There are just some things you never tell a bride-to-be and her groom. Especially if you’re responsible for making their wedding cake and it’s not finished yet even though you’re just four hours away from the start of the ceremony. Oh, and to top it off, you’re lost in the middle of a major metropolitan city 45 miles away from said nuptial confection. Give or take a few miles.

It was literally hours before my friends Marvin and Sarah would be married in a beautiful ceremony overlooking the San Pedro Harbor, and I was somewhere near Slauson and Crenshaw in the slums of Los Angeles, looking for a Mr. Wisdom and his wheatgrass farm.

“Hello,” my frantic voice screamed into my cell phone. “Mr. Wisdom? I can’t find you. Are you sure you’re down here?”

“I am on Slauson near West,” he answered slowly. “In a pink house.” Looking around, I saw dogs running rampant on the sidewalks and the thick layer of trash that lined the gutters, but no pink house. I began to wonder if it really was “wheatgrass” I was buying, and not the other kind of “grass” that might be awesome at first but could possibly result in my arrest. (I promised myself that upon my arrest, my one and only phone call from jail would be to a bakery for a new wedding cake.)

I drove around some more and finally, a bright pink house emerged from the dilapidated rows of buildings. He exists! I parked in a red zone, stepped over some homeless people lining the sidewalk and pushed my way through a creaky screen door. After weaving my way through bedrooms and hallways (and feeling weird about walking through a complete stranger’s home), I found an older, distinguished man in a white linen suit. Dazed, he looked up from his newspaper and smiled slowly. Oh my God, I thought. I really did commit to buying a massive quantity of weed.

“Are you Mr. Wisdom?” I asked tentatively.
He smiled even wider. “I am he.”
“Great! I’m Cynthia, here to pick up the wheatgrass I ordered.” Please don’t hand me the contents of a Ziploc bag.

Mr. Wisdom took me behind his house to a shed surrounded by another batch of homeless people. “You know, I’ve been growing wheatgrass for more than 25 years,” he said, ignoring all of them. One of them looked at me, nodding his head knowingly as if he was listening to some internal lecture and needed to convey his understanding.

“I will help you carry,” he said to me. I nodded back.

Mr. Wisdom opened the rickety shed to reveal his pride and joy – rows and rows grass flats, tall, in bright shades of emerald green. Some glittered under the sunlight that managed to make its way through cracks in the roof.

I grabbed a flat and started walking toward my car with Orlando, the bobble-headed homeless man. After I thanked him and handed him some cash, he admitted to me that he had a drinking problem.

“Do not,” I instructed while pointing to the cash, “buy booze or drugs with this.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” he promised. He swore to his God that he wouldn’t, and as I got in my car, he rambled on about the bible.

Orlando was interesting and I kind of wished I had more time to listen to his stories, but I had to leave. I now had three hours, including drive time, to get home, finish the cake, pack everything into the car and drive to the wedding location, which was about an hour and two freeways away without traffic.

But, at least I had the wheatgrass. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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We’ve all been though this. Moving, I mean.

I haven’t touched a stove in two weeks (unless you count the serious cleaning that was needed), mainly because I’m straddling between an apartment and a home of my very own. The new place is a condo that overlooks a small lake with ducks, lily pads and waterfalls. Inside my tiny, tiny space are cathedral ceilings and my very own kitchen pie window. I actually have a windowsill in which to sit pies. Heaven, anyone?

So while I heave and haul 28 years of my life into hand-me-down cardboard boxes, let’s spread a little link love, shall we? I haven’t poked around the blogosphere in awhile – and it looks like I’ve missed a lot. Regular posting should resume next week. Here goes:

• First, the heart-wrenching news we’ve all heard about Gourmet. It’s been a few days, but it still stings like rubbing alcohol in an open wound. I’m anxious to see what’s going to happen to food journalism in the near future, (and what next editor Ruth Reichl will touch with her golden hands) but man, what a low blow. And for the employees, too – who according to reports, got just a couple of days to pack up and leave. What happens now?
• Esquire mag has named Jose Andres’ The Bazaar as its Restaurant of the Year.
• Food Frenzy writes about a man who’s living off of nothing but grated cheddar cheese.
• Heart-of-gold blogger The Chickenless Kitchen makes Pineapple Citrus Tartlets with honey and gets creative with cutting pie dough (nice work!).
• There’s a neat muffin concept over at The Other Side of 50: Ham and cheese on rye. Big yum!
• I LOVE those super-awful supermarket brownie bites they sell in plastic tubs. These from Night Baking look so much more appetizing – so I may have found a new brownie to worship.
• It’s called the Sex Panther. Why? Your guess is as good as mine. But you can see it for yourself at This Is Why You’re Fat.
• One of my favorite blogs out there is Tea & Cookies. Our beloved Tea recently tackled Purslane.

… lounging on powdery beaches with the scent of plumeria wafting through the breeze. I’m in Hawaii for the week. Regular posting will resume next Wednesday — thank you for reading and hope all is well with the rest of the world.

