Anger Burger

As an American, I didn’t understand until recently that ramen is an edible foodgroup.  That wretched dry brick was all I’d had, and even as a salt-hungry and largely tastebud-dead teen I knew that shit was evil.  After eating it I’d get a chemical flush all over my face and neck and would often lose sensation in my tongue for a short while.  It did not bode well for my desire to be a penniless college student.

Then, I found real ramen.  A paragon of noodles.  The king of bowl-meals, an ambassador of all things salty and soothing.  Hakata ramen, my current obsession, is made with a thick, oily, milky-looking bone-based pork broth.  It’s fucking insidious, I warn you now.  Traditionally, Hakata ramen should have very thin noodles lacking that trademark kinkiness of other ramens, and I think that’s a good deal of why I like it so much, but if I implied it wasn’t about the broth I’d be misleading you.

The Viking and Frego.

It doesn’t surprise me that Los Angeles is home to several great and totally authentic ramen joints, but what did surprise me is that we moved near one of them: Ramen Jinya.

He accepts your heathen noodles and will spare your village.  Today.

I think I’d still prefer a bowl of Shin-Sen-Gumi’s Hakata ramen if handed a bowl of each and asked to choose, but we’re starting to enter Sophie’s Choice territory.  Jinya’s pork is superior and the broth is almost a dead ringer – only the noodles break in favor of Shin-Sen-Gumi, and then only because I feel less of an ass ordering them soft (the option is right on the ticket you fill out and hand to the server).  But here’s the real issue: Shin-Sen-Gumi is a 45-minute drive away now.  Jinya, you have the lead.

A few years ago I made a kind of life-long New Years resolution of sorts, and it was:  work towards living in a Hobbit hole.  When you’re done laughing, I’ll continue.

It came about from a burgeoning frustration and disgust with my cheap yard-sale Ikea hand-me-down furniture.  Somehow I’d acquired a lot of low-quality mid-century reproductions, as most of us in the low-income bracket seem to do, and my personality could not be more at odds with this aesthetic design.  While I read science fiction and goof off on the coming singularity, I knew for many years that I was only truly comfortable when surrounded by gnarled wooden things, tufted old furniture with turned legs and a ring of power hidden somewhere nearby.

Basically, as we must get new items, particularly large and furniture-shaped items, we now restrict ourselves to the mantra of “Would this be in a Hobbit hole?”  The downside is that we’ve gone without a sofa for years since we can’t seem to find a Hobbit sofa that we can afford.  The upside is that, slowly but surely, we’re turning into the mouse-scented, dusty old fogeys I’d hoped we’d be.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that the Hobbit hole rule has applied to smaller items as well, which is why I was instantly lovestruck by Broomchick’s handmade brooms on Etsy:

This beauty arrived in the mail last week, my housewarming gift to myself.  If it seems absurd to pay $50 (after shipping) for a broom, not so long ago I’d have agreed with you.  Now that I have it, I can’t imagine not having it.

The obvious attraction is visual – the rough bark handle, both straight and crooked, the chunky weaving where the bristles meet the shaft, even the leather loop at the top.  Hell, we hung it on a prominent wall in the kitchen, we like the look of it so much.  However, it’s the secondary functional attraction that I didn’t expect to be so infatuated with.  The spring of the natural bristles is totally unlike the synthetic brooms I am familiar with, and the bark on the handle not only is perfectly grippy for spindly sweaty hands like mine, but the more you use it the better your hands smell.   After vigorously sweeping our large area rug today I smelled as though I’d been hauling chopped wood.  I mean this in a good way.

I fear I’m getting loony here, but I can’t express enough how pleased I am with this broom.  The idea of it borders on a domestic kitsch I would normally avoid, but I find myself glancing fondly at it each time I walk by, and yes, sweeping more than I normally do.  If you’re looking for a thoroughly useful holiday gift for someone, I truly can’t think of anything better.  Everyone needs a broom.  Almost no one has a broom worthy of display.  Done and done.

Broomchick makes a wide variety of shapes (I also bought a turkey-wing hand broom and nearly purchased a cobweb broom as well, but finances being what they are I had to draw the line somewhere) and colors.  Really, go look.  Look how little I’m swearing!  That’s how much I want you to look at the fucking things.  Whoops.

Who knew I was going to have more time to write during my move than after? Did any of you know this? I didn’t know this.

So, lemme tell you about how I’m in love with an old Mexican woman.

As you might imagine, the only thing that makes me sad about moving is that we’re moving away from our established eateries, including the trucks.  Sure, the food trucks visit other parts of town, and they even come up to the Valley, but nothing like the Street of Trucks (which, if you’re a Google map addict like me is at 5900 Wilshire).  Things at Guacamole House are bucolic, but I still have dreams of being walking distance from cheeseburger sushi and overpriced banh mi.

