One of our favorite vegan restaurants in Los Angeles right now is Matthew Kenney’s Plant Food + Wine in Venice. We don’t usually make it that far west very often, but, when we do, we end up there 80% of the time (the other 20% of the time belongs to Gjelina, who does amazing things with vegetables). The restaurant opened up not too long ago after Kenney shuttered his old nearby Santa Monica outpost M.A.K.E, which was equally impressive and raw, which is saying a lot in our book (you can see 2014 write-up of M.A.K.E. here on the journal).

A little while back, PF+W announced that they’d be doing an eleven day pop-up of Matthew Kenney’s Asian-inspired Belfast, Maine culinary incubator project, Arata. Our friend and Director of Culinary Operations, Scott Winegard, had been hard at work at the Maine project, so we were somewhat aware of what they were doing. As they put it: “Arata, which is Japanese for fresh and new, offers plant-based ramen noodles, steamed buns, small plates, desserts inspired by Far East flavors, and an original cocktail and organic wine program.” All of that’s right up our alley, so, despite the truism-ism of east-siders never traveling west and west-siders never coming east, we’d been meaning to buck the trend and come by since the July 28th opening.

Alas, packed schedules and snarling traffic delayed our westward venturing up until the very last night of Arata’s Venice residency, this past Sunday. But we finally made it over, and, man, are we glad we did.

Winegard and company have taken traditional Japanese and pan-Asian dishes and transformed them using bright, vibrant, ultra-fresh local farmers produce and a shit-ton of creativity. The result’s almost as satisfying to adoringly behold as it is to eat. Another aspect of this menu that Scott pointed out to us when we were there—this is one of the first times a Matthew Kenney restaurant has employed soy, in this case in the form of fresh tofu + tempeh from a Bay Area organic soy farm.

The starters were our favorites—two sets of soft, fluffy buns (or bao), one filled with smoked king oyster mushrooms, cashew hoisin, scallion, and cucumber, the other with grilled tofu, mustard miso, pickled chile, and napa cabbage. Then we got kimchi pancakes with sesame-chile sauce and some really fucking great crispy fried maitaki (sometimes known as hen-of-the-woods mushrooms) with a sweet soy dipping sauce.

The noodle dishes and bowls were pretty great too though, with the ramens employing a lighter, thinner broth to showcase and highlight the vegetables used in the soups. We ordered Chile Ramen—smoked tofu, charred chiles, and red pepper purée—and the Spicy Udon—a broth-less noodle dish that actually used flat rice noodles rather than rounded wheat udon noodles and was far from spicy but really good nonetheless, tossed with a sichuan tempeh, radish slices, and a creamy cashew sauce that struck us as almost linguine-esque. We got a good look at (but didn’t eat) the Arata Ramen too, which was chock-full of pulled mushrooms, bak chop, dulse seaweed, and accented by a corn purée.

Sadly, as mentioned above, the short-lived pop-up has now left the west coast, but who knows—maybe they’ll seek a repeat performance given the response. Or maybe we’ll make it to Belfast, Maine some time?

We’re in the midst of both peak pepper season and peak tomato season here in southern California and it really shows on our weekly visits to the Hollywood Farmers Market. They’re so plentiful and so beautifully enticing, it’s been a war of the wills every Sunday not to walk away with armfuls of each.

For the peppers, we’ve gotten really into homemade hot sauces (more on those later); and for the tomatoes, you name it—heirloom tomato + cucumber salad in olive oil, fresh tomato sauces, roasting on the grill, eating them whole + raw. One farmer—a new one on the southern-most side of the market whose name I have yet to take note of—offers up more varieties of cherry tomatoes than I thought possible, all of which are sweet and fresh and irresistible.

This past Sunday, I came away with more than my fair share of these cherry tomatoes and was hit with a sudden craving for fresh pasta lasagna. What we ended up with was a simplified, deconstructed take on the traditional mainstay that was truly craveable. What’s more, it was really pretty easy to make and nice in terms of not having a giant tray of left-over lasagna a week after the initial cooking.

We’ve been trending towards writing up less strict, measured-out recipes of late on these pages and more just walking readers through the general concept of a dish and leaving the particulars to taste and individual creativity—this is no exception.

