Life Is Too Short For Birthday Party Pizza

To all whom I'm about to offend -- especially parents who have graciously invited my kids to your kid's birthday party -- I apologize.  But I cannot help myself.

Life really is too short for Birthday Party Pizza.

By Birthday Party Pizza, I mean the super cheap kind that comes from a national fast-food chain and is meant to inexpensively feed a horde of small children who'd rather get right to the main event -- birthday cake -- and is also meant to feed parents who attend the parties too and find themselves in need of a little more sustenance than the precut carrots, celery sticks and ranch dressing.

In this day and age of slow food, locally grown ingredients, organic this and free-range that, there is some awesome pizza to be had out there.

Read more »

Love Means Having To Drive Past Monterey Park

With all due respect to the late pop novelist Eric Segal, who penned the ridiculously inaccurate yet often quoted line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," I submit the above definition, which proved its validity last night.

Late Blooming Mom, Dad and five-year-old twins were driving on Interstate 10 around dinnertime, heading back to Los Angeles from an overnight trip to see visiting relatives in the Palm Springs area. The drive between L.A. and P.S. is pretty much a culinary wasteland of Denny's, TGI Friday's, Mickey D's, the slightly more tolerable In-n-Out Burger, etc. But after you get through the strip-malled communities of Pomona, West Covina, El Monte, etc., you come to a culinary mecca for some of the best Hong Kong-style Chinese food outside of Hong Kong. It's called Monterey Park, and even the most casual reader of the Pulitzer-prize-winning L.A. Weekly food writer Jonathan Gold knows that a u-shaped segment composed of Atlantic Avenue, Garfield Avenue, and San Gabriel Blvd. contains a large number of excellent Chinese food establishments.

Sadly, Late Blooming Mom does not get out to Monterey Park very often, even though it is, traffic permitting, maybe 10-15 minutes east of downtown L.A.

Read more »