Enter: Antojitos mi Abuelita.  In Caucasian, that translates¹ to “Raddest Mexican Food Ever.”

That’s my friend Nathan on the right.  He’s even more blurry in person.

Oh, mi Abuelita.  Oh, my heart.  Is three times in a week too many?  I hope not, because my stomach shows no sign of stopping.  Each day we don’t eat at the Abuelita truck, I wonder when the next time we can eat at the Abuelita truck will be. Unfortunately each time we go it’s after dark and the little folding tables are lit only by a single fluorescent bulb, so the photos look like this:

But I think you get a reasonable idea of what we’re dealing with here.  Also I’m shaking with hunger rage.  Anyway, the above is Mike the Viking’s burrito mojado, which Google warns me might mean “wetback burrito” but something tells me that’s not what Abuelita means by it.  The sauce over the top of the giant burrito isn’t the typical enchilada sauce of most wet burritos, but a shockingly flavorous oregano-laced tomato soup loaded with stewed peppers and vegetables.  It’s not overly spicy or tomatoey, but somehow transformative in a way that I would never have predicted.  Easily the best wet burrito of my life.

But I’m here to talk about the huaraches.  The photograph is uniquely terrible even by my standards, so I’ll have to walk you through it with word pictures: it’s a fried corn masa bottom, like a thick tortilla, that ends up chewy and a little crispy just around the edges.  It’s too soft and chewy to pick up and eat like a tostada, so it’s a knife and fork kind of thing.  It’s topped at Abuelita with green chili sauce, lettuce, cheese, crema, meat (pork, here) and the crowning, mind-blower: carmelized onions.  I cannot express how much the huarache is more than the sum of its parts.  It’s an unexplainable phenomenon.

Truly, I could not be happier.  I had believed only the mentally impaired could experience a blissfulness such as this, but for a few brief minutes I figured out a work-around.

¹ It might be closer to “Grandmother’s Street Food” but I learned German in high school because no one warned me that learning German was a complete and total waste of time. Scheiße!

“… We have every confidence that we’ll find a big, free, wood-floored house in a crime-free part of the city where wild unicorns deliver baskets of ripe figs and avocados to residents every morning.”

That quote?  Was me two years ago, being sarcastic about the kind of place I expected to live when we moved to Los Angeles.  We settled for a sunless, loud ground floor apartment with no real parking space and no visible plantlife.  But then as you know we are now moving into a lovely wood-floored house and I decided to let the unicorns and figs and avocados pass until the next place we live.

And then, as we were out at the new house today so the utilities could be set up, I took a walk through my new backyard.  And looked up.  And then screamed at the top of my lungs “OH MY GOD!”

“What’s the matter?!” Mike came running in a panic.

“LOOK!”

“Uh, I don’t…”

“LOOK CLOSER!”

“Is that?”

“THIS IS A MOTHERFUCKING AVOCADO TREE, MOTHERFUCKEEEEER!”

After I literally and truly had a moment of chest pain after jumping up and down and screaming for who knows how long, I took a long breather and tried to rest my eyes and blood pressure by looking at something else for a minute.  “OH MY GOD!”

BANANAS.  How did I not notice we signed a lease for the goddamn Garden of Eden?  I mean, I liked it before, but now I’m already trying to think of how to most casually mention to the landlords that we really won’t be leaving.  Ever.

She really believes she’ll get some cheesesteak.  She didn’t.  We’re assholes.  And she’s allergic to beef.

Meanwhile, The Thing That Lurks, our Boston Terrier, had the most amazing funtime I’ve ever seen her have.  The entire backyard is enclosed, and after a sort of lackluster first 20 minutes – I mean, don’t get me wrong, she wagged her tail and stuff – I was like, well, okay, the dog doesn’t hate it.  And then all of a sudden, and I’m not kidding both Mike and I were there to watch it, she all of a sudden realized she was outside without a leash on.    She jumped straight in the air about four feet and then raced in a 100-mph circle around the whole yard like a jackrabbit on PCP.  It was those most exhilarating and genuinely joyous thing I’ve ever seen anything do, ever.  Mike and I laughed and ran and clapped our hands like toddlers.

Later, after the utilities were all sorted we went out for cheesesteaks where the bastard that cooked them both did not have Wiz to put on it, but also forgot the onions and peppers.  I basically couldn’t eat it.  I ate maybe a quarter of it and put it back down, because a cheesesteak without Wiz and onions and peppers is just a fried beef sandwich¹, which is no good at all.

AVOCADOES.  Oh my god.  I think I might have injured my heart, I’m serious.

¹ A.k.a., a hamburger. Which I normally like and want. But not when I think it’s going to be a cheesesteak.

I’ll give you the punchline up front.  It didn’t work.

