Flickr/dubh

You can't replace the feeling of lounging on the couch with a scrunched-up newspaper. But with the web, at least you don't need to worry about getting ink on your hands and bagel. Here's a roundup of some food-related stories from our country's newspapers this week. Lucky for us, it's mostly free. For now. Macchiato optional.

"The butcher is back," says The Los Angeles Times; plus a review of Umamicatessen.

In The New York Times, food could be upstaging the bands at music festivals; easy fruit and veggie canning; and chefs Thomas Keller and Andoni Luis Aduriz discuss responsible food practices and what it means to lead two of the "World's 50 Best Restaurants."

How to make "Mom-and-Pop Pulled Pork" in The Wall Street Journal; plans for a cutting-edge kosher restaurant in New York's SoHo; stylish Sachi lunch bags; an easy test checks for antioxidant activity in foods.

The Washington Post offers simple summer recipes -- just five main ingredients each.

Gordon Ramsay talks about his new restaurant, Gordon Ramsay Steak at Paris Las Vegas, in The Las Vegas Review-Journal.

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Anne Fishbein

Tar Pit's elaborate bar

When the Tar Pit, Mark Peel's swank watering hole on La Brea Avenue, closed in early March (the victim of a rent dispute), the restaurant's booths, banquettes, bar and barstools, as well as kitchen contents and a trove of glamorous props, all went into storage, awaiting a relaunch. No word yet on where or when. But the spirits, the contents and life's blood of the bar, have migrated to Peel's Campanile, across the street and nine blocks south. You might say the spirit of the Tar Pit lives on in its sister tavern, a semi-permanent pop-up within a venerable dining institution.

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R.E.~/Flickr

Cup of coffee

"In our busy lives, almost all of us have to walk with a cup of coffee. While often we spill the drink, this familiar phenomenon has never been explored systematically." And so begins the abstract for a paper entitled, "Walking with Coffee: Why Does It Spill?" in which researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara set out to determine why, exactly, coffee tends to splash out of your cup no matter how gingerly it's held as you walk from kitchen to table. The answer, researchers discovered, lies in how well you take your coffee in stride.

As ScienceNow explains, "A fluid's back-and-forth movement has a certain natural frequency, and this is determined by the size of its container." And to determine the frequency of coffee as it swishes in a typical mug, researchers asked test subjects to walk with a cup of coffee, sometimes while staring straight ahead and other times while looking at the mug. Cameras and sensors were set up to keep track of the subjects as they walked, and the coffee as it spilled.

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Emma Lorraine

Dinner Date at Whist

Looking for dates in all the wrong places? How about discovering that the right place combines your love of political discourse, eclectic music, and a quirky look at the culinary world. Radio station KCRW is putting forth its inner yenta with Dinner Date.

For awhile now a group of us at KCRW has been noticing that the people who come to our events seem to have a lot to say to each other even if they've never met before. The singles amongst us simultaneously got a thought bubble about KCRW venturing into the date match space. This of course led to riotous laughter and a spate of catchy unusable names. And yet, the idea lingered. After all, we have this huge list of restaurants that support the station through the fringe benefits member discount program. We have DJs who love to share their favorite playlists. So there you have food and music. Doesn't Shakespeare say "If music be the food of love play on"? But in this town it doesn't really have to be about searching for love. It can just be about searching for good conversation, friendship and possibilities. And so much of what the station is exploring now is about possibility. Bringing people together is at the heart of that.

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A. Scattergood

Roy Choi outside Handsome Coffee Roasters

On a bench outside Handsome Coffee Roasters in downtown Los Angeles' arts district, after the requisite coffee inside and under the (also requisite) California sun, Roy Choi sat down late last week to talk about, well, lots of things. He wanted a cigarette, or a few of them. He wanted to be close to the L.A. River. It had been a long few days, with a post Choi wrote on his blog Riding Shotgun generating a sudden media storm (Eater, The Huffington Post, even The New Yorker) of speculation that he was giving up meat, giving up Kogi, giving up cooking altogether.

