Bakery on Figueroa, year unknown. From the LAPL Photo Collection.

Cathy from Gastronomy Blog is full of good ideas. For instance, San Gabriel Valley eaters have her to thank for the handy acronym for the impossible-to-remember JTYH Restaurant: Justin Timberlake, You're Hot! Easy, right? You'll never embarrass yourself in front of the Chinese knife-cut noodle set again thanks to Cathy.

But perhaps her best idea to date is EAT MY BLOG, a blogger bake sale benefiting the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. As soon as she sent out the call for blogger-bakers, I offered to help, and joined Laurie from G-ma's Bakery and Diana from Diana Takes a Bite on the planning committee. Several weeks, hundreds of emails, forty-plus bakers and one planning dinner at Canelé later, the sale is on and I couldn't be more excited.

Click here for the full-size menu.

Come out to Zeke's Smokehouse this Saturday, December 5th from 10 AM to 4 PM and pick up treats like pear and walnut mini coffee cakes, pumpkin swirl brownies, rose and sweet corn macarons and orange and saffron caramels. There will be a couple vegan options and some gluten-free goods as well. Everything will be priced from $1 to $3 and all proceeds will go to the LA Regional Food Bank, which provides food to the hungry all over LA. Rob and I spent one Saturday morning volunteering there, building bags of food for the elderly, and I can personally vouch for the important and inspiring work they do. (You can read more about the LA Regional Food Bank here and find out how to volunteer with them here.)

I'll be making black sesame cupcakes with matcha frosting and cranberry caramel almond tarts, should you want to eat my blog, but no matter what, this Saturday's sale should be a great time. Just ask this guy, who clearly understands how fun baking can be:

Icing a cake, year unknown. From the LAPL Photo Collection.

EAT MY BLOG
Saturday, December 5th from 10 AM to 4 PM
Zeke's Smokehouse
7100 Santa Monica Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90046

UPDATE: The event was a huge success, selling out in the early afternoon and raising $3,000 for the LA Food Bank. Take a look at Cathy's write-up and photos for more details. Thanks to all the bakers and sweets eaters who stopped by!

In Japan every place -- even the smallest, most unremarkable village -- is famous for something. Hokkaido is known for its rich and flavorful milk, its light-bodied, buttery style of ramen and a crab with freakishly long legs full of sweet, delicate meat. All were in attendance this past weekend at the Mitsuwa Hokkaido Fair 2009 -- all except the butter in the ramen, but more on that later.

My friends Mel and Steve, who went to the festival last year, invited me down to the Torrance Mitsuwa on Sunday during the pre-lunch hour, cautioning that the ramen booth had run out the year before. I got there early and wandered around, relishing the familiar sound of "Irasshaimase!" being belted out by tiny uniformed ladies proffering treats. Between the supermarket and the food court, a strip of booths selling Hokkaido specialties had sprung up and I couldn't resist the rows of golden karei-pan (curry bread) at Pullman Bakery. I also eyed the Yubari meron-pan (melon bread made from a special Hokkaido muskmelon) and shiro-taiyaki (white, fish-shaped cakes filled with sweet red bean paste), but decided to wait until after the ramen.

Mel and Steve arrived and we lined up at Shingen Ramen. Steve craned his neck looking for the miso-butter ramen they had eaten at last year's festival, but only straightforward shio ramen was to be found. I was pretty happy about the prospect of any sort of ramen in my belly, but the more Steve talked about the rich miso broth kissed with a bit of famous Hokkaido butter, the more I started craning my neck looking for miso-butter ramen. But, as the old saying goes, a ramen bowl in the hand is worth two in the bush. I sat down before my bowl of shio ramen with only joy in my heart.

The broth was clean and powerfully salty, the noodles springy, the whole bowl surprisingly free of the usual porky grease. It was like a ramen deconstructed, each component simple but nearly flawless.

I would have eaten it with some butter though, had they offered. I'm just saying.

Dessert number one was my still-warm curry pan, a crunchy-coated roll miraculously filled with rich curry, a study in textures and contrasting flavors. I could write a paper about the synergy of crunchy-soft bread, squishy curry and smooth potato chunk...but I'd rather just eat another curry pan.