I mean, it looks great and also not great at the same time.  Never in my life have I stood before a baked good like this one and thought, maybe I’ve gone too far.  Wait, no, there was the time I made a Jell-O mold with Twinkies suspended in it, but that was at someone else’s request.

They puffed ominously in the oven, I thought they were going to explode.

But the thing is!  The marshmallow disappeared.  It swelled up and then disappeared.  The pie was still warm when I cut into it so the top crust just compressed instead of breaking, but the whole pie was basically hollow aside from two pieces of banana.  It was lacking in flavor too – we agreed that it needed more fruit, and my mind went immediately to crushed pineapple.  Crushed pineapple and banana pie with melty chocolate and marshmallow?  Yes.  So alright, I will try to make these again.

To make myself feel better I made some apple and caramel sauce pies.  Trader Joe’s is making a jarred sea salt caramel sauce that is absolutely incredible – it really took everything I’m worth to not just throw the pie stuff away and eat the jar of caramel straight.

But of course, it totally boiled out of the pies.  My fury was like the breaking of a thousand crystal unicorns.  The pies were still good, actually, the burned caramel was only on the pan and not inside the pies, but still.  Luckily I had half a jar of caramel left and could just dip my pie as I went.   Next time I’ll try dulce de leche, maybe that won’t boil out.

See?  Still good.  Great, in fact.  Never underestimate the power of the humble apple pie.   Like, without cinnamon or froofery?  For these pies I tossed the apples with some lemon juice to tart them up even more, something to remember when using a base as sweet as caramel sauce, but man.  Apple pie.  Let’s give it a moment of silence.

Well, I’m disgusted.  So, I made this raspberry pie, see.  It’s a nice enough raspberry pie, it’s been a recent favorite around here after a long spat of cherry pie requests.  I realize we’re right smack in the middle of fresh fruit season, but two bags of frozen raspberries runs me less than $5 and when it’s too hot out to do anything but slap together a crust as fast as you can before the whole thing starts melting, it’s genius.

So there I am, making this pie, when I remember that Anger Burger reader Jason sent me a packet of guava paste.  Which is well and good, lord knows I love a fruit paste, but I was having trouble deciding what to do with the stuff.  It’s very dense and heavy, and while I wanted to make a guava cake, I knew I would have to cook it down with some water or guava juice to make it work in cake.  And you know, that’s a lot of work for someone who recently bought nicer jim-jam bottoms so that she felt less embarrassed about going out to check her mail in them.  However, I am standing there, staring at the usual pile of pie dough scraps, when a little fruitfly whispers in my ear: pasta de guayaba!  And I’m all, I don’t speak fruitfly!  You’re in America now!  Learn the language!  Freeloader.

First, a taste.  Primary reaction: SUGAR!  Holy christ, that’s sweet.  But then: GUAVA!  Lovely, floral, tropical guava.  It even has the slight grit of a guava – like a pear.  Somewhat disheartened, I wonder how I can make something so sweet palatable.

Hmm, I wonder, while staring at some fresh peaches.  Hmm.  What will I do.  Hmm.  Go buy some lemons?  What would I do with them then?  Hmm.  Man, there’s a lot of fruitflies around those peaches.

I know what you’re thinking: for a lady, she’s a sharp one.

There was enough dough left over for four hand-pies, which included 1 1/2 good-sized slices of guava paste and three slices of peach each.  Unsure of what else to do to them, I left them plain.  Just peach and guava paste, no spices, nothing.  The paste was plenty sugary to sweeten the slightly underripe peach, and I was getting too hot to give a shit otherwise.  I hit them with some egg wash and granulated sugar to form a crust and into the oven they went.

So basically, here’s the deal: this was maybe the best fucking pastry I have made in my entire goddamn life.  The guava paste softened in the heat and peach juices, and the peaches themselves were perfectly cooked.  For whatever reason, instead of suffering under the indignity of a re-roll, my pie dough turned out perfectly flaky and crisp.  The proportions, the flavors, everything about it was incredible.  As I ate I was overwhelmed with a blind fury, incensed that I hadn’t made a dozen of these things instead of wasting my time with that stupid raspberry pie.  Crumbs sprayed from me in a cloud.  I gulped for air around giant, still-warm mouthfuls of pie.

Jason, we may have to arrange for more of this guava paste to belong to me.

I can’t believe I’ve never told you about this before, but I have a law of universal constant named after me: Sunday’s Law of Unavailability.

I mean, sure, Mike named it that, but it’s a real thing.  It goes like this: the moment that I desire something — and the more mundane the item the more unavailable it becomes –  it is nowhere to be found.  Unfindable.  I want black jeans?  No one, and I mean no one makes black jeans for under $100.  I need some linen fabric?  It’s not linen season, tough shit.  Pectin?  My grocery store only carries bulk boxes of liquid pectin.

I can go on, but I won’t.  Because I can scratch one item off the list, and that item is chai.

