Friend Janice wrote this morning to say she’s been following my ongoing DinnerTonight tweets and likes the look of our roast chicken. How do we get such golden brown tender roasty goodness? Here’s the technique:
Preheat the oven to 500° Using cooking shears, cut out the backbone of the chicken and lay it out flat, skin side up, on a baking sheet. Tuck the wings under the body. Sprinkle the skin liberally with coarse salt — no oil. The salt helps the skin crisp, so don’t be skimpy. Roast the chicken at 500° for 15 to 20 minutes, until the skin is crisp and golden. Pull the chicken out of the oven and turn down the heat to 425°. Surround the chicken with thick-sliced red onion and other vegetables (or fruit — grapes or pears are great) and return it to the oven for 30 to 45 minutes until the leg pulls easily away from the body.
Here is our beautiful Passover as guests of Josh and Ardrie — with Judy and Laurie. To see a slideshow of all the pictures, click here.
The company was wonderful and the food was INCREDIBLE — Judy’s light and delicious Matzo Ball Soup (she makes floaters!), Adrie’s superlative homemade chopped liver and delightful — and figgy — haroset, Josh’s perfectly cooked lamb — and a matzo and chocolate dessert cake that was like candy.
And Adrie’s mini-haggadah was perfect! And when all the boys sang the traditional songs, it was very beautiful. I hope next year we can all be together again!
I took 1,500 pictures at the Long Beach Bulldog Beauty Contest today. It was such a cool scene, with hundreds of ugly/beautiful dogs and about a thousand people — big guys with long-shorts and tattoos, white-haired grannies with sweaters that matched their dogs, leather-clad dudes whose dogs had spiked collars, arty couples, tanned stylish ladies, 20-something girls that cooed at every puppy, little kids that looked the big-headed dogs eye-to-eye, people in wheelchairs, who rested their hands on stout companions — everybody smiling, feeling connected by their snorty lovable friends. Lots of tightly-curled tails wagging. I was on assignment for Seal Beach Daily, where I’ve posted a slideshow of photos. It was a wonderful, gentle, exhausting day.
Much to my surprise, I got a great reaction to my entry in the Superbowl Chili Cookoff we had at work on Friday. I entered in the Salsa category (the others being Chili, obviously, and Guacamole) with a Yemenite recipe called schoog* that my Mom used to make — Yemeni Jews brought it to Israel, where it’s quite popular with falafel. I tied with another entrant in the popular vote; she won the judges’ vote (the organizer quipped that they went for the American salsa. Heh.) But people kept saying good things about it, and several asked me for the recipe, so here it is:
Makes about 2 cups
4 bunches cilantro
8 or more serrano chiles
8 cloves of garlic
juice of 1 lemon
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp kosher salt
pinch of ground cardamom
Coarsely chop the cilantro, peppers and garlic. Combine all the ingredients in a food processor or blender and puree. Adjust lemon, salt and chiles to taste. This is meant to be very hot — but you should still be able to taste the components. I especially like it with grilled meats.
* pronunciation: the ch in schoog is a voiceless velar fricative or, informally, a hard ch, like in loch, Bach or Channukah. In other words, it sounds like ‘K’ ;-)
Here at last is the re-designed Night Note, which we hope will accommodate lots of entries and big, beautiful photographs in the year to come.
It has been a busy Fall and holiday here on Covina Ave. Since the Global Economic Meltdown, gone is the season for being a philosopher-artist burrowing her way slowly into the heart of paint. This is a season for readiness. This is a season for keeping the tools sharp. A time to work.
And since the beginning of October, we have been working full-throttle. In the last week in November, Val and I and partner Donna Wares launched Seal Beach Daily — a hyperlocal news project.
Think: an online publication — updated multiple times a day — with a mad devotion for one little corner of the world, for its lost pets and city council meetings, for its beach clean ups and Christmas tree lightings, its traffic jams and cable company woes and artists and food and sales tax revenues and what its people have to say.
It’s going great — glowing feedback, good numbers, advertisers, regular contributors, an encouraging community — but it is an all-consuming job. Want to jump into the hyperlocal game? Be ready to get your work on. Be ready to do it all: report it, write it, shoot it, code it, sell it, track it, love it into existence. And you better get yourself an exceptional partner or two, because it is not a one worker business.
So we’re working very hard to start a new business in an historic economic downturn, to be journalists during an historic meltdown of the newspaper industry, to do something satisfying for a living, when most people are just glad to have a job. But, since it has quickly become such a central thing in my life, there will be plenty of time to write about all that in the months to come.
