There's no recession at Google

Just gourmet food on a giant rotating pedestal. There was Slanted Door Vietnamese style beef with watermelon, a foodie breakfast with quail eggs, and an Indian plate with a spicy kabob. And desserts. And an open bar.

No Comments on this Japanese Food Product

Picked up at the Mitsuwa grocery by a work colleague. Makes you want to visit Engrish.com, doesn't it?

Kid Gourmet

This meal turned out great. Chicken in Riesling from the March issue of Gourmet. Leeks, carrots and chicken braised in a reduction of riesling (the bottle I picked up from Venice Beach Wines), with parsley-potatoes. Henry loves it. Well sort of - he's a little strange when it comes to potatoes, but that's just fine with his Dad.

Great New Wine Shop in Venice Beach

For anyone who lives in Venice Beach, you have a great new wine shop on Rose Avenue a few blocks west of Lincoln. I picked up some amazing German wine that Oscar, the owner of Venice Beach Wines, recommened, for about $12 a bottle. You can click here to read by Yelp review that includes contact info and a map. Remember to read Alder Yarrow's Vinography.com if you need some great wine suggestions!

Run Away!

Henry freaking out at the park next to LAX! If you want to see how close these planes come, here is a YouTube video someone shot. The park in Westchester is right on Sepulveda next to the In-N-Out Burger so you can grab lunch and sit in the park and watch the 747s land. Kids love it, and it's a large park safely tucked away from traffic.

What's For Dinner? Gourmet Hog Meat.

On tonight's menu at our house will be the Pork Tenderloin with Arugula, Endive and Walnut Vinaigrette, from the March copy of Gourmet. It's one of the Quick recipes and the ingredient list is simple. The herbs - chive and thyme - we have in our herb garden, and we managed to get all the other ingredients on the cheap at Trader Joe's (and we had a pork tenderloin in the freezer just waiting for this recipe). The dressing is a puree of toasted walnuts, rather than having to track down more expensive walnut oil.

Clippers Game at Staples

Our Activision client was cool and kind enough to hook us up with tickets to a box at the Staples Center to catch a game between the Clippers and the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors kicked the Clippers' asses (no surprise there); I think the look on Lindsay's face probably has more to do with whatever disturbing tale Paul is weaving just behind her.

I ate three Staples Center hot dogs (they were free in the luxury box), which is the whole motivation for me going to anything NBA. Note how many people are paying zero attention to the game.

Stinky Latte

I forgot why I took this picture, although I think it had something to do with th smell. Yeah, it smelled like the sewer system at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Sepulveda & Palms had backed up into the shop. The odd thing about it - other than the odor - was that the employees seemed immune or were pretending nothing was wrong.

"Rocken" the Three Sandwich Sampler

3 Squares Bakery on Abbot Kinney:

Shrimp Grilled Cheese with Diakon/Wasabi Pickle
German Meat Loaf on Pretzel Bread with Pickled Veggies
Lox with Horseradish Mayo and veggie chips.

Also had an awesome burger, and there is a modern Viennese style bakery with excellent Julius Meinl coffee.

Truffles Grow Amongst My Roots

My mother sent me this article, which had made its way onto the NYTimes.com most emailed list, about the growing of black truffles in a small town in the corner of East Tennessee. It is, in fact, Chuckey, a small town in which my grandfather, Judd Allen Bolinger, was born and raised.

From the Times: "Chuckey is not the sort of place one expects to find the holy grail of the food loving world. But on the edge of town, perched on a south-facing slope overlooking the birthplace of Davy Crockett, an orchard of 350 hazelnut trees has begun to sprout Périgord truffles, the fragrant black fungi that can send epicures, as well as routing pigs and dogs, into fits of frenzied greed."

Wow, It's ColecoVision

I found this while checking out Ning again - where you can create your own social network app from templates created by others. I've been filling out some content and exploring some of the features and tools on Ning for a LA restaurant review app that will serve as a companion to my blog. I got a great url for it: boltoflight.ning.com. My tagline (cheesy) is Where Good Food Strikes. I'll work on that, I promise. Once I get some content uploaded to it, I'll add a permanent link onto the site. Now that I'm a Wii and a Xbox 360 owner, it's funny to see how far the industry has come since its inception.

My father bought be the original PONG game back when we had a black and white Sony television, which if I'm not mistaken was multi-band because we originally bought it in Germany, but there was a switch on it so it would work in the US. I could be making that up, but that's my recollection - that and when you turned it off the electron beam made a really cool pattern on the screen and then dissolved into a bright dot. I never had an Atari, but I did have one of the early Texas Instruments personal computers, which had a terrible button keyboard. I used to spend hours typing in BASIC programs from BYTE magazine, which you can now buy on eBay.

Carolina BBQ Plate

Heaven on a plate: pulled pork with pepper vinegar sauce, cole slaw, hushpuppies, fried okra, and a jug full of sweet tea. Allen & Son Bar-B-Q in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. If you ever find yourself in Raleigh-Durham, do not skimp on a trip out to get a taste of what might be the most original and most American of meals.

Allen & Son Bar-B-Q

While back home I had to make a pilgrimage to one of the great Bar-B-Q restaurants in the country. True Eastern North Carolina pork barbecue, hickory smoked and filled with a flavor that you just know doesn't get any more authentic. It's food that is timeless and unchanging. It's hard to describe, and most people probably don't usually think about food so nostalgically, but it's like food for the centuries. There seem to be so few American foods that taste so purely good as this kind of real barbecue: meaty, gamey, earthy, tangy, peppery, spicy and sweet.

Allen & Son was featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the week before we headed back home. I couldn't find it on their site, although there is this photo of Keith Allen. The article was a good background on why Allen & Son is the real deal.