Dessert number two was a shiro-taiyaki. Or two actually, because I really like taiyaki. It's my second favorite Japanese festival food.* I once even made a purse with a felt applique of a taiyaki and the phrase "I want to eat taiyaki" embroidered on it in Japanese, so you see how I serious I am about this little pancake fish. But I had never tried shiro (white) taiyaki and was wondering how MJ Shokudo managed to keep their tai so vampire pale, when the first bite made it clear: mochi flour. Freshly grilled, the little fish was addictively chewy with a crisp outer skin and smooth, sweet bean center. Forget mochi ice cream balls, people. Mochi is magical when it's warm. MAGICAL.

The melon pan was unfortunately sold out, so there was no dessert number three. But that's okay. I scoped out the market's candy aisles and ogled the Hokkaido crab for sale before heading home, feeling a little sad my pretend Japan day was over. As my former students would say, it was very enjoy! Shall we do it again next year?

* My very favorite Japanese festival food is jaga-bataa ("potato butter"), simply a well-steamed potato topped with a giant chunk of butter. You salt it to taste and eat it in a bowl with chopsticks. Simple and fantastically satisfying.

My kimchi.

Sundays are inextricably linked with pickled cabbage for me. When I was small, Sunday was jook day with my dad, a post-church ritual involving hot rice porridge, tiny dried shrimp and a can of pickled cabbage.* My mother, fearful of her children OD-ing on salt, always put away the pickled cabbage before I had my fill, so I remember those mornings as warm and slow and filled with an aching desire for more slippery, crunchy, salty bites of pickled cabbage.

Making red cabbage sauerkraut.

So when I heard about Machine Project's Krautfest '09, a Sunday dedicated to learning how to make not one but two types of pickled cabbage, it was a no-brainer. I was there, despite the long list of items to bring and the napa cabbage brining that had to happen the night before. No one ever said love was easy.

Shredding cabbage on a giant mandoline.

Machine Project was less crowded than it had been during Fallen Fruit's Public Fruit Jam, but the attendees were just as friendly, a buzzing roomful of people excited about making pickles. First we learned the simple art of sauerkraut making from Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, the couple behind the blog Homegrown Evolution. After shredding a head of cabbage, I massaged in about a tablespoon of salt by hand, then dumped it into a small bucket and beat it to a juicy pulp with the bottom of a glass jar. (Others used beer bottles or their fists.) Dump in the other half, beat, repeat -- until all three heads of cabbage sat, mashed and juicy, in the bucket. That was it. In order to age properly, the cabbage must remain submerged in the brine, so we were given plastic zipper bags to fill with salt water and use as sauerkraut weights, along with the instructions to "Pick out anything that looks weird" as the cabbage ages, a process which should take anywhere from a few days to two weeks. To figure out if it's done, "Just taste it," said Kelly. "It's done when it tastes ready to you."

After writing our names on our buckets and stowing them away, it was time to master the slightly more complicated art of kimchi making from the mother-daughter team behind Granny Choe Kimchi, Oghee and Connie Choe. The kimchi ingredient list had sent me to California Market on Beverly the day before, where I had no trouble finding ground Korean chili pepper, a ginormous head of napa cabbage and gat, Korean mustard greens. We were instructed to brine the napa cabbage the night before, peeling off all the leaves and soaking them in a gallon of water mixed with half a cup of salt. We also had to bring a small shredded daikon, a whole head of peeled garlic, a piece of peeled ginger, an onion (which actually should have been a bunch of green onions) and a little sugar and salt.

Mama Choe instructed us to cut up all the cabbage and put it in the bowl along with the chili pepper. Many people had brought the wrong type of chili powder, so Daughter Choe walked around with a giant sack and a teacup, dispensing Korean chili powder to anyone who needed it. Then came the garlic and ginger, crushed in a garlic press, followed by the onion, chopped fine, the daikon and the chopped mustard greens. A tablespoon of sugar and two teaspoons of salt were mixed with a cup of water and dumped in, along with a bit of cooked rice to aid fermentation.

Passing out kimchi samples.

I pulled on plastic gloves and set to work mixing everything in the bowl, massaging the cabbage to soften it. The Choes walked around adding a few pieces of their own mature kimchi to each bowl to help jump-start fermentation. I packed my young kimchi into a big jar and sat back to admire it, pleased at how much it looked like real kimchi.

Choucroute garnie.

