Stories

From the LA Times

Long before Rick Bayless, the Too Hot Tamales and even Diana Kennedy, there was another teacher and cookbook writer who introduced authentic Mexican food to a wider American audience. Though she is all but unknown today, at the turn of the 20th century a remarkable woman named Bertha Haffner-Ginger not only learned how to cook Mexican favorites but also packed lecture halls nationwide and published a cookbook sharing her knowledge, whetting the country's appetite for a cuisine that wouldn't travel outside of the borderlands in earnest until the 1950s.

And she got her start at the Los Angeles Times.

Haffner-Ginger was hired by the newspaper in 1912 to head the inaugural Times School of Domestic Science, an institute the paper devoted to the art of teaching the region how to cook via test kitchens, classrooms and hands-on training. She lectured weekly on subjects ranging from French techniques to baking, dairy to poultry, in an auditorium in the Times' then-new office building. From there, she took her show on the road, touring the country teaching.

Among her most popular topics: Mexican cooking. "An announcement that my lesson for the day would be Spanish dishes invariably brought record-breaking crowds in any city in the United States," she claimed in the introduction to her "California Mexican-Spanish Cook Book," published in 1914.

Read more...

I’m a looky-loo. I real estate dream shop online, a lot!!!! Late one night when my husband was safely sleeping,  I forwarded a photo of a house on a lake I had found and the subject said, “Lets buy this instead of doing an addition to our house.  It’s MUCH cheaper.”

So, instead of doing construction , we bought a house online in Quebec.  Doesn’t everyone in L.A. do that?  Come on.  You know you do.

Well, we did.

So, there we were that first week, enjoying our pristine lake when we got our first and possibly only visitor.  It was our neighbor, the retired judge who lives up the road on our quiet lake.

He was there to inform us about ecology and keeping the lake from getting that nasty blue algae that was killing a lot of the other lakes.  First we heard of that.  Perhaps we didn’t research enough.

Every time I see a naked mannequin, I just want to stick one finger out, point, and yell “NAKED MANNEQUIN!”

I can’t be the only one, and I certainly can’t be the only one who has wanted to dress that naked mannequin up in a summer outfit just so I could invite him or her—or it—out for tea time in Central Park.

Yes, certainly, we’d have a tea party as lovely as the Mad Hatter’s on a blanket spread out on the Great Lawn. Although, I’d leave the invite for the Red Queen behind, because she’d surely be too delighted with how easy it would be to “be off with it’s head—that is, if the mannequin I window shopped for on 5th Avenue had a head at all!

But we’d sit for hours in the sun…me the Mad Hatter, and the mannequin, the Alice to my imaginary Wonderland-ah yes, it’d be the perfect tea party for two. Both of us, pale, and in serious need of SPF 50, we’d sprawl out across my blanket, and we’d laugh about the kids swinging and missing in their game of wiffle ball, and we’d compliment the jazz performers we could hear off in the distance, and above all, we’d share stories.

It came to me in a Saturday morning Skype. My four-year-old nephew looked into the computer and asked what I had for bweckfist. I said I ate breakfast in the form of a second dinner the night before. His parents laughed. Though that late night enchilada plate from our local Burrito King wasn’t all giggles.

I wouldn’t be hungry until lunch. A pattern was threatening to form. Two nights prior it had been pancakes and bacon from the Burrito King hours after a sushi dinner. Family faces stared at me in the video window for elaboration. I heard myself inventing then blaming it on Post Cleanse Disorder (PCD).

My sister and brother-in-law did the Master Cleanse a month before we did. Leo laughed, feigning pain, “I know what you mean, man.”

Our stomach’s egos were out of check; too prone to temptation. I should also mention I had an accomplice in the Burrito King missions: our buddy H-berg, who claims he can take at least twice as much as me when it comes to things of an intoxicating persuasion, but whom I impressed early in our friendship by demonstrating I could eat at least as much as him. I haven’t revisited the Burrito King for solo midnight pancakes and bacon. These things taste much better in good company.