ANYWAY…

I feel like an apology is in order, but 1) my lack of updates has not diminished the quality of anyone’s life, 2) it’s not like you’re paying for it, and 3) after the first week, I doubt you even noticed I wasn’t here.

So tonight, I wanted to talk a little bit about pizza. Which you might have guessed. (The title is inspired by a pizza parlor in Oakland called Zza’s that my family went to once or twice when I was very young. I have no recollection of the quality of the food, although I think I remember that they had an electric sign “ZZA’S” sign inside that they would light up for your birthday. Or maybe I’m just making all this up.)

I finally figured out that for all the things that my oven screws up completely, for all the effort that I have to put into not buring every single thing I throw in there, the one thing it can do really well is cook pizza. I’ve been making a lot of pizza recently, because I enjoy making the dough, it’s easy to find good toppings, and it’s really the only from-scratch bread-type object I can pull off. Plus one batch of dough can last two nights, or one round of pizza plus grissini, which I made tonight. Those turned out pretty good too.

So remember how I said how hot my oven gets – 600 or whatever? Yeah, that’s not right. It has to be much hotter than that. I started noticing that when I put pizzas in the oven after I’d turned the oven on and left it to its own devices for twenty minutes, that the pie would be done in about half the time that any recipe I could find would estimate. And the only reason I thought it was at 600 was because that’s as high as my oven thermometer goes.  My new guess is closer to 700, although without a professional thermometer I may never know.  There may not be an upper limit on how hot it gets – it may just get hotter and hotter until it explodes, and you’re left standing there, fully scorched like a cartoon character, a set of blinking eyes in a body of ash.

Mostly that’s fine, because you want your oven as hot as possible for pizza. It actually works out to my advantage. The only problem is that I don’t have a pizza stone, so my poor baking pan gets all bent out of shape over the heat. Literally. Like Carson Wells, it’s just not prepared for the intensity of the task I have asked of it.  I suppose I’ll have to spring for a stone soon, before my pan shatters in the oven. Plus I have to dress the pizza on the preheated pan because I don’t have a serving board to slide a dressed pizza onto the pan with, so that’s a frantic two minutes. But all in all, the current gear makes a good, crispy crust with a nice sizzle.

Pizza is a great do-it-yourself activity if you plan at least a day ahead – I find that a night in the fridge really gives the crust a good tang.  Here’s the recipe I use for the crust if you’re interested. I’d leave more crust-space than F&W does, and be sure to brush the edges with olive oil. But it’s a good, solid recipe to start with if you don’t have one already.

Super Bowl’s coming up. I always get a little excited for it – not for the actual event, which hasn’t contained a team I cared about for over a decade, but for the small get-together that accompanies it. It’s always a good chance to try out some fun comfort-food type recipes that I’ve been thinking about for a while. And of course, it’s always a great opportunity to make a huge batch of guacamole. Making guac isn’t something I get to do all that often these days because J isn’t a huge fan of the stuff, and avocados have such a short shelf life (once they reach ripeness, anyways) that if I buy one there’s an even chance it will wither on top of the fridge before I can get to use it. Considering how rare these things are going to be this spring after this year’s devastating crop freeze, I’ll probably cut back even more on my avocado purchases this year. It would be a shame to waste even one. But I’ll definitely be picking up a few today. They’ll be put to good use tomorrow.

In a similar vein of anticipation, the SF Chronicle has published a group of guacamole recipes in their Wednesday food section. It was fun to look at the recipes, some of them coming from restaurants that I’ve had my eye on for a while. Guac is one of those foods that is simple to make, and yet can run in a thousand different directions depending on what the cook decides to include in his or her version. Most of these are variations on a theme – some combination of tomatoes, onion, garlic, chiles, cilantro (occasionally), and salt. There are also the wacky versions that add sour cream or mayonnaise. Blech. Who would do such a thing?! Avocados are already filled with fat, sweet flavor. Why do you need another (inferior) fat to drown it out? Most food history sources I could find point to this being an American adaptation, which doesn’t surprise me. Damn Americans. Always gotta deep-fry the lily.

There is, however, the tricky question of citrus juice. Usually you’ll see lime or lemon juice, although I’ve seen a few versions with other kinds of citrus.  The problem is, I don’t like either one. For me, the acidity of lime or lemon juice is so effective at cutting through the fattiness of the avocado, it takes away the pleasure of the avocado’s flavor. Unless the cook is VERY stingy, citrus can quickly overwhelm almost everything else in the guacamole bowl. So I usually leave it out. The majority of the Chronicle’s assembled guacamole chefs disagreed with me, though: 3 out of the 5 recipes included lime juice. Oh well. They probably know how to control it better than I do. Which is why I’m leaving it out tomorrow.

Pointless prediction: Colts 27, Bears 17

I got an email from Ghetto Gourmet a few days ago. It was one of those happy/sad moments. Happy because the night J and I spent with the Ghetto Gourmet folks was a lot of fun and featured some pretty dang good food, and it was fun to remember that night. Sad because unless the Ghet takes a serious turn away from the direction they’ve been heading in, it’s very unlikely we’ll ever get a chance to go to one of their events again.

A little background for the uninitiated: Ghetto Gourmet is a roving, semi-clandestine dining group that puts on small (less than 40 people, usually) dinners in houses, lofts, warehouses, and anywhere else they can find a room or two, an oven, and a range. Most of their meals have taken place in California, but upon checking their website, they seem to be heading off for more dinners across the country. If you want to go to a Ghetto Gourmet event, it’s pretty simple: you pay in advance through their website, they tell you where to go and what time, and you show up (with wine/beer – it’s BYOB), sit down at a long, low table, and chat with your neighbors while 3-5 courses are brought out in succession. Most of the dinners feature some sort of entertainment, like a local band, a performing troupe, or whatever else happens to be hip at that particular instant. The faux-secrecy, the intrigue, and the quality of the presentation make GG a fun and novel attempt to put a little spark and surprise in the California/US dining scene.