For now, I’m so glad we managed to squeeze in the long overdue Night Note redesign. New: the “latest tweet” in the sidebar in my latest Twitter post. Foodie friends will note I post a picture of our dinner every night on Twitter. And for browsing fun, there’s a continuously updated list of suggested web reads. I’m determined to get posting here into the big blogging mix, so keep an eye on this space.
Above: An osprey photographed taking off at the Seal Beach Pier, the picture originally appeared with this post at Seal Beach Daily.
Over 23 years, we’ve done the holidays every which way. Boisterous parties, dinners for twelve, warm family gatherings, once with South Park on in the background and plates set aside for the newspaper late-shifters, once in a black velvet cocktail dress. This year we were in pajamas. Just Val and me in snuggly holiday bliss. It was a quiet and modest celebration, in keeping with the serious and sort anxious season the world — and so we — are in right now.
We spent the day cooking and playing Little Big Planet — this year’s selection for the Cohen Holiday Gaming Season — and at sunset we served up our Thanksgiving roast duck with acorn squash and figs, oyster dressing, Chinese broccoli sauteed with anchovies, sweet potato puree with labne and ginger. We broke out a bottle of the good stuff and gave great thanks for all the goodness in our lives.
NightNote readers, friends, family, wandering strangers, you are on our list! We are thankful for you and hope that your far-flung celebrations were as warm, wonderful and reassuring as our own. Happy Thanksgiving!
Seal Beach Daily is off to a wonderful start. The mailboxes runneth over with goodness, good wishes, good contacts, good news. And I have to admit, although it is a lot of work, I am having a good time. And the SBD has hit a nerve in Seal Beach. Readers e-mail that they want this site, with this approach, and that makes me want to be part of creating it for them. I can’t help it; at some level, isn’t it every journalist’s dream to have a little hometown operation?
Been wondering where in the world is Kate Cohen? Sorry for the blogging drought, but I’ve been busy building Seal Beach Daily with Val and Donna. It’s been a full time gig for four weeks and tonight we are good to go! Seal Beach Daily is our little web team’s foray into the world of hyper-local blogging. More about that soon. Tonight, I’m just too beat from the pre-launch crunch to write about it. I hope you will visit the SBD, patronize its advertisers and watch us grow in the coming weeks.
Over at CaliforniaAuthors, we’re running another cool book lotto. We’re giving away a signed copy of Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant named Isaias Hellman created California by Bay Area journalist Frances Dinkelspiel. It is an interesting and personal history. From californiaauthors: “Frances is a former newspaper reporter who has spent the past EIGHT years researching a book about her great-great-grandfather. Isaias Hellman was a California builder and financier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who played a pivotal role in creating one of the world’s most dynamic economies.” Learn more and enter the drawing at californiaauthors.
at the Will Rogers Middle School in the affluent Marine Stadium/Belmont Shore area of Long Beach. The weather: California Fall perfection. I walked right in and picked up my ballot. It was great to be able to cast my vote for Barack at last. And to say NO on Prop. H8 and phooey to Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (who may represent OC, but never represented me), by voting for dark horse Dem Debbie Cook.
Headed back to the video wall to sweat Indiana, which at this writing is too close to call according to MSNBC. Below, my polling place. And be sure to click here to see Val’s cool voting pix.
City of Ten Thousand Buddhas and the Avenue of the Giants.
OCT 12, 2008 12:52 AM BY KATE
An ethereal, gently warm fall day. Leaving the famous vine-lands of Sonoma under sunny skies, rolling north and into the NorCal leg of the trip, we headed for Ukiah on a chowhound tip. We were looking for The Sagely City of Ten Thousand Buddhas — a Chinese Buddhist monastery — and its Jyung Kang (To Your Health) Restaurant. The monastery was founded by Venerable Master Hsuan Hua, a prolific founder of Buddhist institutions and the teacher of the Six Great Guidelines: not contending, not being greedy, not seeking, not being selfish, not pursuing personal profit, and not lying. The restaurant is of course entirely vegetarian; its emphasis is on “the love of fresh organic ingredients and the well being of all living beings.” They use no MSG, onions, garlic, chives, scallions, leeks or eggs. Still, we’ve heard their food praised for its flavor and the savory deliciousness of their tofu and gluten dishes.
