Christine Chiao

Judges' panel at Science & Food

An apple pie bake-off with a twist opened the final installment of the UCLA Science & Food lecture series this past Sunday, in which students enrolled in the corresponding undergraduate class vied for the best in final group project. The range of theories, as it turned out, would expand further when Christina Tosi of Momofuku Milk Bar and Zoe Nathan of Huckleberry (not to mention, Rustic Canyon, Sweet Rose Creamery, and Milo & Olive) each shared insight into her personal process in baking.

Before their lecture, Tosi and Nathan were part of the panel of judges, including Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold and KCRW Good Food host Evan Kleiman, invited to select the winning project amidst a slew of experimental apple pie recipes, varying in focus from texture to taste. The audience participated in the sampling as well, asked to vote in the People's Choice category. Amy Rowat, a biophysicist who co-created the class and the series, chose pie as a platform to look into such scientific principles as the melting points of fat and how solids become liquids. Now in its second run, the series began at UCLA last year, with guest lecturers including Rene Redzepi of Noma and Momofuku's David Chang.

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Jeff Kirshbaum

Winemaker Seth Kunin at AVA Santa Barbara's tasting room

Like a lead singer with a side solo project, AVA Santa Barbara is winemaker Seth Kunin's side gig. Because Kunin Wines is a well established Santa Barbara County-based brand -- known for its Rhone-style blend, Syrah and Zinfandel -- Kunin decided to create another label, AVA Santa Barbara, to explore and make smaller batches of other varietals rather than dilute his well-known "personality driven" Kunin Wines label.

Opened in February, AVA Santa Barbara's glass, steel and very contemporary-looking tasting room in Santa Barbara's low-rise Funk Zone is the only place to find Kunin's small-batch production of varietals like Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc and Grenache. Taste the bright 2010 Los Alamos Grenache and then look up to see where it's from -- the tasting room's entire wall is covered in a vivid, chalkboard map that creatively illustrates the Santa Barbara wine country, its various micro-climates and American Viticulture Areas (AVAs) with a few harbor seals frolicking offshore thrown in.

Close to the beach, the Funk Zone -- an area of industrial-style buildings and businesses between the 101 Freeway, train tracks and the beach -- is a very cool place to taste wine. Although, as Kunin explains, this wasn't always the case.

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In food-on-television news, Masterchef Season 4 gets fired up tonight on Fox with a two hour premier -- and apparently there's breast milk involved. Judge Joe Bastianich is quoted as saying that one contestant used her own boob juice in a dish during auditions. Swell. The the page for the promo spot, with Bastianich burning money or something for some reason.

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7-Eleven

Cheap drinks are awesome

Slurpee fans rejoice. To kick off the Memorial Day weekend -- and the beginning of summer vacation -- 7-Eleven will be slapping a 49-cent price tag on their medium-sized Slurpees beginning Friday, May 24. The deal will go on all weekend long until Monday, May 27, and has been timed in order to celebrate the convenience store's new product -- Slurpee Lite Sugar Free Sprite.

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The Spare Room

cocktails at The Spare Room

With the flurry of trends in the cocktail world, you'd be hard-pressed to guess which will have staying power. Take barrel-aging. Yes, it's super cool to get your nightly cocktail from a barrel with provenance, but is it really relevant anymore?

With barrels now available to the home bar geek, distillers barrel-aging and bottling their boozy recipes, and barrel-aged cocktails appearing in even more experimental combinations across the country, barrel-aging seems destined to age quite well.

So, what exactly is this mysterious process? Not so mysterious at all, really. Booze has been in barrels for centuries. During the Golden Era of the cocktail in the late 19th century, Jerry Thomas -- the ultimate bartender/showman -- was aging rum shrub in casks for about six weeks, as well as bottling many of his cocktails, most likely for easy storage and batching drinks. At the turn of the century, 1910 adverts from the Heublein Company touted their bottled cocktails first being aged in wood; these Club Cocktails were popular even into the 1960s.

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Seed Kitchen

Vegetarian sushi at Seed Kitchen

Sushi With the Chef
Eric Lechasseur will offer a prix-fixe vegetarian menu that includes a vegetarian sushi roll, salad and beverage for one night only at Seed Kitchen. The chef has studied in Japan and France in addition to completing a program in Canada. The menu shows a Japanese influence with dishes like the Saisai donburi macro bowl.
WHAT: Sushi With the Chef
WHEN: Sunday, May 26, 4 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. seatings
WHERE: Seed Kitchen, 1604 Pacific Ave., Venice; (310) 396-1604.
COST: $25 plus processing fee (presale); $30 (at the door)

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A. Scattergood

Connie & Ted's

If you've spent any time dining at Providence, Michael Cimarusti's Melrose Ave. seafood palace, you'll know how much the chef and co-owner of the place loves his fish. Since it opened in 2005, the restaurant has earned accolade after accolade, including Best Restaurant, 2012 in these pages. But for all of its myriad charms, Providence is hardly the kind of low-brow fish shack that Cimarusti loved going to as a kid, when he spent summers visiting his grandparents in Rhode Island, fishing and eating lobsters and steamers along Narragansett Bay.

So it shouldn't come as a huge surprise that when Cimarusti started planning a second restaurant, his thoughts turned to the clam houses of his childhood. Connie & Ted's, which is named after Cimarusti's maternal grandparents, will open it's enormous doors in early June.

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Tom Bergin's

Pretzel at Tom Bergin's

Chopped Viewing with Brandon Boudet
Chef Brandon Boudet of Little Dom's, Dominick's, Tom Bergin's Tavern, and 101 Coffee Shop participated as a contestant on the high-intensity Food Network show Chopped. Tonight is his viewing party at Tom Bergin's Tavern. The pub will be extending its normal happy hours from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. by an hour, ending at 8 p.m. as a result. The happy hour menu includes $1.50 tap ponies, $5 well spirits and cottage pie cheese fries for $5 each.
WHAT: Chopped Viewing with Brandon Boudet
WHEN: Tuesday, May 21, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Tom Bergin's Tavern, 840 S. Fairfax Ave. Los Angeles; (323) 936-7151.
COST: No additional cost

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Screenshot of Patric Kuh's Twitter page

Flickr/purpaboo

Roast pork with vegetables ... and herbs?

With Los Angeles voters deciding on three ballot measures today (D, E and F) regulating marijuana dispensaries, here's some food for thought: Pigs fed marijuana stems, roots and leaves on a farm outside of Seattle grew 20-30 pounds heavier. (And happier, too?)

"They were eating more, as you can imagine," Susannah Gross, the farm owner with the porky pigs whose feed was supplemented with potent pot plant scraps, told Reuters. Also, they just wanted to wallow in the mud all day.

In November, the state of Washington made recreational marijuana use legal -- medical marijuana was already legal there. A medical marijuana grower named Matt McAlman provided Gross with the detritus of his business. He said he hopes the idea expands to other forms of animal husbandry, including chickens and cows.

Kinda gives new meaning to the terms "pot-belly pig," "herbed chicken" and "grass-fed beef," no?

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