Much has been said in recent weeks about the ethics of food blogging, and the whole debate seems to have come to a head with Eater LA and it’s debacle in posting an anonymous tip that defamed downtown LA wine bar The Must. It starts here at Eater LA with the anonymous tip, then ends up here in a letter from the restaurant. And if that’s not enough, here’s a great story by Elina Shatkin of the LA Times that sums it up, with some commentary on the ethics of anonymous sources. So, are anonymous sources ethical?

That conversation is just one side of the multifaceted ethics debate. In another angle, people are wondering whether reviewing freebies or doing paid posts are Kosher. In this BusinessWeek story (mentioned in Shatkin’s piece), Douglas MacMillan writes that the FTC “wants bloggers to disclose when they’ve been wooed with cash or freebies from companies they cover.”

The notion of full disclosure is standard practice in journalism. And there are reasons for it. It’s the best way to combat bias, and it informs the reader of anything they may consider shady. I’m happy to see there are lines being drawn in the food blogosphere, and it will be interesting to see how it all ends up.

To help food bloggers along, there’s this fantastic code that was dreamed up by two fellow food bloggers. Then there’s the EGullet code of ethics.

Both of these codes are similar to the ethics codes of the Association of Food Journalists. This is the one I follow, but that’s not to say I don’t have a few things to learn as well.(Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more.)

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I’d like to write a book.
There, I said it.

That’s something I’ve had trouble admitting to people, for fear of them saying something like “You? A book? What makes you think you’re interesting/knowledgeable/talented enough to write a book?”

But after the Symposium for Professional Food Writers conference, I don’t have trouble telling people this anymore. After you sheepishly admit something like that to Michael Ruhlman himself while at dinner one night, you kind of get over your fear. His responses: “I wanted to write a book when I was your age, too,” followed by, “About what?” and “Why?” Hmm.

Well, I want to write about food. I want to write about food and memory and life and love and all that. Memoir-style. Because I’ve been blessed with a multiracial background, with a loving mother stuck in the ways of pre-war Vietnam, who tried to raise her child in that old manner in this new country. Because there’s a lot to explore in this often hot-blooded mother-daughter relationship, both culturally and personally, that I hope can help other mother-daughter teams out there understand their own relationship dynamics.

Even more, because there’s a story in my Irish/Italian father, too. He’s a lover of Mexican food who told me that he believes he’s an alien from another planet, sent to Earth because his brother wanted to be king of said planet. My father apparently was next in line for the throne. A year later, I would meet him for the first time in 22 years.

And because I believe food heals. Not in the way a person temporarily binges away depression, or in the medicinal or nutritious way, but in that can’t-put-your-finger-on-it, soul-calming way. If you let it, it will assemble you back together and make you whole again. People really need to know that food can do this. It’s certainly done this for me.

I kinda wish I wasn’t embarrassed to detail this to Ruhlman when he asked. I said something along the lines of “I don’t know, I have time; I’ll figure it out.” He probably would have given me some great advice. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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This week I’ve been at the Greenbrier in  West Virginia for the annual Symposium for Professional Food Writers. The bad news is that it’s coming to a close tomorrow, but the good news (well, for me anyway!) is that I’ll be back to blogging. I’ll report back with interesting tidbits and such next week.  Have a lovely weekend!

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I gathered some friends together to squelch our mutual curiosity for a tiny, scarlet berry and it’s “miraculous” effects.

The gathering was called flavor tripping, and the berry is deemed Miracle Fruit. Eating one of these will weird-out your tastebuds to varying degrees and allow you to experience food in a different way – by ditching some of their nature-intended flavor profiles for radically different ones. The promise was that acids and sour foods would take on sweeter notes, while already sweet foods would become cloying. It sounded too good to be true. And in some respects, it is. It’s a crapshoot, really.

First, you bite into the berry, roll the pulp around your tongue for a few minutes (to coat tastebuds) and spit out the seed. If you’ve done it right, it’s effects should last anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, depending on the potency of the individual fruit, and, as Wired magazine speculates, depending on your genetic makeup. There’s no guarantee that it will work, and no guarantee of how long it will work. You just have to trust that it will. And for the most part, it did: A few people reported that the berry worked instantly, but others say the effects were extremely subtle until a second berry was ingested. (I had ordered extra berries for this scenario.)

For their price ($3 each), they’re not anything you would reach for when you want a snack (and the Miracle Fruit’s taste isn’t anything to write home about, either). So, are they worth it? Read on for the rundown and some comments from flavor-trippers.

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This Friday Link Love is brought to you by the adorable little Daschund (lookit the smile on his face!) that surfaced on the Internet months ago. I’ve found some other equally small and/or sweet blurbs from the culinary world for your perusal. Have a good one!

• Food & Wine magazine names its Best New Chefs of 2009.
• David Lebovitz encourages unusual flavors of homemade ice cream (carrot cake ice cream!) for the LA Times.
• The Chocolate Peanut Butter Gallery tackles Devil’s Food Twinkies with peanut butter filling.
• How sweet it is: Pie of the Tiger offers a step-by-step lesson in sugar casting bowls. Eat the fruit, and the bowl, too.
• Serious Eats celebrates the (possible) birthday of the ice cream sundae.

– Cynthia Furey