The monastery is not a tourist attraction, but a quiet, contemplative working religious community and school. All visitors are asked to sign in at the visitors center, where we parked, signed in and set out across the campus to the restaurant. A peacock wandered by and as we walked along, passing the Instilling Goodness School, we were struck by the stately institutional architecture of the many buildings on the large park-like compound. It seemed late 19th/early 20th century, with Arts and Crafts dignity, and it spoke of a previous purpose for campus. Later, we were to learn what this was.
But on our visit that morning, we walked through the peaceful campus and by the great hall adorned with fantastic and gigantic painted figures, heavenly kings shod with curling slippers, surrounded by curling clouds in the Chinese style. Monks and students were gathering at the hall for midday devotions. We passed one small procession, lead by a bell ringer and accompanied by chanting students. Up the path an older nun walked with a younger companion who shaded the elder woman’s shaved head with a parasol. They talked softly. A school girl tagged alongside.
The small restaurant is in a pleasant but plain lunchroom with large windows. It reminded me of a classroom from my country grammar school in Ohio. When we arrived, a large three-generation Asian family was sharing a feast at a table in the middle of the room; the food looked great and the smells were enticing.
We sat near an open window and made our selections from a large menu filled with unfamiliar dishes, but thankfully, with many pictures. The friendly woman who took our order suggested the stir fried broccoli and house special fried rice, to which we added Vegetable Dumplings, Hot and Sour Soup, Seaweed Soup, Golden Balls with Ginger (savory fried gluten balls). Now, I thought the broccoli and fried rice might not be the most exotic things I could try, but she was so friendly, and so sure we would like them, that it only seemed polite to accept.
And, they were so good, the distinct flavor of each ingredient still fresh tasting, bright. The big bowls of soups were tangy. The seaweed soup tasting of the ocean. The hot and sour broth was light and complex with tender mushrooms and a delicate bean curd mesh. The dumplings were tender with a yummy mixed veg filling. And the Golden Balls were golden! These were little balls of salty savory wheat gluten fried and served with thinly shredded ginger. Nice texture, not too chewy. Very snacky. Very easy to pop one after another.
All this was served to us in giant portions, easy enough to feed four off any one plate and two on our “small” soup orders. So we feasted and packed up plenty of leftovers for dinner. $32 dollars for two meals of impeccably fresh, local and lovingly prepared food. Perfect.
On our way back to the car, the doors to the great hall were open to let in the day and we stood with our backs against an outside wall to listen to the resonant chanting, and then we peeked into a side hall filled with hundreds of golden and gilt porcelain Buddhas smiling serenely into the quiet. We visited the bookstore and then headed out the Mountain Gate, north for the great redwood forest.
As I drove for the Humboldt woods, Val iPhoned up the history of the 400+ acre campus and found that it was once a State Hospital, opened as the Mendocino Asylum for the Insane in the 1890s. Many buildings were being added to the site through the 1930s. The hospital was closed in the 1970s during a drought which made its further operation impossible. Venerable Master Hua purchased the property in the late 70s and used his “wisdom eye” to find a well that now feeds the whole complex.
In two hours we made the Humbolt Redwoods State Park. Humbolt is the home of one of the Great American Car Touring Roads, Highway 254, The Avenue of the Giants. The road leaves the busy 101 and winds gently through the spectacular redwood forest. It is lined with turnouts and parking areas, where visitors can just pull off, hop out of the car and in a few short steps be in a quiet grove of ancient and enormous trees, shaded by the high canopy, walking on trails carpeted with fallen needles and lined with sorrel and fern. So idyllic, you expect the fairies or your spirit guide or the leprechauns to show up and take you on some sylvan adventure. There are also the roadside attractions, like artifacts of vacations gone by: the tree you can drive through, the chimney tree, the house made of one tree, the eternal tree.
We took the Avenue and rolled along at 40 mph, stopping at this grove or that, as the day wore on. There’s no explaining the feeling of being in the presence of these trees; their scale throws off your perception, giving you an off-kilter other-worldly feeling. Each curve of the road reveals a wowing view and and you drive through the forest open mouthed. We pull off mid-afternoon and walk a trail down to the stony bank of the Eel River. We sat on the stones, shared big bites of Healdsburg Farmers Market marionberry pie and watched the river roll silently by. Birds fussed from the trees towering over far side of the river. Tiny fish darted in the shallows at our feet.
