Newsletter: Ceviches and serious wine
Happy Saturday, which is looking like another hot one in Southern California. And since you might not feel like firing up the oven when the temperatures are hovering around triple digits, how about making ceviche, which doesn’t require you to cook your fish at all. We have some excellent suggestions for the addictive South American dish, sourced from local ingredients by way of Peru and Ecuador, and using seasonal produce as well as seafood.
What to pair with a plate of chile-spiked rockfish? How about some local wine, specifically some of the stuff made from a crew of winemakers called “garagistes.” People jump-start all kinds of hobbies in their garages, and in wine country that includes, no surprise, wine. We have a story about that, as well as a foray into the coffee scene in Lynwood, found not in a garage but in a community center.
We also have some suggestions for what to do with the market produce now hitting the stands (summer beans), as well as some ways to grill your desserts rather than baking them. You might also whip up a batch of popsicles, which you could load with blueberries and lavender, or spike with some of the same ingredients that you put into your favorite cocktails. Keep cool, however you can, and enjoy your weekend.
CEVICHES FROM PERU AND ECUADOR
If your experience of ceviches, the South American dish of citrus-cured fish and seafood, has been limited to the straightforward versions served at many seafood restaurants, food writer Amelia Saltsman has brought back some more inventive versions from a recent trip to Peru and Ecuador. These are recipes built on local seafood, but loaded with chiles, leche de tigre, sweet potatoes and corn. Not a fish person? She has a recipe for a vegetarian ceviche that’s got not only a wealth of seasonal vegetables, but popcorn. Yes, popcorn.
WHAT’S IN YOUR GARAGE
“Strange and wondrous things happen in garages,” says wine writer Patrick Comiskey. And yes, he’s talking about wine — specifically the breed of self-starter wine fanatics called “garagistes,” so named for their penchant for tinkering not in their wine cellars but in their garages. There are not a few of these, so many that they have not only their own name but their own wine festival called the Garagiste Wine Festival. He tells us what goes on there, plus highlights four local winemakers who participated in the most recent Santa Monica festival.
A LEGENDARY RESTAURANT CLOSES
For the last 46 years, Piero Selvaggio’s landmark Santa Monica restaurant Valentino has been the locus of high-end Italian dining in Los Angeles. He introduced many Angelenos to truffles, balsamic vinegar and not a few wines from his famous cellars. That era will end with 2018, as the restaurant will close Dec. 31. What’s next for Selvaggio might surprise you: an “Italian steakhouse” in Newport Beach. Food Editor Jenn Harris has details on this and more news (dim sum in Vegas; more pizza in West Hollywood) in her weekly restaurant news column.
SOS CAULIFLOWER
Fashioning wedges of cauliflower into steaks has been an on-trend recipe in recent years. And one reader wrote in recently to request the cauliflower steak recipe from the Four Seasons in New York City. Test Kitchen Director Noelle Carter got the recipe in her latest Culinary SOS column, a slice that comes atop quinoa and blanched vegetables. Pining for a particular recipe? Write to Noelle and she’ll do her best to find it for you.
CO-OP CAPPUCCINO
There are the third-wave coffee shops that, with their gadgets and accouterments, look more like science labs than java joints, and then there is Collective Avenue Coffee, a co-op in Lynwood that’s run out of a concessions stand at a community center. Thus rather than siphons and pour-overs, there’s a pingpong table and piles of kids’ backpacks. Food writer Ben Mesirow talks to the local pair who envisioned the worker-owned cooperative cafe.
The Taste(s): Our annual Labor Day festival, the Taste, will be held over the course of that holiday weekend at Paramount. And this year we’re having two Tastes, not one, with the second happening in October in Costa Mesa. For more info and early tickets, go to extras.latimes.com/taste.
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And don’t forget the thousands of recipes in our California Cookbook recipe database.
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