Not including the pot I used to flash-boil the pasta, I actually did this as a single-pan dish. Everything was farmers’ market sourced with the exception of the flour and tempeh (both of which actually would be options at our market, now that I think about it).

For the fresh pasta, first off, I assure you, it may seem daunting, but it’s really very easy to make and is so, so good. Many modern recipes don’t even incorporate semolina and instead just use fine quality white flour (we like King Arthur). The Kitchen has a good recipe that walks readers through it all pretty thoroughly; the only caveat for fellow vegans would be to bring in the ‘flax egg’ to sub in for the chicken eggs, detailed on this previous post. So, in the case of this recipe, we halved it for a recipe for two (and even then, ended up with about twice as much pasta as we needed), so it was 1.5 flax egg (1.5 TBSP ground flax + 4.5 TBSP warm water, chilled). Following that pasta recipe, you can make that ahead of time and set aside for 30+ minutes at room temperature and even fridge if you want to do it way ahead of time.

Once that was done, I sautéd half a sliced sweet onion in olive oil on medium-high heat in my small cast iron skillet, letting it brown and caramelize only for a few minutes before adding half a block of tempeh, sliced thinly and then crumbled up by hand. I browned that and then added a little salt, pepper, smoked paprika, and fennel seed before lowering the heat a bit and carefully adding about a cup of homemade vegetable broth. Then I let that reduce and thicken and set aside, scraping as much out of the pan as possible.

While that was going, I blended up a homemade cashew cheese. It’s kind of different every time, really, and you can read a little more (and get an actual recipe via a chef friend) on a previous post, but I’d say the general keys are soaking the raw cashews the night before when possible (for maximum creaminess), having a really good blender (especially if you don’t soak the night before), using some nutritional yeast and a decent amount of salt, and, if possible, getting a little cheese-like funk in there via some brine, ideally some that’s homemade and, thus, a little more subtle (I like using homemade cauliflower stem brine).

While that was blending and after I’d scraped out the skillet, I halved my cherry tomatoes—kinda the more, in terms of quantity and variety, the better—and peeled and sliced five or so cloves of garlic, adding it with a generous amount of olive oil to the skillet, and cooking under the broiler, watching carefully to make sure tomatoes are cooking to the point of bursting but not overly blackening. I then scraped that out into an empty dish and set aside.

Now back to the pasta—we don’t have a pasta maker; I like to do it by hand. So, in my case, I took the ball of dough and cut it in half and then rolled it out on a long cutting board with plenty of additional flour to prevent sticking. In this case, I made one big, long noodle—maybe 1.5′ x 6″. Then I cut that in half length-wise so I ended up with two long, rough-hewn noodles. I then took my first noodle and placed it in boiling water for all of one minute, until it started floating at the top of the water and looking more cooked than…not cooked. I gently removed the noodle from the water, placing one end—about 1/5th of the length—in that same skillet with a little olive oil in the pan’s bottom and gently laid the remainder of the noodle on an adjacent cutting board (see the photo to the right). Then I repeated for the second noodle.

Then it was a simple matter of adding alternating layers of fillers—tempeh mixture + cashew cheese + tomatoes—and folding over the length of the noodle; filling, fold; filling fold, until you’ve run out of noodle. So like an accordion noodle pasta—one sheet, folded over and over again. With most of the layers, I wouldn’t do all three fillers for the sake of stability, but you do you. One tip—end by topping with first cheese and then the tomatoes, then carefully roast under the broiler until the cheese has browned well. Then top with some cut fresh basil.

Enjoy! And get to those tomatoes while they’re good, California!

With this unrelenting heat of late, we needed a little relief this past weekend. What better solution than a visit to the newly opened, vegan-friendly soft serve joint in Silver Lake, Magpie’s Softserve?

We keep hearing about this place from friends and have been meaning to check it out for far too long. They boast inventive flavors (Thai Iced Tea? Strawberry Cheesecake? Peanut Butter Pretzel?), work from a chef-inspired, from-scratch recipe for the soft serve, and always have at least two vegan soft serves on tap and at the ready.