Then it was back up the trail that winds under fallen giants and through verdant underbrush to the car. Back onto the road. It was almost twilight when we got to the Founders Grove, a most spectacular and easily accessible old-growth grove that has been a preserve since the 1920s. It is the home of the Dyerville Giant. One of the forest’s largest trees, it was more than 370 feet tall — that’s 30 stories or as tall as Niagara Falls — and 1600 years old when it fell in 1991. It is more than 50 feet in circumference. A burl on the fallen tree is expected to sprout new growth, in keeping with the species name: Sequoia Sempervirens, or ever living.
Walking through the grove — alone, in the late of the day — was like being in the nave of a great cathedral with soaring ceilings, sacred perfumes, dappled lighting, velvet quiet. And when the sun was getting low and we knew we could linger no longer, we headed back to the car and walked up on a doe and her two fawns grazing on sorrel and stepping silently through the sword fern. We stood still, breathing quietly and watched the little family until they moved off into the deeper woods. Then we walked quietly back to the car.
^ On the Eel River trail
^ In Founders Grove
^ With the Dyerville Giant
^ Fallen trees become home to thousands of species
^ A fawn in Founders Grove
We stopped for the night at Rio Del at the very humble, but perfectly fine, Humboldt Gables Motel. We got there just before the fog started to roll into the spaces between the hills. There in our little room, we laid out a left over supper of our Jyung Kang food and our salads from Bangkok Cuisine in Berkeley. Then we cuddled up in the cool night to dream our woodland dreams.
Motelling Sidebar: We love the old 50s motels, but they share one problem: tissue thin walls. At the Humboldt Gables, the German guy in the room next to ours was snoring an aria from the Gotterdammerung and it sounded like his head was on the pillow next to mine. A 21st century solution: my iPhone app, Ambiance that lets you select from a menu of sounds to drown out noise in your environment. To counteract a German tourist snore, I found rain on a tin roof to be perfect. Soon I dropped off and was probably snoring the harmony like a Rhine maiden.
^ Humboldt Gables Motel, Rio Del CA
Click here for a map of this day’s locations.
Big Graze Road Lesson 1: Watch your pungent acquisitions
OCT 10, 2008 5:21 PM BY KATE
Last month, while we waited for the skies to clear over Hollister so we could go up for our breathtaking glide, we drove up the road to see what was on offer at the locally famous Casa de Fruta. The Casa is a fruit stand/roadside attraction on steroids with an overwhelming amount of stuff. The whole place was hung with new garlic braids. A new braid was on our shopping list for in this area — which is famous for its garlic production — and, the price was right, so we found a nice one and checked out.
We put the braid in the back of the truck and headed off to soar through the now-clearing skies. But when we got back to the car after our glide, the heavy garlic smell hit us as soon as we opened the door. Whoa! Val wrapped the braid in two plastic bags, put the package in a brown paper bag and then tucked it deep into the kitchen stuff in the very back of the Element.
A short time later, we were on our way to Berkeley and I had to roll down my window for some fresh air. Pew! Afraid to leave it to embed its essence into the car, we took the braid into our room at the Berkeley Rodeway Inn. We stored it in the little alcove off the bathroom and we opened our window onto the courtyard. But as I reclined in bed, blogging our day, I could still smell the garlic and it was starting to get to me. Finally, I’d had it. I took the garlic out to the parking lot and put it under the front wheel of the car, where, Val pointed out, it looked like a suspicious package. A stink bomb, I said. By then, I was crabby about it — I don’t care what happens to it, I just can’t stand to smell it anymore, I said. Let some fool steal it, then it will be his stinky karmic problem. Val said he thought it would be better if he bungeed it to the roof of the car, which he did.
Back in bed, I was thinking I didn’t like the way the weird little package called attention to the car. I knew I couldn’t breathe its perfume for another two weeks. We have to get rid of it, I told Val. Cut our losses. We couldn’t mail it to ourselves, because our mail was on hold at the post office for three more weeks and you can get yourself in trouble by stinking up government workplaces. Then it came to me: we’d mail it to Laurie with instructions to hang it in one of her out-buildings, where its scent would not offend. And let me just say: you know you have a good friend when you can mail your stinky problems to them. (Thanks, Laur, you’re the best!)
So the next day, with great relief, I slid the braid into a Priority Mail box and handed the stink to the USPS. What a free feeling! In a couple of days, Laurie reported the package’s receipt and the braid is now hung safely in her garage, where the dogs give it an occasional curious sniff, but human noses remain unassailed. This weekend the braid will finally come home to Covina. It will be stored in our garage, where we hope it will mellow, or at very least, inhibit termite colonization.