Kimchi making was over, but there was one last pickled cabbage pleasure: choucroute garnie, the Alsatian specialty of cooked sauerkraut and smoked meats, made for us by Jean-Paul Monsche, an Alsatian friend of the Homegrown Evolution crew. Before we dug in, Jean-Paul told us a bit about the history of the dish and the special place it holds in Alsatian culture. He claimed his rendition wasn't perfect, but I thought it was fantastic, redolent with smoky meat, the sauerkraut mellow and tender. Perhaps I should have been born in Alsace, where my consumption of massive amounts of pickled cabbage would have been a point of regional pride rather than cause for alarm.

I'm so proud of my kimchi.

Oh well. The 10 pounds of cabbage currently fermenting in my kitchen will hopefully help me get over the childhood trauma of never having enough pickled cabbage.

* Pam of Rants and Craves recently wrote a lovely post about her own weekend jook mornings with her family. She strikes me as the kind of mom who would let her boy eat as much pickled cabbage as he wanted though.

Communal jams.

It is perhaps not surprising to hear that people who devote half their Sunday to making and sharing fruit jam with a bunch of strangers are really nice. But I didn't know what to expect this past weekend when I attended the Fourth Annual Public Fruit Jam at Machine Project in Echo Park, hosted by Fallen Fruit Collective, a group that organizes occasional public fruit-gathering walks in LA. I had a great time and learned a lot, so in the spirit of sharing, here are some of the tips I picked up.

DO bring fruit to share from your own trees or that you've gathered from public land (in parks, hanging over sidewalks, etc.). I saw bags of homegrown oranges, crabapples, jujubes, lemons, nectarines and tiny plums the size of cherries. Jessica (my jam-making partner in crime) and I ended up incorporating everything but the jujubes into the second jam we made.

Raspberries, peaches, lemon verbena and lemon zest.

DO set aside any special fruit you want to use for your own jam. Jessica had made a stop at the Atwater Farmers Market that morning and the first jam we made used all the raspberries and peaches she bought, along with lemon zest from some shared lemons and the lemon verbena I had clipped from my backyard.

But DON'T be a jerk and if someone asks if they can have a little of what you brought, DO share. A woman sitting next to us had brought a piece of ginger she was mostly using for herself, but she kindly gave us a knob when we asked.

Cooking the jam.

DO fill the bowl you're given with chopped fruit. The proportions are somewhat flexible, but you'll need about five cups of fruit, five cups of sugar and one packet of pectin to make about four small jars of jam. You cook the jam by yourself, with the assistance of the jam-making experts floating around, but it makes it easier for them to guide you if you start with the correct proportions.

DON'T just chop up a little bit of everything and throw it into a bowl to become an unappetizing pile of mush. Remember finger-painting in kindergarten? When you thought mixing every color together would result in the most beautiful color ever, but instead turned a mucky, ugly brown? It's like that. DO have a plan, even a vague one.

Simmering plum-nectarine-citrus-basil jam.

But DON'T be afraid to experiment. The second jam we made included plums, crabapples, nectarines, basil, oranges, grapefruit and ginger. Sounds like a scary mess, but it's actually quite good: slightly bitter from the grapefruit, sweet from the stone fruit, a tiny bit gingery and tinted a lovely coral hue.

Plum-jam-maker standing in front of us. Love the matching apron!

Perhaps most important: DO talk to the people around you! We met a father and son from Culver City who were there because the son, who was around ten years old, loves gardening and cooking. I wish I had been that awesome as a kid. Standing in line for the cooking stations outside, we befriended the people ahead of and behind us, which made the 30-40 minute wait bearable, and we ended up swapping jars of jam with them at the end. (And regarding the line, DO wear sunscreen and DO get there early, so you aren't waiting outside under the relentless afternoon sun.)

Clockwise from top: blueberry-lemon-mint, plum-citrus-basil, raspberry-peach-lemon verbena.

Finally, DO leave a jar of your jam for the communal archives and DON'T be afraid to enjoy the rest yourself! Stored in the refrigerator, the jam will keep for 2-3 weeks, longer if frozen. I've been slathering it on toast and PB & J sandwiches and mixing it into Greek yogurt at breakfast. I've also been peeking covertly at the pretty row of jars in the fridge, remembering one of my favorite passages from the canning chapter in my grandmother's old edition of the Joy of Cooking:

"I should like to begin my chapter with the assurance that it is a thrill to possess shelves well stocked with home-canned food. In fact, you will find their inspection (often surreptitious), and the pleasure of serving the fruits of your labors, comparable only to a clear conscience or a very becoming hat."

So true.