.  But thanks to the folks at Four, I can look forward to the promise of new tasty treats throughout the year – my own annual cycle of culinary renewal.

Trader Joe's Omega Trek Mix

This is the best-tasting trek mix I’ve found that doesn’t contain anything yogurty, peanut buttery or chocolate-covered.  Why, you ask, would you want a trail mix without those delectables?  Cause I feel better when I eat it, ok?  I can go over to See’s Candies and get a pound of toffee-ettes if I’m looking for that kind of fix, thank you very much.

This combo has walnuts, pistachios, omega 3-fortified dried cranberries, pepitas, pecans and almonds, with a healthy dash of salt to give it a perfect savory-sweet taste.   Trader Joe’s also pre-packages it into perfect little snack packs for those of us who can’t be bothered to do it ourselves.  Great for the car or on the go.

I am going to take this opportunity, as the sun peeks out after two dreary May days, to highlight a lovely little Mexican restaurant I discovered recently called El Sol.  Located in a little shopping center on Honolulu in western Montrose/La Crescenta (and next-door neighbor to my new weekly hangout, the Wishy Washy coin laundromat), El Sol is a family-run restaurant that serves up tasty homemade Mexican-American dishes.  With only eight or ten tables and booths covered with plastic floral tablecloths, it’s a cozy, homey place. And the food tastes like someone’s mom or grandma made it.

Pork huaraches

In my two visits, I have enjoyed warm tortilla chips with a fresh, slightly spicy salsa; tortilla soup made with loads of fresh veggies, like zucchini, squash and carrots; and huaraches con carnitas, which are flat, slightly thick corn tortillas topped with beans, cheese, roasted pork, cool and crisp shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, fresh cilantro, guacamole and a dollop of sour cream.  (The last dish was a daily special, but the owner assured me that its popularity will make it a standard menu item soon.  Excellent.)  Every dish I tried at El Sol was flavorful, light and well-seasoned; in contrast to your run-of-the-mill Mexican restaurants, the food wasn’t greasy, over-sauced or drowning in melted cheese.  I found that to be a welcome alternative.

This is a little diamond in the rough, so you need to check it out.  Thank goodness my washing machine will be out of service for a couple more months and I’ll have to make weekly treks to the laundromat.  Forget fluff & fold – mamita’s got some eating to do.

A bowl of pho

I’ve always been afraid to pronounce this Vietnamese noodle soup the correct way, for fear that I might be mistaken for uttering an obscenity, or that I might look like a major poser.  Looks like it should be “foe”, but actually sounds like “fuh”.  Take note, my friends; when I throw that one out there, keep your snarky comments to yourself.

Well, I’m going to get more practice saying it, since I’ve found a good little Vietnamese noodle joint right down the street in Montrose.  Pho 22, located across the driveway from Anderson’s Pet Store on Honolulu, is a cute little restaurant with a menu focusing on the aforementioned hot noodle soup as well as another hard-to-know-the-right-way-to-pronounce-it dish: bún (not as in hamburger, but as in Daniel, the American pioneer).  Bún is a cold dish consisting of rice vermicelli, grilled meat or tofu (I had the pork), fresh cucumber, carrots, bean sprouts, cilantro, a sprinkling of ground peanuts and a side bowl of a light, seasoned fish sauce that you can pour over the entire thing.  They also threw in a little fried spring roll for kicks.  Here’s a picture of it.

Bun cha

I found the dish to be refreshing and very filling.  The cold noodles soaked up the flavorful (but not overpowering, thanks to the addition of lemon juice, sugar and vinegar) fish sauce and provided a soft and chewy counterpoint to the crunchy brightness of the raw veggies.  The pork was a bit tough from being overcooked, so I will likely try the tofu next time.  Overall, the dish satisfied my carbohydrate craving for noodles without the post-meal crash I get from regular pasta.  Plus, at less than $10 a shot, this well-balanced meal-in-a-bowl is a pretty good deal.

