Fun at Les & Nic's...or...Happy 66th Sue!

Last weekend we flew to Sacramento to celebrate Sue's 66th birthday with friends and family, wine and food. Because I have had two recent complaints about my lack of attention to food, I will start the festivities off with food, good food.

Les was in charge of appetizers. (Some might say he went above and beyond, as Sue ate so many appetizers she was too full for dinner. Was Mary miffed? Hard to tell, she didn't say. Usually if she's not talking she's miffed.) I ate everything! This cold/bronchitis has not inhibited my appetite. He started us off with fish and shrimp cakes...

with a mango salsa. There was a also a heavily horseradished cocktail sauce that was almost as good as the mangoes.


The most interesting dish of the night, and my favorite, were the dove jalapeno poppers. Les has a friend who hunts dove near the Sea of Cortez in Mexico and brings them back in a cooler. Les wraps the breast meat in jalapeno and bacon...and the result is baconey-spicy-gamey goodness. There was some discussion about where the Sea of Cortex is, I knew it was at the tip of Baja and Les thought it was in the armpit, and it turns out we are both right.

Anyway, those poppers were my favorite dish of the night. I love game.

Les also paraded out crab stuffed mushrooms. These were giant.

Mom stuffing her chicken with Lucy & Ethel's pesto. Mom and Sue are Lucy & Ethel. They make pesto from scratch every year from fresh basil grown in Sue's garden. Heaps of it. They put it in plastic zip lock bags and distribute the bags to everyone they know. It's GREAT pesto, I have some right now in my freezer from last year. I always assumed Mom was Lucy and Sue was Ethel, but upon enquiry that night, they say they take turns..depends on who is in what mood. I like this.


The gorgeous roasted pesto stuffed chicken. It was also accompanied by polenta with a mushroom and bacon ragu, but at this point I had some wine in me mixing with my cold meds and was forgetting to take more pics.

No trip to Les & Nicole's is complete without visiting all the animals. They have a koi pond as large as my house, no exaggeration. They have a wide net strung across it to keep the populous crows away from the pricey fish.

There are hundreds of fish of all sizes in this pond. I was enamored of this huge white one, huge I tell you. And there was another beautiful orange & black one I loved with a giant mermaid-like tail.

Nicole also keeps chickens for laying, not eating. She collects the eggs every morning and sells them at the Elk Grove Farmer's Market. She is known as the "egg lady" of the Elk Grove Farmer's Market, wears a cute little apron and most likely some sexy high heels. She has great taste in shoes.

This is her newest batch of chicks. She got 44 this last week from her supplier. Those white columns are their water source. When she first brought them home she had to pick up each one individually and dip their beaks in the water so they knew where to go to drink. How cute is that? Dumb birds! Adorable fuzzle little dumb birds!

And I fell in love with this one.


This is Les & Nic's 6 month old vizsla, Remington. She is really the perfect balance between tons of energy but also a placid demeanor.

Remy sleeps.

Remy wakes. You know she is thinking, "Why in Hades did you wake me?"

Remy and Mom. Remy is licking the chicken and pesto off Mom's hands. They look so sweet together. Mom needs a dog.

California Jeopardy: Vices in a Tent at 4000 Feet

Alex, what is the Cahuilla Casino on highway 371 in Anza?

Cahuilla Casino
52702 Hwy 371
Anza, CA 92539
1-888-371-ANZA (2692)
http://www.cahuillacasino.com/



I find Anza worrisome. It is about 40 extremely windy oftentimes icy miles northeast from Temecula. About 120 miles from my house and another world away.


I have been stuck at this casino in a snowstorm, during a heatwave and during an interminable 90 minute lunch break. There are no auto services for putting on chains in case of snow. There are often wind warnings in effect for people traveling the hilly, vertiginous roads in between Anza and Hemet, Anza and Indio/Palm Desert and Anza and Temecula. This morning at 6:55 AM the mercury dropped to 22 degrees as I drove past one of California's most welcoming casinos.

The bartenders and the manager here are as friendly as heck, even when telling you to put your camera away, now. I wonder if they are suspicious, do I look so out of place that maybe I am casing the joint? One member of the slightly less glamorous Oceans 3.14?


Whatever the reason, the faces are always smiling, the rum & diet cokes are strong and the Caesar salad is the tastiest food served for lunch within about 15 miles (nothing else is open for lunch except Dairy Queen & 7-Eleven).