Was it only two weeks ago? September 23. It was our second day in Sonoma County, CA. We started with a quick cruise through downtown Healdsburg and then off to Geyserville for a tasting at Locals. We asked where we could set up a picnic lunch and the friendly guy behind the bar suggested Quivera winery — an organic, biodynamic and solar-powered winery that has a nice picnic area used by wine tours and random visitors, like us. He gave us a map and traced out a route up the pretty Dry Creek Road.
At Quivera we purchased a drinkable and robust organic Zinfandel which we paired with creamy, delicately goaty and yummy Cowgirl Creamery chevre, the last kitchen garden tomato, olives and radishes.
^ Quivera Winery
Then it was back to Locals for their delightful vertical tastings, where we enjoyed Zinfandels from four different wineries tasted side by side — and four Pinots and three Sangioveses. What a great way to taste wine! It’s not about finding the best, but about using one to taste the other, to make comparisons, to find our what you like and to find the wines that fit you. That kind of tasting opportunity is not to be had at an individual winery’s tasting rooms. We bought several bottles from Portalupi, Dark Horse and Ramazotti wineries.
And Carolyn Lewis, the Locals owner who was pouring for us, took a look at a my biz card and a few of my paintings on the iphone and invited me to see her nice new gallery space up the block. She’s interested in the work and wants me to keep in touch — if I ever build up some inventory! A very unexpected and very nice turn in the day.
Then we were off to the Healdsburg Farmers Market for some dinner ingredients — Val found garden fresh long green beans and he suggested a big dinner salad of beans, potatoes, eggs, tomatoes, arugula — a take on a purslane salad we’ve been eating based on a recipe from our favorite Cretan cookbook. We picked up the ingredients. Plus, for Val, some smoked black cod that the fisherman-vendor said was “caught in 600 feet of water, 30 miles out in the Pacific” and smoked by the fishermen themselves. And of course, some pie — marionberry.
We headed out Sweetwater Springs Rd. — one of the trip’s most twisty and beautiful roads — in the low afternoon sun, to the Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, where we cooked dinner in a grove of soaring redwoods. Beautiful. Quiet broken by the tapping work of woodpeckers. Val made his delicious egg and potato salad and served it up with smoked fish, luscious figs, Quivera Zin — all in a truly grand dining room.
As the light faded and I washed the dishes, bats fluttered overhead feasting on sunset insects. They were so high up, they looked like butterflies. We headed back to the hotel via the easier River Road drive, just as night really took hold.
Faithful readers of The Night Note will know that Rita Matassa is a frequent commenter here, a Friend of the Night Note, and many will know that she is an important part of the M&M/NightNote blog-munity, being responsible for bringing one M — Mark — into the world. So Rita and I met in the cyber world a while ago, when our latest burst of blogging was just taking off. And although we hadn’t met each other in “real” life, Rita always has something to say to make me smile.
Today, as I was cruising through Oregon on the way home from The Big Graze Road Trip, I got to stop in Eugene and enjoy a very nice meeting, lunch (yum! brownies!) and conversation with Rita at her cozy house. The afternoon rolled by and we could have chatted on through the evening and I got to have that wonderful feeling of ease that comes with being good friends. We giggled a lot, shared histories, admired M&M, talked about newspapering and cooking and traveling and writing and making art, about getting to sleep, enjoying life and playing the cards you are dealt. Is there a better way to spend an afternoon?
Thank you Rita for my great afternoon! And for my little lunch bag — I am eating my brownie midnight snack right now. Don’t you love the internets? I do!
Over at CaliforniaAuthors, we’re running another cool book lotto. We’re giving away a signed copy of 
A short time later, we were on our way to Berkeley and I had to roll down my window for some fresh air. Pew! Afraid to leave it to embed its essence into the car, we took the braid into our room at the Berkeley Rodeway Inn. We stored it in the little alcove off the bathroom and we opened our window onto the courtyard. But as I reclined in bed, blogging our day, I could still smell the garlic and it was starting to get to me. Finally, I’d had it. I took the garlic out to the parking lot and put it under the front wheel of the car, where, Val pointed out, it looked like a suspicious package. A stink bomb, I said. By then, I was crabby about it — I don’t care what happens to it, I just can’t stand to smell it anymore, I said. Let some fool steal it, then it will be his stinky karmic problem. Val said he thought it would be better if he bungeed it to the roof of the car, which he did.
We headed out Sweetwater Springs Rd. — one of the trip’s most twisty and beautiful roads — in the low afternoon sun, to the 
