baking, santee alley, doughboys & tuna fish

here is a recap of the last couple of weeks. i made chocolate chip cookies a couple of weeks ago. chocolate chip cookie pics these days are kind of played the same...overflowing-stack-with-one-a-little-off-center-so-you-are-not-sure-if-the-whole-thing-will-tumble pose. this is all i could come up with for this batch. we'll see what next time brings.

the following week i made some red velvet cupcakes. they were necessary to bribe one of my bosses.

i think this recipe is the undisputed champion for the time being, the manny pacquiao of red velvets.

last saturday, morgan and i went downtown to santee alley. i don't think either of us has been in at least a year. it's the best place to find bad bootleg dvds, horrible quality knock-off handbags, illegal red-ear slider turtles, and other oddball things.

after santee alley, we went to the new big wangs downtown. it was like 11am, so it was pretty dead in there. morgan and i didn't quite feel like drinking pabst and eating hot wings yet. i forgot to take a picture of my blt there. it was oversized and had a basil aioli.

last sunday, i met pete at doughboys. he is kind of in-town for work, anaheim-ish. i got the breakfast special, which is eggs, bacon, and almond peach pancakes with raspberry sauce.

pete got pan toast, which is cinnamon buns and croissants chopped up and soaked in an egg and vanilla custard like french toast, then made all crunchy on the griddle. also served with raspberry sauce. i didn't get a shot of his plate o'bacon because it is that thick cut kind that looks greasy and sluggish when prepared. i requested extra super crispy for mine, but you can only take the thick cut so far.

our food was yummy, but took about an hour to get. the table next to us sat down a few minutes after us, got their food, ate, and paid their bill before we got our food. i think our server forgot to put our order in, like how he forgot he had already taken out drink order. he then forgot to add the red velvet cake to the bill, so i guess we are even.

i found an old friend from the randolph commissary days on facebook today. really exciting because i hadn't had contact with him since i saw him last in vegas in 2004! whenever we were in vegas i would always wonder if he was still there and where he was working. thank goodness for social networking!

this week, we went on a factory tour of a carpet manufacturer and had lunch there. i grabbed a sandwich not knowing what it was. i took a bite and realized it was smelly tuna and could not finish it. they didn't have any trash cans in the meeting room we were in so i could only hide it in my bag until we got out of there. i wrapped it in layers of paper napkins first so i thought i was safe. getting back to the office, i took the sandwich out of my bag and discovered all of the tuna juices had soaked through the napkins and also my marine corps wallet. i got it in yuma when i went to visit justin for marine corps ball a few years back. i think i really fucked that wallet up and i am disappointed. i can't get the stink out of it. i don't know why i thought i could get away with hiding tuna fish in my purse. happy birthday, justin.

umami burger

i know, i am probably the last in los angeles, but i finally got over to umami burger last weekend. it is a tiny room with another tiny room in the back. i got there around 5:30pm and had a lady take my name for the list. yes, there was a wait already at 5:30pm. the wait wasn't too long, though. after all the hype it was finally good to be there.

the menu is short. it offers six different types of burgers, a couple of side options, drinks, & desserts. i ordered the original umami burger.

for sides i went with the thin-cut fries. see that soup spoon filled with ketchup? it is umami ketchup and that is all you get. it is their special blend and they are stingy with it. it tastes like ketchup with truffle oil, which is not a bad thing.

another side i couldn't pass up was the malt beer-tempura battered onion rings. i ordered the roasted garlic aioli sauce with it, but it came out with the umami ketchup anyway. i like to think that was an accidental bonus.

then the burgers finally arrived! from what i can remember, the umami burger is loaded with sauteed onions, shitake mushrooms, a parmesan frico, (parm cracker,) roasted tomatoes, and umami ketchup.

(notice the classy glass-bottled coke lurking in the background.)

the manly burger has beer-cheddar cheese, smoked salt onion strings, bacon lardons, and possibly umami ketchup.

they even had lustable salt & pepper. these look like the vic firth "pump & grind" set i have seen on amazon.

i read today on chowhound that this location on la brea is boo'd. it was really small and a bit tight in there, but it wasn't as bad as some of the chowhounders said. maybe we got there early enough to avoid madness. in any case, i have been thinking about those burgers everyday since saturday. it was more than good.

from last week

so, more on what happened last week.....

my brother was able to make his first trip to los angeles. twenty four hours after arriving, i surprised him with his first trip to las vegas. we got there at 3:30am, so i think i was too tired to take pictures. here are a few of pictures i took previously in vegas.....

i finally started taking pictures at jean philippe patisserie when we went to the bellagio........

the desserts were too attractive to not document.

we got a couple of mango sorbets.

we gambled a little and won a little.

when we got back to los angeles a few days later, and things were a little less eventful. we ate at doughboys, (as previously mentioned.)i had the beefy mac & cheese.

my brother, jason, had the sloppy joe.

crystal had the s.o.s.

ceyjay had a huge sandwich. i think it is called the monster?

we stopped into the shop where LA ink films, high voltage tattoo. jason got a t-shirt.

we ate at the cheesecake factory and split this salad with bacon dressing

and these garlic rolls with fontina inside. you dip them in that marinara sauce.

we got to sit outside and people watch.

we went to the beach a little north of malibu.

and we ate at neptune's net.

it was a pretty busy week!

the new blog

this is not my first blog posting, but is the first on blogger. i have another blog page, but it is like this big sea of alone-ness over there. i started elsewhere because i have always had this idea that blogger is hard to navigate and so far i do not have the hang of it. it looks like the picture behind the blog name is aligned to the right and there is this odd column on the left. if anyone has any pointers on this, it would be appreciated.

this pic is of the famous red velvet cupcake at doughboys on 3rd st. it is quartered so that we all got kind of an even piece. doughboys was one of the fun places we went to last week when my brother was visiting.