The night that J and I went out for a Ghetto Gourmet meal, the dinner was took place at a house in Culver City (it was originally supposed to happen in Silverlake, but apparently had to be relocated due to size issues). J and I aren’t world champion conversationalists, but everyone we met (including Steve Julian!) was very nice, and the dozen or so people we ended up with at the table were a great group of 20-30somethings. For the most part, the food was excellent and interesting: sushi with cured beef and mint as an amuse bouche, for example. A few dishes felt like they could have been just a smidgen better with a slight tweak or to. But that’s splitting hairs; the dinner was well worth the $40 per we shelled out. The acoustic guitar duo that performed during the dinner was even decent, although they alternated complaints that we were either too quiet or too loud during their songs. The Ghetto Gourmet owner also spent a little too long waxing poetic about how terrific the underground dining community was and what an exciting vanguard we were part of. Nonetheless, the Ghet made for a fun meal and good stuff all around.

So why won’t we be heading out to any more GG events? Well, since that night about six months ago, Ghetto Gourmet’s dinners have risen in price from $40 per head to $50-60. Forty bucks for a dinner of that size, with no tax or tip needed, is a solid deal – a similar dinner at any number of upscaley places in LA will set you and your mate back $100 at least. $50 is pushing it a little…but $60? Without alcohol? If you’re talking about paying $120 for dinner w/BYOB, now you’ve got a whole host of popular restaurants that can compete in that price range. Sunday Suppers at Lucques, prix fixe at Opus, the market dinner at Hatfields, even a standard three-course dinner at Range – all these places can match or beat a dinner at that price, depending on what you order. Places with a lot of weight and heft in foodie circles (and, admittedly, mostly places that I haven’t visited yet. Er.). Places that I would bank on having a good meal at before going back to the Ghet. Another possible outcome of this is that the higher the entrance fee is, the less interesting people you are going to see at the dinners, as the spaces are taken by more guests who are looking to take a break from their usual routine of Patina and Spago, shocked that their neighbor would ask them for a taste of their wine. In other words, a very standard LA restaurant crowd.

I dunno…maybe the folks at GG think that their ability to provide a night’s entertainment has evolved to the point that the extra $ is worth it to their customers. Or maybe people are just tired of going to the same places and they need something new and a little exciting, and they’re willing to shell out a little extra for it. I haven’t been to one of the $60 per dinners, so I can’t speak to their value. But to me, it seems like ringing up that kind of a tab goes against what the owner of GG was going on about at our dinner that night – something that cut across the normal dining experience. Kind of a shame.

I’m currently working on a very short-term temp assignment (less than three full days) for a company in Glendale. On assignments like these, you really only have time to meet your immediate supervisor and maybe two or three other workers you’ll be interacting with, and that’s it. You stay pretty incognito the whole time you’re there, smiling at people while making no effort to introduce yourself or engage in anything longer than 10 seconds of conversation. As long as you’re fine with being an anonymous pawn, it’s good work.

The tricky part comes when someone in the office brings communal food into the kitchen – bagels and cream cheese, for example. You’re not really an employee…are you allowed to partake? Nobody will call you out for not being allowed to eat if you’re caught, but when I’ve had office food as a short-term temp in the past, it’s always felt a little bit like stealing. The longer that an assignment lasts, though, the rules change. As far as I can tell, here are the ground rules for how long you have to work in an office in order to gain certain food-related privileges:

1-2 days: You can get water from the office cooler during off-peak kitchen hours. Avoid eye contact at all times.

1 week: You can pour the cold dregs remaining in the office’s coffee pot at 11:30 into a mug (that you brought yourself).

1 month: You can use the microwave. If whatever you are warming up explodes, however, leave the building immediately, don’t look back, fly to Tibet and become a monk. Underground. Forever.

3 months: Go ahead, take the last bagel. It’s an unidentifiable flavor (pistachio? guacamole?) and stale anyway. But don’t touch that cream cheese. That is not for you!

6 months: Where’s the secretary? Three-martini lunch? Oh, three-martini coffee break. Well, see that basket of gawdawful hard candies on her desk – the ones that probably taste like milk and kerosene? Help yourself to a handful; nobody else has.

1 year: You can take a third slice of pizza from the box. Just make sure 1-Month Guy watches you do it as he stands there with an empty paper plate. Yes, 1-Month Guy, this is how it is!

2 years: At the company holiday party, you can order a fourth gimlet, while your boss – still stuck on the eighth step in AA – watches. Bottoms up, sir! Nice sweater.

5 years: At last, the double-whammy – you decide that you need to stay late to finish the project that in all truth would have been finished last week were it not for sheer laziness, so you order Chinese food from across the street for delivery and expense it, along with the $20 tip you gave the half-stoned dude who showed up. Hey, you didn’t have anything smaller in your wallet, right?

10 years: You can store half-eaten candy bars in coworkers’ desks, then ask for them back a month later.

15 years: The new CEO walks into his office in the morning to find you sitting behind his desk, without any pants on, eating cubes of butter. You are given a $5000 raise on the condition that next time he catches you doing that, you are at least wearing underwear.

20 years: You catch the new guy on his first day trying to sneak a bagel into his pocket. His disappearance is mentioned once on the evening news a few days later.