While I am keenly aware that Pho 22’s fare isn’t the be-all, end-all of Vietnamese cuisine in Los Angeles, it does offer an introduction to food that isn’t readily available in the immediate La Canada area.  It’s worth a trip to see if it piques your interest.  If it does, you have a nice variety of restaurants within a 20-mile radius that offer more refined/authentic/sophisticated/delicious versions of pho and bún and other unexplored Vietnamese delicacies.  Some that come to mind are:  Blue Hen in Eagle Rock, Golden Deli and Saigon Flavor in San Gabriel, Viet Noodle Bar and Indochine Vien in Atwater Village, and Ginger Grass in Silver Lake.  Or, as I posted a month ago, you can always hunt down the Mandoline Grill truck if you’re on the go.

Montrose Home Bakery is a cute little storefront in one of my favorite local foodie areas, Honolulu Avenue in Montrose.  They have your traditional bakery offerings, all of which are tasty: danish, muffins, cookies, fruit tarts, cakes, etc.  But no one prepared me for this.

This ain't Wonder Bread, Helen

One of their bakers must have dropped some acid the other morning, because these are slices of a loaf of bread they were selling on Tuesday.   It tastes just like plain ol’ white, but it sure doesn’t look like it, courtesy of copious amounts of food coloring.  I’m not sure if this is an on-going offering, or if they take requests for other color palettes.  I sure hope they do, because I think this is genius.

My son – usually a straight-up, no-frills, bologna-on-wheat kind of guy – insisted I make him a sandwich with this bread yesterday.  I was a little concerned the kids might find it (and him) weird, and lord knows I do not want to contribute to my child’s potential social ostracization.  But the bread did quite the opposite – it made him into a total rock star.  I was told that one of the lunch aides felt compelled to bring the slice around to show the kids at every table in the cafeteria.  I heard about it in car line at the end of the day.  Kids were yelling to me from the sidewalk, wondering where the “rainbow bread” came from.

Well, now you know.

The Breakfast Jack can kiss my you know what

Now here’s an educational institution I can really get behind: The Grilled Cheese Academy.  A brilliant marketing campaign for Wisconsin cheese, the GCA website presents a gorgeous catalog of over twenty-five gourmet iterations of the traditional Wonder Bread/Kraft American/Parkay margerine concoction.  Let me tell you, these sammies sure are purdy.  Predictably, my personal favorite is The Nantucket (#4), although The Flatiron (#6, pictured above) is a close second.  My panini grill (which has been languishing for weeks after the initial post-purchase spurt of activity) is going to get some action this week as I try to replicate some of these beauties.

If I were to pick my own local grilled cheese fave, it would have to be from Berge’s Sandwich Shop on Foothill.  A combo of what appears to be american, jack and cheddar cheeses are grilled to gooey perfection on your choice of bread (I prefer the classic white), and it pairs perfectly with their sublime tomato-basil bisque.  A must for lunch on those gloomy gray days of winter (or the beginning of June gloom).

If Berge’s doesn’t quite cut it for you, or if you need to push the envelope with some limburger or butterkäse, then you need to get yourself to the Grilled Cheese Invitational, taking place on Saturday, April 24 at the Los Angeles Center Studios.  People from all over the country evidently come to this juried cheese sandwich extravaganza, so get your tickets early.

And begin fasting now.

I see you, Kogi truck

As if an answer to my recent prayers for assistance with the whole food truck tracking thing, a nifty little website came onto my radar yesterday.  la.truxmap.com shows you – in real time – the location of these trucks (they follow about 80 in total) when they are out and about in the Los Angeles area.  No need to hop from website to website, potentially wasting valuable transit (and eating) time, to determine which one is closest to you; just one click, and you (literally) get the whole picture.

Once you pull up the map, you can click on the specific trucks to see their menus; current, past and future locations; recent tweets and Yelp! reviews.  It even gives you traffic updates so you can plan out the most efficient route to your meal.

And if getting on this one website is still too taxing for you, you can also sign up for email alerts that come only when your favorite trucks are within a certain radius of your zip code.

You have no excuse to miss out on this any longer, people.

This is very, very dangerous.