Last Week in L.A.!

Plus: Alison Roman's Labneh Dip, A Last Supper at Pizzeria Mozza, and Rosie Schaap on Lunch Therapy.

Hey everyone,

Craig keeps teasing me because every five minutes I’ll say something like “this is the last time we walk Winston on a Monday morning in L.A.” or “this is the last time we’ll make coffee on a Monday morning in L.A.” But the truth is: this is the last time we’ll walk Winston / make coffee on a Monday morning in L.A.! Unless you count Topanga Canyon as L.A. which, based on my quick research, it actually is (western Los Angeles County) because that’s where we’ll be staying next week, at Craig’s Aunt and Uncle’s while the moving truck starts whisking our things east. (Then it’s a week in Provincetown, then we move in.)

A lot of people warned me that “packing is a nightmare” and I shrugged it off like “it might be a nightmare for you, but I know what I’m doing!” But now I agree: packing is a nightmare. Especially the part of it known as “whittling down your cookbooks” which I absolutely refuse to do. I went through a period a few years ago after reading Marie Kondo where I rid myself of so many books that I completely regret giving away. So this time, I’m keeping anything that I love and we’ll figure out where to put them when we get to NY. (Luckily we have a lot of room in our new place, including three shelves for cookbooks in the kitchen!)

So the packing continues until Friday when the movers coming. It’s funny, I’ve been exclusively packing the kitchen these past few days and just when I think I have it all put away, I open another cabinet and see more dishes and appliances and things that I have to tape together another box to stow away. As far as food, my neighbors made out like bandits: I had all of these half-opened packages of chocolate and noodles and chia seeds and buckwheat flour that I couldn’t put on the moving truck. So over to their place they went.

I did pack spices and sealed boxes of things, so hopefully that’ll be okay. As far as the books, a lot of them on top of my kitchen bookshelf were caked with sticky dust and I didn’t know what to do, so I Tweeted to Celia Sack at Omnivore Books and she suggested Goo Gone and that worked AMAZINGLY.

Despite all this work, I still found some time to record my podcast and this week I have the delightful Rosie Schaap as my Lunch Therapy patient.

Rosie’s the former Drinks columnist for The New York Times, the author of two books, Drinking with Men and Becoming a Sommelier, and in today’s session she talks all about moving to Northern Ireland, being the only Jewish person in her small village, meeting her husband (and her dog) there, and the latkes she made for lunch. We also talk about drinking in general, how to do it for a living without becoming an alcoholic, what she learned as a bartender, and which cocktail she orders to test a bartender’s skillset.

@amateurgourmetRosie Schaap is my patient on this week’s Lunch Therapy. Listen wherever you listen to podcasts! #drinks #cocktails #podcasts #drinking #oldfashioned #fyp #pod

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You can listen to the whole thing on Spotify below, on Apple podcasts, or wherever else you like to listen.

Now for some other newsletter business.

On Tuesday last week, we hosted our last dinner party here! (Crying emoji.) Our friends Sam and Bobby came over and brought a strawberry pie.

I made my classic combo of cavatappi with sun-dried tomatoes and Caesar salad but for an appetizer I gave Alison Roman’s labneh dip a whirl.

The dip itself is a cinch to make. Put labneh in a bowl (she has you mix it with lemon juice, but mine was so tangy, it didn’t need it). Then in a skillet you sauté scallions, cilantro, and Aleppo pepper (or chili flakes) in olive oil on medium low heat until the oil turns orange and the scallions start to sizzle. Set that aside until it’s cool and then drizzle over the labneh. It’s so pretty and so tasty and then you can serve it with whatever vegetables you have around. I went with radishes, cucumbers, fennel, and watermelon radishes which I finally figured out how to deal with (peel, slice into little watermelons).

As far as last hurrah’s go here in L.A., the one restaurant we needed to go back to before we left was the one that I most wanted to go to when we first moved here: Pizzeria Mozza.

Even though I’m about to be a New Yorker again, I have to say that my favorite chef in America is probably Nancy Silverton. Her flavors are my flavors, and her expertise surpasses my own in such astounding ways that I could never even fathom making a pizza crust as delicious as hers (the pizza that I ordered, pictured above, had anchovies and olives and fried capers) or stuffed squash blossoms as crispy and wonderful as hers.

They were so well seasoned but not too salty! And the dessert? The strawberry gelato pie? There aren’t words. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

Here are some links to keep you busy while I pack:

• Leafy greens as good as croissants? (NYT);

• My new neighborhood has a brand new erotica wine bar (Grub Street);

• It’s Buffalo Chicken. It’s a Cobb Salad. It’s a Buffalo Chicken Cobb Salad! (Smitten Kitchen);

• Create your own workout based on what you have around (via Kottke.org).

That’s it for today folks…

Back to the kitchen I go.

Your pal,

Adam