I read Jonathan Gold’s extraordinary restaurant columns in the LA Weekly every Thursday, so when my wife, Tara, and I started planning our recent week in Los Angeles, we imagined nights spent dragging our baby from osteria to taqueria to izakaya. But the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market our first Sunday morning was astounding, overrun with asparagus, artichokes, lettuce, shellfish, even freaking avocados. In the Northeast at this time of year we’ve been running on fumes for months, but Southern California isn’t missing a beat. We bought perhaps a little too much food, then canceled our dinner reservations and started calling everyone we knew to come over for dinner.
At first I tried to be at least a little restrained. The second night all I did was dress short strozapretti pasta with a sauté of baby asparagus, green garlic, fava beans, and a couple of glugs of peppery unfiltered olive oil (also from the market, of course). Well, technically speaking, there was also that first course of baby artichokes, deep-fried and served with mayonnaise made with market eggs and that market oil, and then those strawberries we served after dinner with tarragon and goats’ milk yogurt. But I wasn’t trying to make up for lost time or anything. I’ll be able to cook all those things in New York soon. Really. By June at the latest.
We bought and ate obscene amounts of citrus, and smuggled more of it home in our luggage. I loved the enormous Oro Blanco, a thick-skinned grapefruit/pomelo hybrid with tons of flavor but gentle amounts of acidity. The tangerines were excellent, too, but my heart belongs to the blood oranges, with their vibrant color and rich, mellow juice. A life that includes citrus salad dressings every night is not so bad, it turns out. They work as well with fresh, crisp, multi-hued lettuce as with asparagus that’s been blanched and left at room temperature. The dish that stopped me in my tracks, though, was a salad of Haas, Fuerte, and Pinkerton avocados, dressed with the floral, bright juice of Persian lemons, a splash of oil, and a generous amount of salt. Balanced on a point between rich, sharp, salty, and smooth, it’s what I’ll dream about while waiting for spring to arrive at home.
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