How to Have the Best Roadtrip Down to Los Angeles Ever

1. Stay up the night before burning CDs, which they do still sell in those silvery towers. Make sure to include fun themed compilations and the obligatory California playlist. Play them at appropriate times, like when driving through Weed, CA ("Songs About Stones and/or Getting Stoned," of which there are unsurprisingly a lot).
2. Pack hilarious friends, who will keep you in stitches for all ten hours, and make driving through tears of laughter extraordinarily difficult.
3. At rest stops, through some miracle, choose fast food restaurants where the door opens directly into the restroom, and you don't even have to make awkward eye contact with employees from whom you will buy nothing.
4. After ten hours of crazy driving, stop off in San Francisco to walk along Crissy Fields at midnight, see the underbelly of the Golden Gate Bridge, and decide that you're never walking on sand in anything other than boots ever again, because this is the first time you haven't carried a sandcastle back in your shoes.
5. Fall asleep and wake up in a beautiful mansion in Nob Hill with a view of the entire city.
6. Have brunch at Burma Superstar.
7. Die happy.
8. Drive to LA.

More seriously, here is a rundown of two of the best Southeast Asian dishes I've ever had, at a restaurant I've been to three times, once for every time I've been to San Francisco. Actually, I think during one trip, I went twice.

Tea Leaf Salad is presented at the table, like most of the dishes at Burma Superstar, with all of its components separated: Burmese tea leaves, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, dried shrimp, fried garlic, crispy mung beans, peanuts, & sunflower and sesame seeds, all arranged in a square of heartbreaking deliciousness. The server lovingly mixes it at the table and then the salad is inhaled. The tea leaves are from Burma and they're fermented in a secretive way, the secret of which I will discover, and then I will eat nothing but this salad.

We definitely wanted lamb, but we didn't know what kind, but both of our servers recommended the chili lamb. It's Chinese in origin, which is apparent once it comes out doused in fried Szechuan peppers. So good, especially on top of their coconut rice, which puts anything I've had in Portland (and I'm looking at you, Pok Pok) to shame.

Fool's Chocolate Swirl Cake

It comes as no surprise to anyone who has read this blog or heard me rave about my latest chocolate-making experiment that I like to make a lot of crazy things from scratch. Also unsurprising: the first store-bought thing I reconstructed at home was alcoholic. That year for Christmas I handed out bottles of homemade Baileys.

But I am also extraordinarily lazy, and will condense as many bowls as possible into one, and sometimes, if there are dinner parties to be had, I will decide that cocktails work much better if one isn't running around in clouds of flour trying to make a million-dollar dessert an hour before it's supposed to be served. Not that I've done this or anything. Also, it is really difficult to make anything with a cocktail in your hand.

Anything except this cake, that is.

onwards »