Past non-dairy flavors have included such scrumptious contenders as Chai Coconut, Dark Chocolate Mint, and Blood Orange Creamsicle, but they were featuring a coconut-y Almond Joy flavor and the popular mainstay, the Corn Almond, which we both opted for. And it’s certainly earned its popularity—it had a rich sweetness to it and you could actually see the tiny specs of corn in the soft serve.

Katie topped hers with candied pecans whereas I opted for the excellent maple coconut flakes (which are mellow and not too coconut-y) and the vegan fudge sauce—heaven in a cone!

With an oft-rotating menu of flavors and rare reviews of their other vegan offerings, we’re sure to be back to be back for another visit soon…especially since the merciless sun seems to be on a mission to melt Los Angeles.

Magpie’s is located at 2660 Griffith Park Boulevard in Silver Lake, just off of Hyperion, down from that Trader Joe’s with the terrible parking lot and across the street from that Gelson’s that now has a bar inside…for my fellow grocery store aficionados.

At the start of this month, we ventured out to try a newly opened Burmese restaurant on Sunset in Silver Lake—Daw Yee Myanmar, an import from the San Gabriel Valley touted by Eater LA as “one of SGV’s best Burmese restaurants.”

We’d never had true Burmese cuisine, but there was a joint that opened up in DC right after we moved away from that fine city years back and we’d always been curious. Myanmar’s geography means that it borrows from Chinese, Indian, and Thai cooking + cultures, so how could some combination of all of those cuisines not rule?

We reached out to the cafe via Facebook to see how vegan-friendly they might be and they got back to us right away, explaining that many items were vegan as were and more could easily be made vegan.

When we visited (and as of writing, seemingly), the cafe was still fine-tuning the permanent menu, calling it a soft opening still, so we’re not clear on what may or may not be long-term dishes, but most of what we got seems pretty mainstay.

A must are the Garlic Noodles (pictured above), which are easily made vegan and feature wheat noodles tossed in garlic oil with chickpea ‘tofu,’ which seems to be polenta-like (soy-free) tofu rods. If you’re into spice (and additional awesomeness), ask for their housemade chili sauce, which is superb and goes very well with the noodles.

Then the Tea Leaf Salad, which is like nothing we’ve had before and highly craveable (and vegan as-is). It features truly distinctive and defining fermented tea leaves, shredded cabbage, steamed corn, diced tomatoes, crunchy fried lentils, fried butter bean, fried garlic, roasted peanuts, and toasted sesame. The taste and texture of this dish make it another we’d highly recommend getting.

The Burmese Vegetable Curry is good and vegan as-is, but basically a fairly tame, well-spiced stew—nothing too spicy—with okra, potatoes, lentils, daikon, and curry leaves. And the chickpea ‘tofu’ + Burmese samosas filled with onions and masala potatoes are totally solid openers if  you’re looking for them.

Daw Yee—at 2831 Sunset in Silver Lake—is open 5-11PM Monday through Friday, closed Tuesdays, open 11AM-11PM Saturday, and 11AM-10PM Sunday. And, most importantly, they have cute neon paper animal heads on the wall. As Eater points out, no liquor license, but next door at Same Same street thai (also vegan-friendly), they’ve got a solid beer + wine list.

Daw Yee Myanmar facade photo via Eater.

Macro shot of our sweet potato doing its best to start a sweet potato garden and giving us a nice color palette in the process.

Unit 120 is the self-proclaimed culinary incubator of Eggslut‘s Alvin Cailan, located in the Far East Plaza in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. With Alvin’s vegan-friendly, market-vegetable-driven Filipino regular Amboy, we’ve unsuccessfully been attempting to stop by for a while now. And I’d personally planned a visit Tuesday for Keep‘s 10 year anniversary party, but was effectively land-locked by the aforementioned neighborhood brush fire.

But then, this morning, scrolling through my emails, I saw one from Eater LA titled ‘Fried Orange Chicken Sandwiches Are a Thing Now’ with this photo featured.

Maybe you already know this about me, but I love Chinese food. I love Sandwiches. I love delicious chicken-like substances that are animal-free. So, hope in my vegan heart, I clicked through.

