Jeanne Kelley

strawberry rhubarb pie

Even though Angelenos enjoy cookouts year-round, tradition (and marketing) tells us that Memorial Day weekend kicks off the official outdoor cooking season. What better way to celebrate the beginning of summer, end a barbecue, and to mark a holiday originated to commemorate fallen civil war soldiers, than with pie?

The perfect late spring/early summer, old-fashioned pie is definitely filled with strawberries and rhubarb. Rhubarb is one of those weird vegetable-cum-fruit plants that, despite being delightful, can't help but come off as a little archaic -- it has toxic leaves, after all. But pair the long pink stalks with strawberries and you've got a sublime combo. Rhubarb gives body, texture and earthy tartness to strawberries. Strawberries lend color, juice and sweet floral fruity-ness to rhubarb.

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Ryan Robert Miller

mini peppers

At first I was skeptical of the colorful mini peppers packaged in the clamshell at the grocery store. I can be wary of produce not sold from crates at farmers markets, and these glossy, firm, petite yellow, red and orange babies looked just too plastic-perfect and remarkably un-heirloom to be any good. But eventually the mini-me cuteness and a giant, bargain-priced bag proved too tempting.

The little peppers turned out to be as fun as they look. Not only are they honeyed as the name implies (they are marketed as both Sweet Mini Peppers and Veggie Sweet Peppers), their flesh is tender and they are practically seedless. Tasty cooked or raw, you can eat the peppers whole, and when roasted or grilled, the skin is so thin it needn't be removed.

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A. Scattergood

Paula Wolfert and a pot of couscous

If you love couscous, Moroccan cuisine and the many glorious cookbooks of Paula Wolfert (not necessarily in that order), you have someplace to be this Saturday morning. Wolfert will be speaking at downtown's Central Library in an event brought to you by the Culinary Historians of Southern California. The talk will focus on Wolfert's latest book, The Food of Morocco, which won a James Beard Award (International cookbook category) on Friday. (Congratulations, Paula!)

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Anne Fisbhein

Roy Choi loves cookbooks

​Cookbooks have long faced competition from magazines and newspapers. But now, it's the Internet Age. Print publications are putting their recipes online, and websites such as Epicurious and Food help you find instructions for virtually any dish with just a few clicks. Meanwhile, blogs are offering their own perspectives and kitchen tips. Many of these websites are beautifully designed. (Just check out the tomatoes at Gilt Taste.) Still, cookbooks persist with their hard covers, thick pages and glossy photos.

Saturday, LitFest Pasadena will host a panel on "Cookbooks in the Age of Epicurious" from 3:10 - 4 p.m. with several L.A. food writers. Jeanne Kelley will moderate with Jenn Garbee, Matt Armendariz, Joseph Shuldiner and Squid Ink editor Amy Scattergood as panelists. (We've just gotten word that Shuldiner is unable to attend.)

Kelley is a Squid Ink contributor whose books include Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes, Holiday Baking and Salad for Dinner. Garbee reviews cookbooks for Squid Ink and covers history, artisan foods and baking. She is also the author of Secret Suppers: Rogue Chefs and Underground Restaurants in Warehouses, Townhouses, Open Fields, and Everywhere in Between, and is working on a baking book. Armendariz, a photographer, wrote On a Stick!: 80 Party-Perfect Recipes and blogs at Matt Bites. Pure Vegan is forthcoming from graphic designer Joseph Shuldiner. Scattergood co-authored Good to the Grain, and is writing a cookbook for kids.

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Food Book Fair

The food intellectual is not a new phenomenon, but it is a new cliche. The glut of rant-prone gonzo restaurant critic bloggers, armchair sustainability experts and urban chicken farming gurus reminds us that the importance of caring about food, where it comes from and who makes it has soaked deep into our collective psyche (and Twitter feeds) like milk into bread for meatballs. In less than two weeks, the first Food Book Fair will celebrate thinkers, writers and artists who make food their focus in a fairly massive marketplace of ideas set to go down at the new Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn.

