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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Butchery demonstration.

Cochon 555 is a feast for the senses. From the piggy small plates to oysters, to cheese cubes, to tartare, to ice cream, there are irresponsibly epic mountains of food. Some of it is really good. And from Anchor Steam bottles to wine tastings to single-barrel Four Roses Manhattans, there's enough drink to cripple an army of Keith Richards clones.

On Sunday, rap bounced around the rafters of the House of Blues on Sunset for the fifth annual installment of the touring food-and-drink festival. Women over 50 bobbed their heads to vintage Lil Wayne. Perfume collided with the smell of stewing meat. Slides depicting the faces of contestants and the logos of sponsors flashed across the projector screen. As you squeezed from table to table, your sustainable cardboard dishes and wooden utensils held aloft to avoid collision with another attendee's head, your body was constantly under assault, pinioned by elbows, brushed by shoulders. You felt not unlike a pig in a pen.

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Anne Fishbein

A butchery demonstration at a previous Cochon 555

After Cochon 555 2011, we surrendered. Fattened up like one of the hogs that the crowds of attendees had, locustlike, swirled around, oily-faced and intoxicated, we swore off the thing. We were almost politically opposed to the maniacal level of indulgence that the event seemed to encourage. This year, we're ready for another shot at the lard-soaked affair, promising our conscience we'll have just a few fewer bourbons and perhaps graze more selectively than on previous excursions into the porky paradise.

Yet based on what we're hearing, at the May 5 Los Angeles edition at House of Blues, restraint will be a challenge.

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A. Scattergood

Porchetta at Barbrix

Porchetta, as we recently discovered, is having its moment in Los Angeles. Or maybe it's having another moment, as the glorious Italian ode to pig is hardly a recent discovery. The roasted pork dish had been gracing Italian menus, Italian food trucks and rustic Italian kitchens for a long time before it hit the restaurant scene in L.A. And of course chefs here have been cooking the stuff for years. Don Dickman has been making porchetta for over a decade, at his now-shuttered Santa Monica restaurant Rocca since it opened in 2003, and at Barbrix, which debuted in Silver Lake four years ago.

Dickman's porchetta, he recently told us in Barbrix's tiny open kitchen, is easily adapted for the home cook -- not least because it is not made with a whole pig, suckling or otherwise. (Although he did make the dish with a 100-lb. pig at Rocca.) These days, Dickman uses a Niman Ranch pork shoulder, which he seasons, ties, covers, then puts into an oven for about four hours. That's more or less it. There are a couple tricks -- not because porchetta is a tricky dish, but because there are always tricks to the best dishes -- most of which involve fennel pollen. Find it, buy it, use it, and do so very liberally. That's about it for tricks. "The simpler it is," says Dickman, who has logged many hours as a culinary instructor, "the more likely you are to cook it."

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Aaron Cook | AACK Studio

A.O.C.'s new location

When Suzanne Goin and Caroline Styne (Lucques, Tavern) announced late last year that they were closing their wine-and-small-plates restaurant A.O.C. to reopen in a different location, we might normally assume a months-long transition period, while we all waited for permits and whatnot and dreamed nostalgic dreams about Goin's black rice and saffron aioli. Not so for Goin and Styne, for whom daily low gear still probably means more than most of us do in a month. Tomorrow the new incarnation of A.O.C. opens its doors, conveniently right down the street from the old location, in a space some might remember from its days as Orso or, more recently, Il Covo.

A.O.C., which opened in the original location in 2002, will still be much the same in many ways, with the same charcuterie, cheese and wine that made the restaurant one of the best in town. In the kitchen: chef Lauren Herman, who was chef de cuisine at the previous A.O.C., pastry chef Christina Olufson and bartender Christiaan Rollich. The wine list (150 labels, 24 wines by the glass) is of course Styne's.

There will be small plates and large dishes to share, as well as new things on the menu: focaccia; a whole roast chicken ("Ode to Zuni") with panzanella, fennel, Meyer lemon and green olives; and lamb shank with white bean bruschetta, tapenade and feta salsa verde. There will also be a variation of Goin's suckling pig, a dish she's been serving at Lucques for years. For more on that, turn the page.

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G. Snyder

2012 Cochon 555

The country's roving pig-themed culinary festival, Cochon 555, returns to Los Angeles on May 5, bringing its celebration of nose-to-tail cooking and sustainable farming of heritage-breed pigs.

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Flickr/StuartWebster

uncooked pork chops

Oh, you dirty swine.

A new and alarming Consumer Reports study found that pork chops and ground pork are teeming with nasty bacteria that cause food poisoning, CBS News reports.

Urvashi Rangan, Consumer Reports' director of consumer safety and sustainability, told CBS, "We found potentially harmful bacteria on most of the samples of pork that we tested. One organism we looked at, enterococcus, is more a measure of filth indication, maybe fecal contamination." Eleven percent of samples tested positive for enterococcus, which can cause urinary tract infections and other health issues.

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A. Scattergood

The Tasting Kitchen's rillette

Celebrating this year's Best of L.A. issue -- now out in print and online -- we're counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

23. The Tasting Kitchen's Pork Rillettes:

Deciding what to order at The Tasting Kitchen, the Abbott Kinney restaurant run by chef Casey Lane that has been one of the best restaurants in the city pretty much since it opened, is always a happy quandary. You might ask if Lane has been breaking down whole animals recently, or what form the many pastas, made daily in the small kitchen, might have taken. You could certainly order the chicken wings, a glorious tower of laquered poultry that comes with a rolled damp towel (a slice of lemon, a sprig of rosemary), as if you somehow wandered into a swank Korean barbecue restaurant. You could just close your eyes and stick your fork on the menu and let the restaurant's household gods decide.

But whatever you choose, you should really start with the rillettes, a rustic ode to pork that comes shaped into an enormous quenelle, with a bit of tangled greenery, a ramekin of whole grain mustard and some pieces of the glorious housemade bread, nicely charred by the kitchen fires.

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mikeywally via flickr

Mmmm ... bacon

Can it really have only been a couple of days ago? Yes, news of the porkocalypse began to spread just earlier this week after a British trade organization, the National Pig Assn., put out a press release stating that "A world shortage of pork and bacon next year is now unavoidable."

The reason?

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A. Scattergood

porcetto at Sotto

Leading up to this year's Best of L.A. issue (due out Oct. 4), we'll be counting down, in no particular order, 100 of our favorite dishes.

75: Porcetto at Sotto.

Porchetta is one of those dishes that, once you've tried it, tends to feature prominently in recurrent dreams. The same genre of dream as those in which Dario Cecchini intones Dante in Italian and everybody's pasta turns out like Gino Angelini's and world peace is somehow achieved through fennel pollen. Porchetta, or porcetto as they call it at Sotto, is magic in the form of slow-roasted pork. Seasoned with salted herbs. Blasted in a 525-degree oven (as high as Sotto's goes) until the skin puffs. Then alchemized via four hours at 300 until it eventually comes to rest, between some truly excellent house-made bread, on your table.

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