Turns out, the fried orange chicken sandwiches in question indeed came from new residents at Unit 120, Golden Boys—chefs Hunter Pritchett and Adam Midkiff, both former sous chefs at Son of a Gun. Grasping at straws, I briefly mentioned via Instagram that they should totally offer a vegan version of the sandwich, and, an hour later, they replied with just that—the tea smoked orange cauliflower sandwich.

Backing up, Golden Boys currently exists—usually—as a Thursday night pop-up culinary residence, serving coursed family-style dinners embracing a fun, healthy, and transparent approach to Chinese Food in Los Angeles. The menu’s farmers market-driven and, as Hunter assured me today, totally vegan-izable given some heads up. Check out their Unit 120 page for more details.

Tonight, though, the Golden Boys opted for a more casual, window-centric sandwich night, featuring both the sandwich menu. And I must say, the vegan cauliflower version was fucking spectacular. Pictured a tender, smokey, charred cauliflower steak coated in a wonderful, sweet-but-not-cloying orange sauce, and then topped with spicy, crispy sichuan tiger slaw and smashed cucumbers, all sandwiched between two grilled, crispy-soft potato buns.

The chicken/cauliflower sandwich was supposedly just running tonight as a special, but Hunter assured me you’d be able to order it as an add on with the the regular Thursday night menus going forward. Menu and details all via their 120 page; check them out on Facebook to stay keyed in to their adventures to come.

PS—they also sell cool shirts for $20.

A new entry in our up until now unformed must-read short books list—the updated, illustrated version of Food Rules from food guru Michael Pollan.

I, for one, recoil by nature when I feel like someone’s telling me what to do, so I was hesitant to read anything presented as rules for eating. “Who are you to tell me what to do? Why do you know better than me or anyone else?” That kinda thing.

But after Katie read the book and loved it, and after getting through the brief introduction that presents these more as suggestions based more on cultural wisdom and traditions and the reasons behind than faddish science, I gave the short volume a try. Honestly, it’s changed how we think about food and, thus, how we cook and eat. Obviously, being longtime vegans, we already thought about food a lot. And me being someone who loves to cook at home from scratch, we were already doing pretty well in my opinion. But this book helped us really even more thoroughly examine our relationship with food in a really healthy way. And it’s readable in a single sit, which is always nice.

Highly recommended for foodies and just people who eat food. Which is all of us, last I checked.

We again contributed to a vegan bake sale + benefit for Burrito Project LA this past weekend, this time with a new culinary venture—vegan shepherd’s pie buttermilk biscuit bites, a literal and figurative mouthful.

If you’re not familiar with BPLA, they work to support Los Angeles’ hungry + houseless by getting together to make + distribute—you guessed it—vegan burritos. We did an interview last year with one of the group’s organizers and more recently Vice did a great piece on the group’s work that’s well worth the read.

If you’re interested in giving these biscuit bites a try and don’t want to wait for the next bake-sale-based-benefit, they’re relatively easy to make.

We started with our long-held vegan buttermilk biscuit recipe. Then, we basically worked up a batch of smashed potatoes—sautéing 4 or 5 cut-up fingerling potatoes with their skins still on in olive oil until browned, then adding a few sliced-up cloves of garlic, cooking for another five minutes, and adding our homemade vegetable broth, cooking covered on medium heat until tender, then adding salt to taste along with a tablespoon or two of nutritional yeast and smashing with a fork.

At the same time, we sautéd a sliced white onion in olive oil on low heat until translucent and fragrant and then threw in our lentils (you can use a drained can or, preferably, a cup of soaked and then boiled until tender dried lentils). Cook until tender, scraping and smashing, seasoning with salt and pepper, a little ground cumin + fennel, and grated cinnamon. Really, you can spice them however you like or normally do, we were just going for a warm feeling with the cinnamon + cumin and a little bit of a traditional sausage taste with the fennel.

You’d then set both fillings aside and fill a muffin tin with the biscuit dough, making a divot in the middle of each bit of dough and baking at 350°F for about 10 or 15 minutes until they firm up. Once they do, take them out of the oven and check them—some if not all will bake out and fill in the divot, in which case you can just scoop the middles out a bit (added bonus—you’ve got extra little donut-hole-esque biscuit bites). Return to the oven and bak until golden, not brown. Again remove from the oven and then fill, first with a scoop of the lentil mixture, then with the smashed potatoes. Now turn on your broiler and place the tray directly under the flame to give them a nice browning, carefully watching them to make sure they don’t get too scorched.