Interested in intersections between food and art? Curious about how people living in cities are reaffirming their connection to the land they rarely see? Eager to tackle the concept of "food porn?" From May 4-6, the Food Book Fair will oblige with panels featuring Harold McGee, Colman Andrews, Ed Behr of The Art of Eating, Gael Greene, Peter Meehan and Dr. Marion Nestle, among the many confirmed gastro-sages, and representatives from such publications as Lucky Peach, Diner Journal, Edible Brooklyn, Gastronomica, Laphams Quarterly: The Food Issue, Meatpaper, Put a Egg on It, Remedy Quarterly, Swallow Magazine, The Runcible Spoon, White Zinfandel and Wilder Quarterly.

We know Brooklyn is pretty far away, but with a lineup like that (it's like the Coachella of writing about eating, though we doubt Prosper Montagné will be appearing via hologram), you may want to at least tell your friends to go.

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Anne Fishbein

Chef David Myers at Comme Ça

If you are the sort of person whose bookshelves are stacked with cookbooks written (a relative term these days) by fancy New York chefs, the volumes of titles bearing the names of folks like Eric Ripert and Andrew Carmellini and David Chang, and you've kind of wondered where all the L.A. chefs are, then you might want to read today's feature food story.

Laurie Winer writes about the coastal divide in the world of cookbook publishing, through the lens of an anonymous L.A. chef (20 guesses on that one) and of chef David Myers, who currently runs Comme Ça, Pizzeria Ortica and a restaurant in Tokyo, and whose previous restaurant Sona is still lamented. Myers has been busy lately, working on a new Los Angeles restaurant and, yes, a cookbook. Read the story. And check back later for a few recipes from the coming book.

Andrea Raffin

Editor's note: As many of you have probably noticed, the Weekly is currently searching for a new food critic. This sort of thing takes time. Sometimes a lot of time, right? So in the interim, we've asked (begged, really) noted cookbook author, television personality, foodist, movie star and local mom Gwyneth Paltrow to come aboard as our guest columnist. We're also very happy to announce our partnership with her company goop. Welcome, Gwyneth! Her first story...

My close friend and confidant Victoria Beckham and I were just discussing over brunch how stressful it is being busy moms in heels. It's insane. Between reading emails, making vision boards with Isabel Marant, and researching the most effective psyllium husk, there's very little time to whip together a quick, healthy, committed and tolerant weekday night dinner for your family.

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Screenshot of Ruth Bourdain's Twitter page

Jeanne Kelley

foraged salad with goat cheese

You don't have to be a Nordic, Michelin starred-chef like Rene Redzepi to work wild-grown foods into your cooking. We can forage right here in Los Angeles County. Because of our summery winter, edible plants such as lamb's quarters, miner's lettuce, nettles and wood sorrel are flourishing now in our local canyons and mountains and maybe even in your own backyard.

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Anne Fishbein

Roy Choi, with cookbooks

If you love both Roy Choi (Kogi, Chego, A-Frame, the world) and your treasured stack of cookbooks, those demi-glace-spattered volumes cluttering your kitchen or serving as doorstops to same, you might want to turn the page to today's feature food story, in which Choi considers his path from local chef to cookbook author. With some stops along the way, involving reading other people's books and, yes, a little cooking:

"Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating also spoke to me, made me believe in my cooking. Forget measuring, just take a handful of this or that, he writes, or make sure your guests are in a good mood before serving spleen. He says it's done, probably, when you think it's done. This book is how cooks really cook: from the heart, cooking a heart, and with a little tongue-in-cheek while cooking tongue or braising cheeks."

Choi, as you may know, recently signed a deal with Ecco (Anthony Bourdain! Dan Halpern!) to write his first cookbook, Spaghetti Junction: Riding Shotgun With an L.A. Chef, due out next year.