All this left Choi (Kogi, Chego, A-Frame, Sunny Spot, the world), he said, humbled. It also seems to have left him a bit baffled. By the perceived controversy, but also -- and more interestingly -- by the level of emotion and influence he can generate in his hometown. Choi has become, for reasons that still escape him, a pivotal figure in Los Angeles, both in the food world and beyond. Most people date the current food truck revolution to his Kogi BBQ truck, but it's more than that. He is, to quote Dana Goodyear, our David Chang. He has revitalized the industry, given voice -- and menu -- to a moment, and mobilized both literally and metaphorically the food culture in L.A. All this has left him having what might be described as an existential crisis. Or maybe it's just a moment of clarity, the thinking man's necessary response to hitting critical mass. Maybe we should all sit down, get a cup of coffee and a cigarette -- or a Sriracha bar -- and think about what's going on more often than we do. Turn the page.

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California Strawberry Festival

strawberry and goat cheese pizza

California Strawberry Festival
Strawberry shortcake? Boring. How about strawberry pizza, nachos or kabobs, along with strawberry beer? More than 40 food booths will offer strawberry-centric items at the California Strawberry Festival. Also expect concerts, contests, amusement park attractions and a couple of hundred arts and crafts vendors.
WHAT: California Strawberry Festival
WHEN: 10 a.m.-6:30 p.m., May 19-20
WHERE: Strawberry Meadows of College Park, 3250 S. Rose Avenue, Oxnard
COST: $12 general admission; $8 for seniors and military; $5 for children 5-12.

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amazon

The publisher's description of The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World is about as boastful in the book world as it gets: "The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published."

Here, it is spot-on.

This 500-page, prose-heavy manual is more an encyclopedia than an actual cookbook, meaning you won't find pretty photographs of homemade yogurt hanging out with beautiful cherry jams inside.

What you will find is a forward by Michael Pollan. And the only resource guide you will ever need for all of your soy sauce, sorghum beer, tempeh and hamanatto (whole fermented soybean "nuggets") weekend fermenting dreams. A Master Food Preservers-worthy guide to fermenting everything edible -- and some things that are not.

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Via Travel Channel

Anthony Bourdain relaxing on a Baja beach

The Baja California episode of No Reservations begins with a soundtrack of gunshots and sirens peppering news reports of violence in Tijuana. But against this noise we see Anthony Bourdain strolling into town looking unafraid. He knows what you're thinking: "Wait, isn't Tijuana dangerous?"

The short answer, we learn, is there is no short answer. Yes, it's been a hotbed for drug-related violence in recent years, which has caused Americans largely to stop going. So what does one find just over the border these days? A city that's stopped caring, apparently, about catering to our vices and is now in the midst of a renaissance, especially when it comes to the culinary scene.

Bourdain also reminds us in this episode that Tijuana is merely stop one on your Baja excursion, if you're wise, and that a journey further south will land you in wine country that "feels like Tuscany."

In other words, our SoCal backyard is blooming again, and watching this show will make you want to frolic in it.

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Paso Robles Wine Festival

Paso Robles Wine Festival

Summer is a wine-drinking marathon in California, and up and down the coast, each weekend brings pleasant opportunities to imbibe outside. The diversity of events reflects the state's varied wine-growing regions. Those on hotel grounds come with a room night package -- a smart way to go.

Because it's a relatively slow time at wineries, winemakers tend to have some downtime before harvest to get out and pour their wares. And that's half the fun, meeting the folks behind the wine labels. Seminars and panels add an educational element, but the best way to learn more about wine is to try more. Here are 10 upcoming events, from Paso Robles to Newport Beach to downtown L.A.'s Union Station, at which to do just that. These are organized by date, with the events that are upcoming -- starting this weekend with No. 10 -- listed first. Turn the page.

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Flickr/Joey Zanotti

"I try to stay with themes or objects or sources I can trace back to my personal history," artist Robert Therrien once said. "The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me in some way or another ... the more I am attracted to it." Little wonder, then, that plates, pots and pans have inspired much of his recent artwork. Today's Flickr pool photo, of an untitled sculpture by Therrien at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to you courtesy of L.A. Weekly reader Joey Zanotti.

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