A New Hotel in Town: The Citizen

The Citizen
926 J St
Sacramento, CA 95814
(916) 447-2700
http://www.jdvhotels.com/hotels/sacramento/citizen


There's a new hotel in Sacramento and I enjoyed it very much this last weekend in town for Sue's birthday. Rooms were less expensive than those at the Sheraton, and I am guessing this is just an introductory phase. Once word of The Citizen's wonderfulness gets out, it will surely be more expensive.

While researching the history of the building, I found this blurb on HospitalityDesign website.

Joie de Vivre's Citizen Hotel has put a new spin on quintessential Sacramento. Located two blocks from the state capitol, the hotel is housed within a restored 1920s-era high rise. Joie de Vivre hired San Francisco designer and hotel restoration guru Candra Scott to create interiors that reflected Sacramento's political climate. The boutique hotelier preserved the historic building's distinctive architectural elements, including its mansard roof, soaring ceilings, grand center staircase, marble panels, and the 1920s-era clock in the lobby.

One walks straight through the long gorgeous lobby into the dark cool reception area. The reception area is two stories, with the top story being part of the bar/lounge upstairs. It's definitely a hot spot right now in Sac. There were beautiful people partying down in the bars and spilling out onto the sidewalks for a smoke both Friday and Saturday nights last weekend.

The lobby area has a library feel to it, with stacks upon stacks of the Federal Reporter in the shelves and political cartoons framed and hung everywhere.

I am sure my mom and C would know what the Federal Reporter is, however I am going to rely on the predictably and enjoyably unreliable wikipedia for my info.

The Federal Reporter is a case law in the United States that is published by West Publishing. The third and current Federal Reporter series publishes decisions of the United States courts of appeals and the United States Court of Federal Claims; prior series had varying scopes that covered decisions of other federal courts as well. Though West is a private company that does not have a legal monopoly over the court opinions it publishes, it has so dominated the industry in the U.S. that legal professionals uniformly for included decisions.

I really enjoyed all the cartoons everywhere. They hearken from many political eras and from both sides of our two party tendencies.

The rooms are even better than the beautiful lobby and reportedly delicious restaurant.

Mom surprised us by leaving a bottle of Perrier-Jouet in our room...we arrived with me exhausted and sick in the grip of this deadly SARS-like virus that JUST WON'T QUIT...and here was an ice cold bottle of beautiful bubbly. So sweet, Mom. Thanks!

The king-sized bed was wide and comfy, with perfect high thread count linens, with lots of down pillows to prop me up and extra blankets for me to curl up in. Good thing the bed was so lovely because I basically flew in to Sacramento to stay in bed the entire weekend.

The furnishings, decor and etc are very cohesive throughout the hotel. The colors, quality and look are very similar throughout. Someone had a great concept and really followed through in the execution.

Even the bathroom has that 1940's post-War era feel to it. The wall paper, fixtures and furniture. Great water pressure, decent toiletries, good towels and so on.

The above hung in our bathroom.

On floor ten, waiting for the elevator, I can imagine people using these stairs in a pre-elevator era.

I could not resist these quotes in the elevators. The elevators' interiors were painted simply black with political quotes on both facing walls. Two different quotes in every elevator. Clearly it is challenging to get a good shot in a moving elevator. People looked at me like I am weird. OK, sometimes my obsessive recording of everything new and fun might be a little weird. I care not.

I love that the political cartoons and photos really document a political continuum and many years of politics in Sacramento. A lot of people in Los Angeles really discount Sacramento as a place worthy of visiting, forgetting it has been the political hub of the state for a very long time.

There are now several very nice hotels, many Victorian B&Bs, and some very high quality restaurants. Almost everywhere you go in Sacramento has good wine, and wine culture is prevalent being so close to the heart of the world's second most important wine region.

Naturally, many people in Los Angeles discount anything in the United States that isn't either Los Angeles or New York. Even San Francisco can get the stink eye from time to time.

I definitely plan to stay at The Citizen on my family induced forays up into Northern California. Because The Citizen is amazing and unique in Sacramento, I am going to need to carefully plan my trips in advance.

I may even fly up just to check into The Citizen next time I am sick. Beats the heck out of the Fairfield Inn in Temecula.

When There's Nothing Good to Eat, There Are Always Kittens

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Kogi Quest #1

I added #1 to the title of this posting because I plan to be visiting the Kogi truck as often as I can get my husband, someone who would prefer to buy his way out of anything quest driven, to humor me. I am thinking I can accomplish this weekly...


