My dear friend of my heart showed me her city in food. We ve known each other for more than half our

I just returned from a crazy weekend trip to L.A. to visit my high school best friend and celebrate our 40th birthdays in a glorious way that would have made our teenage selves proud! We stayed at  a boutique hotel on Venice Beach, shopped at The Grove and ate at rock star chef restaurants. We visited the Burbank cheap airlines tickets farmers market, drank Intelligentsia coffee, ordered one too many cocktails and talked cheap airlines tickets about everything and nothing for two solid days a luxury we haven t had since our children began constantly interrupting our cross-country phone calls.
We had fantastic pastries from Porto s for breakfast guava strudel, mango empanadas, meat pies and my favorite, potato balls. Think shepherds pie, deep-fried! For lunch, we went to Mozza, a restaurant partly cheap airlines tickets owned by the great bread and pastry guru, Nancy Silverton. Unbelievable.
Finished with a strawberry-rhubarb sundae. Must remember to make almond brittle for my desserts in the fall. My mouth is watering, remembering the luscious pleasure of the strawberry ice cream swirling with the tang of rhubarb. Mmmm.
It s cappuccino. It s art. It was accompanied by my indecision. I couldn t decide cheap airlines tickets whether to have a twice-baked hazelnut croissant, which I imagined would be like an almond croissant, but wicked, or a thyme comte croissant. The Intelligentsia barista told me I was having both. So I did. Both great. cheap airlines tickets Hazelnut cheap airlines tickets best.
Lunch at Surfa s. Flowers in my salad! Shopping in Hollywood, then dinner at Red O, Rick Bayliss restaurant. I got the molé enchiladas because Gia is making mole in the book I m writing now. Delicious! I was running out of room but it didn t diminish my pleasure in the beauty of my corn and goat cheese tamales, my spicy pomegranate cocktail or the habanero salsa that blew our heads off. (And when I looked cheap airlines tickets out the window, would you believe I saw that my childhood friend Hal Sparks was headlining cheap airlines tickets at The Improv across the street?! Los Angeles is huge but the world is small.) The molé looks a lot simpler than it tastes.
My dear friend of my heart showed me her city in food. We ve known each other for more than half our lives now but most of those years have been spent apart college, culinary school, living in different cities, marriage, children, jobs life. It was amazing to catch up and be able to integrate our now-selves with our then-selves and carry our friendship into the next half of our lives. Shining our hearts forward. Living learning and eating!