We topped the finished product with chopped green onion and a nice, quick tomato jam, halving a handful of cherry tomatoes from the farmers market and placing them in a cast iron pan with a little olive oil, scorching in the broiler, tossing with a tablespoon or so of cane sugar once removed but still hot, and smashing with a fork once cooled.

You can make any components ahead of time and assemble when ready to eat/serve/donate.

If you’re local to Los Angeles and want to get involved with Burrito Project, you can find out more about their next meet up via their Facebook page. Below, Katie + Burrito Project LA leader, Aubrie Davis at the bake sale; below that, pre- and post-scorched tomatoes, before being smashed.

We’re continuing to develop the partnership we’ve been working on with Chef Minh Phan of porridge + puffs that we talked about a few months back.

In our research + development phase, we’d been perfecting the design and brand of PINCH—Minh’s line of savory jams + sauces—while she perfected the recipe and variations in flavor. Our first iterations on labeling followed the visual theme we’d established—ingredients-based patterns within a grid system that plays off of porridge + puffs’ graph paper imagery—with brightly-colored, hand-printed and -cut labels.

Leading up to Minh’s final summer appearance at Smorgasburg LA this past weekend, we worked with her to have a series of glass containers screen printed at a nearby glass printing specialist using a new pattern that celebrates the local ingredients the products rely on and the state they’re from. Minh sold the savory jams in their new jars publicly for the first time this weekend and we’re hoping to line up some permanent selling points in Los Angeles that we should be able to announce in the fall.

Stay tuned.

Below, a shot Minh took using the jars at a colorful pickling session for the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project.

the result: #pickles in jars designed by @ravenandcrow for #PINCHbyporridgeandpuffs #silkscreened #collectorsitem #californiasun #madeinLA

A photo posted by minh phan (@mignardisesla) on Jul 5, 2016 at 10:00pm PDT

Yes, you read that subtitle correctly.

Mad Pambazos is indeed a Mad Max-themed, with suitably named sandwiches and salads, a food truck they’ve dubbed the “war rig,” and an in-character backstory to support it all.

We’d seen it around the corner from our studio over the past few weeks but had no idea what a pambazo was. Though we had every intention of looking it up, Eater LA saved us the trouble by posting a piece on the apocalyptic food truck this morning.

Turns out, a pambazo is “a delicious sandwich from Mexico City, dipped in salsa and pressed until hot and crisp” (MP’s words) and it is indeed delicious (and not nearly as messy as you’d think). It also turns out that Mad Pambazo was again parked a stone’s throw from our office, so what better to do for lunch than give it a shot.

A lot of the menu is pretty animal-meat-centric, like the Toecutter, Silvertongue’s Chicken, and the Lord Humungus Pastor, but they do offer a vegetarian option—the People Eater—that they speedily assured us they could easily do vegan via Twitter. The result is a beautifully hot (and spicy) mess of thick-sliced smoked potato, equally thick-sliced red chili butternut squash, salsa verde, cabbage salad, and pickled jalapeño between two excellent pieces of bolillo-style bread (like a Mexican sourdough) that have been dipped and pressed crisp. Truly, truly excellent. We don’t have a formal Best Sandwiches in Los Angeles list, but if we did, this would be near the top…along with Mohawk Bend’s BBQ Chickpea Cutlet, Dune’s Green Falafel, Little Pine’s Sausage + Fennel Sandwich, and Blue Window’s Vegan Cheddar Melt. …Huh. I guess we do have a formal Best Sandwiches of Los Angeles list.

We also grabbed a guac tostada with habanero mango salsa (one of up to three daily guacamoles they offer), a giant, $4 tub of housemade pickles, and a selection of their complimentary housemade salsas (our favorite was the black, slightly sweet, not-as-hot-as-it-sounds charred habanero).

You can check Mad Pambazos’ schedule on their site (looks like they’ll be at Downtown LA Artwalk + Night Market next week) and follow them on Twitter for up-to-date info.