My good friend K and I have been promising each other to get together when we get some free time and hunt down Kogi BBQ, the Korean BBQ taco truck that drives around LA and parks at a couple different locations each night. I had been home sick all week (to Hades with people who come in to work so sick they cannot hold their head up, cough and sneeze on you, and borrow your mechanical pencil, Hades I say). When K tm'd me and said she was down for the Kogi quest, I rallied the troops and away we went!

We all met up at Barbarella, the new kid on the block in Silverlake. K is superwoman. She will drive anywhere for anything or anyone. I love a chick like that.

It was my second time popping into Barbarella. The bartenders and cocktail waitresses are pretty, the atmosphere is sophisticated and the seating is aplenty.

We also noshed on heirloom tomatoes with burrata cheese and and a tuna tartare. Both were pretty durn tasty. We snacked a little and had a glass of wine. Tales of the Kogi truck has us fearing lines 300+ with potential waits of over an hour. The troops needed fortification before going in.

Kogi BBQ has been getting a lot of press recently. In the New York Times, this week:

Kogi is a Korean barbecue catering truck – a gourmet version of the old British hot dog vans or California taco trucks. It tours LA by night, keeping in touch with its customers via Twitter, serving an unlikely but perfect combination of four kinds of Korean barbecue wrapped in miniature Mexican tacos and sold dirt-cheap (a taco costs $2, a burrito $5). The black-clad cooks toil inside the truck like culinary ninjas – I count 11 of them in the cramped space – while those in the queue flash their iPhones and flirt.

Jonathon Gold in LA Weekly writes,

Not since Pinkberry has anything captured the local imagination as quickly as Kogi, the Korean taco truck whose owners went from giving tacos away on Hollywood Boulevard to becoming rock stars of cuisine in little more than a couple of months — which is to say, 10 times faster than it took Guns N’ Roses or System of a Down to break out of the tyranny of small clubs. The Doheny, the swankest membership tavern in town, has arranged tasting menus of Kogi food paired with their exquisitely balanced cocktails, and the crowds that form when the truck rolls up to UCLA are big enough to disrupt traffic. In the parking lot outside the Brig in Venice, Kogi becomes an impromptu nightclub, a taco-driven hookup scene as perfervid as anything with a $40 cover charge. Last Saturday night outside the Brig, Kogi swarmed with customers, while the Green Truck, the high-quality organic purveyor that was the first of the gourmet trucks, stood by an empty sidewalk just one block away.

Now, I have been hearing about Kogi from friends, lots of blurbs on Eater LA, and mentions on Twitter and Facebook. My love for Mexican food is equally balanced by my love for bimbimbob, kalbi and kim chee. This was something I knew I needed to explore as soon as I it hit my radar.


After leaving Barbarella, we loaded into a couple cars and headed downtown to the Golden Gopher for Kogi's 9 o'clock appearance.

I ran to the door to talk to the bouncer at 9, 9:07 and 9:20. Nope, not here yet, he patiently answered every single time. Finally, K tms me the truck is here and she is at the front of the line! Woot!

It turns out, as she and S parked the car next to a couple empty spots, a giant white truck slowly pulled up right next to them standing there on the sidewalk. They saw dozens of people rapidly walking in their direction, looked at the truck, and there they were front and center! We were actually second in line, to be honest. We got to watch them set up their immaculately clean kitchen and get the party started.

I wanted to try one of everything. At these prices one can afford it. I was buying food for 4 people so I just went with it. I went for all the carnivorous options, although any vegetarians involved will be happy to note that tofu on everything is an option.

I started with the traditional taco. Four short rib (their specialty), 4 chicken and 4 pork. These were amazing. So simple, so delicious. Korean BBQ meats and all that implies with chili sauce, kim chee and I don't know what else. It was dark and I was hungry.


I caved on a couple of their specials. A kim chee quesadilla. There was no cheese inside, but something that tasted like potato and had a light fluffy potato like texture. This might have been my favorite dish. The flavors danced in my mouth, and the textures were excitingly acidic and spicy but the flour tortilla was also kind of comforting in the starchy way a flour tortilla has.


Last but not least is another special. Spam tacos with fresh Mandarin orange slices. This was more of a novelty item than anything, but damn if it wasn't good. I also tried the chicken burrito, which was huge and easily split between four people. It just wasn't very photogenic. However, it travels well and K took one home to her Korean mama, who immediately pronounced it appropriately authentic. Mama K was impressed, readers.

This was all so good, so so good. The next night out with S & S in Little Tokyo I was trying subtly to get everyone to forgo Japanese for the 11 o'clock appearance of Kogi at the Japanese American National Museum. It was that good. My mouth is watering for some kim chee and kalbi wrapped in a tiny corn tortilla at 7 am in the morning.