This right here is my holy grail chai:

I used to love chai, I could and did drink gallons of all that sugary, anemic crap they sold at most espresso shops.  Iced or hot, didn’t matter.  I liked espresso too, but if I couldn’t take any more of the black gold, I’d switch to that candy-scented teat¹ of chai without missing a beat.

Of course, tastes change.  I stopped taking sugar in my coffee a few years back (out of laziness, first, and then out of preference) and more recently I’ve cut back on sugaring my tea as well.  Last Thanksgiving I made myself a cup of Oregon Chai after having not had it in years and almost blew it back out all over the kitchen. I used to drink this swill?

Thus I set off on the Great Chai Quest which we can just fast forward through because it sounds boring even to me, and I’m the one on stage here.  My mom was sitting in the doctors office reading a magazine, and read about Tipu’s chai, which was described as “peppery” and “intense”.  Or something similar enough that she discretely ripped the page out of the magazine and smuggled it home to me.  Because my beef with chai was twofold: it was always too sweetly spiced (much too much clove and cinnamon) and too hard to brew (microwaving a cup of bark like three times, then straining it and then adding a spoonful of sugar was more than I was willing to commit).

But here is Tipu, bless him, who makes instant chai.  But there’s something funny about it.  It’s not like instant coffee where the liquid is already brewed and the resulting product is dried.  Tipu’s is just the most finely ground spices and tea that I’ve seen in my life.  The second I opened the package I thought with awe and terror, this stuff is going to hurt.

And indeed, my first cup following their directions – 1 teaspoon to each 8oz cup – was so strong that it left my mouth burning for about an hour after drinking it.  Not like “Oh I’m a giant baby” burning, but a noticeable, low-grade warmth.  Spicy!  I was enchanted.  And kind of heartburny.

The second time around I remembered that most coffee cups actually hold 6oz of fluid and halved the powdered spices down to a half a teaspoon.  Xanadu!

And that, my friends, is the best cup of chai I’ve ever had.  Half soy, half water, a single teaspoon of sugar, lots of lingering peppercorn heat, and a sludge of pure evil at the bottom of the cup.  It truly makes mornings slightly less horrific.

¹ That reminds me of a story!  Many years ago my housemate worked at Starbucks. She wasn’t looking forward to the job, but we were all pleased to see in the following weeks that she not only lost weight, but seemed much peppier than usual. I didn’t notice, at first, that she always came home with the largest size of chai they served. I did start noticing that on her days off, she’d be incredibly irritable and eventually she even started going into work on mornings off to buy a chai. So, that’s weird. And then it came out that the chai had ephedrine in it. HA!  Whoops.

I was recently pointed toward Thursday Night Smackdown, which I had never read before and thus had my sense of awe renewed.  Not because the blog is that good (it is that good but, I mean — how is this post going so badly so quickly?) but because each time I feel that I’ve fully and diligently mapped the internet, it turns out there is a whole new section of dungeon I failed to explore.

Anyway, I suspect that a lot of my regulars will adore Thursday Night Smackdown as much as I now do, even if she makes a few too many soups for me to be happy¹.

¹ Why the sadness? Because I love soup. I love it, I do. And the Viking Heathen I have chosen to align myself with does not like the soup. Like, berserker rage does not like it.  So that even if I just make some for myself, he starts to panic and smash things before I can assure him that I’ve made an entirely separate dinner for him that consists of only partially frozen deer meat and the livers of his enemies.

Like you never bought a box of sugar cereal before.

When I was little we weren’t allowed sugar cereal, and we lived with my grandpa, who was allowed.  Wrap your mind around this.  Our boxes of Shredded Compost sitting next to his boxes of Frosted Flakes.  For my 5th birthday I was allowed a sugar cereal of my choosing¹, a memory that remains in my mind as the definition of perfect happiness.  So basically: deny your kids a $2 luxury and then occasionally “splurge” and your poor little waif babies will think you are a god.

I have a not-exactly guilty pleasure of cake-flavored things that aren’t cakes.  So, cake batter icecream?  Yes.  Cake batter jellybeans?  Good in theory, bad in practice².  Which leads me to the obvious mitigating factor that the flavor has to be good, and there are some bad artificially-cake-flavored items out there — mostly when just so mild that the primary flavor is merely vanillin, but also the rare coconut end of the spectrum, which is just weird.

Post’s Cupcake Pebbles are excellent.  A true milky, vanilla, egg-yolky cake-batter flavor, and plenty strong.  Of course, it’s made with like triple-hydrogenated oils, baby seal fat, BPAs and mercury, but shit, dog.  Sometimes a girl needs a giant bowl of cupcake-flavored cereal for dinner.

¹ I chose Smurf-Berry Crunch.
² They taste like coconut.

What if I told you I thought I found my male internet doppelganger?

I wonder which one of us should be more offended.