Lomo Saltado is my go-to meal whenever I eat Peruvian food. It’s hard not to like a dish that contains three of my favorite foods: steak, rice, and fries.
The owners are the nicest people you’ll ever meet. I have a semi-personal connection with them (as I wrote in my Yelp review here), so I’m not exactly an unbiased critic. Their home-style restaurant is cozy and quaint; a true labor of love that you can taste in every bite.
The Donut Hole. La Puente, California.
I was in La Puente this morning, which meant I had to stop at The Donut Hole. While Randy’s Donuts in Inglewood is the Los Angeles icon, for my money The Donut Hole offers the best bang for your buck. Where else can you drive through a donut-shaped building for a dozen fried bits of heaven?
As I wrote on Yelp, the donuts were pretty standard fare. However, things have improved: today I noticed the addition of specialty donuts: red velvet, Fruity Pebbles, Froot Loops, and others. I ordered the blueberry donut and a dozen cronut holes and both were excellent.
The food is secondary, though. It’s all about the experience of driving through the giant donut: it’ll delight your kids and the kid in you.
Warm summer nights of my childhood meant playing outside, hoping to hear the magical song from the ice cream man’s truck. When my lolo was staying with us, my brothers and I were always well-funded; we’d run through the house like headless chickens trying to find him and his endless supply of change for our treats.
Bomb pops, 50/50 bars, Fudgesicles, and other frozen goodies made it into our hands, but my favorite was the snack-sized bag of Doritos. The ice cream man kicked it up a notch for our neighborhood. He had a bottle of Tabasco on hand and upon request he’d pour a few drops into the bag and shake it up, coating the Doritos with a little heat. It was a revelation to my pint-sized taste buds.
While I don’t eat Doritos as much as I used to, I always have a bottle of hot sauce on hand, just in case I decide to do a Throwback Thursday snack like I did today. I’m sure lolo would approve.
I miss the days of Tiger Woods winning nearly every tournament he entered. He’s my favorite golfer of all time and he’s a big part of the reason why I started playing golf.
While he won’t win this year’s British Open, I hope he plays well. With all of the injuries, coach changes, swing rebuilds and off-course drama, Tiger’s days of domination are long gone. But I’m rooting for him to turn back the clock.
I know the TV execs and advertisers are salivating at the possibility.
My wife and I love the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. We attended a few of their Fusion Friday events last summer and today’s Nepal Cultural Festival and Earthquake Relief Fund was our first visit this year.
The festival happened to fall on Second Sunday, when the museum offers free admission. We made the trip before noon and were treated to traditional and fusion Nepalese music and dance. There were a few crafts tables where you could make your own Nepalese mask and one of our favorite food trucks, the India Jones Chow Truck, was there.
Of course, a trip to the museum wouldn’t be complete without a walk through the museum itself. We liked the copies of Snakes and Ladders that were available for play; as explained here, the ancient game originated in India and is still played by children today in its modern version, Chutes and Ladders.
We enjoyed the Visualizing Enlightenment: Decoding the Buddhist Iconography exhibition. This exhibit featured a six-foot Buddha wood carving from over 500 years ago, with an explanation of its details.
The weather warmed up as the day wore on, but the pleasant vibe kept everyone in good spirits, as performers and audience mingled and danced together in the courtyard. It was a good-for-the-soul Sunday Funday.
Scrabble Flash
I have a lot of fun with this little version of the classic board game Scrabble. It’s perfect for solo play and offers a quick fix for Scrabble junkies.
The rules are simple: try to form as many 3-, 4-, and 5-letter words as possible in the allotted time using the electronic tiles. The tiles randomly choose five letters to work with during a game. They sense when a word is formed and give little beep to know you’ve scored. There’s also another version of the game where you try to form as many 5-letter words as possible.
Since there’s no board or opponent, this is a really stripped down version of the game. Scrabble purists may object, but it’s a handy game to have on the road or when you want a quick session of word play.
Best of all, no opponent will ever challenge your word choice. To paraphrase the poker saying, the tiles speak.
Pictured above: the end of a game when Scrabble Flash reveals the maximum number of words that were playable.
Episode 7: The Force Awakens
I’m trying not to get too excited about Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I refuse to click on all of the news, gossip, and photo links. I avoid fan arguments dissecting every little detail from the two official teasers. I don’t Google anything related to Episode VII.
But then this happens.
What an AWESOME clip. It’s exactly what all of us diehards want; what I call the anti-prequel approach to making the film. As much as George Lucas and his team advanced CGI special effects during Episodes I-III, those films lacked the heart of the original trilogy. The attention to special effects took precedence over the writing and direction. How else to explain Natalie Portman’s worst acting to date?
Sure, perhaps J.J. Abrams is going overboard with the back-to-basics approach to special effects and forgetting all about the script and his actors. But I doubt it. He seems to be genuinely excited about his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and the fans are clearly behind him as he tries to give them a film worthy of the Star Wars legend.
Of course, the fans have also promised to rename him Jar Jar Abrams if he screws this up. I can’t wait until December.
Love Letter
To celebrate our anniversary, I took my wife out to eat and I surprised her with a few new games: Scrabble Flash, Ticket to Ride USA 1910, and Love Letter.
We were hooked on Scrabble Flash last year when my sister-in-law bought the game. It’s a fun, high-tech version of the classic board game. It’s an outstanding solo player game and I love the fast-paced play.
I wrote about our addiction to Ticket to Ride earlier this year. We played countless games before downloading the app for our tablets, where we ended up playing most of the time. So, to rekindle our passion for TTR, I bought the 1910 expansion. We’ll be putting this to the test soon and I’m already fired up to try out the new rules.
Finally, no anniversary would be complete without a love letter or, in our case, the Love Letter card game. I’ve heard nothing but good things about LL and it seems like it’s our style of game: easy to learn, with some strategy, and games that don’t take all day to play.
“We won the World Cup, baby!” – Abby Wambach
That’s Abby Wambach at L.A. Live, the first stop of their victory tour across America. It’s been a few years since I’ve been down to the Staples Center for a championship celebration, so it was nice to be amongst the red, white, and blue-clad crowd paying tribute to the 2015 World Cup Champions.
My wife and I made the hour-plus journey from the Inland Empire to show our support for the team. There were fans from all over and we ran into a few friendly faces on this mild July morning. Making our way to the celebration, I thought about all of the young girls in attendance with their parents, friends, and siblings. Was one of the next national team players here? The sentimental side of me hoped so.
At precisely 11am (just like the game itself, soccer players are prompt), the team made its way to the stage. They thanked us fans, their teammates, coaches, and staff, before dancing away into the afternoon to Queen’s “We Are The Champions.”
It was the perfect celebration for the perfect team.
I look forward to a lot of things on the Fourth of July: hanging out with my family, eating lots of great food, and watching fireworks.
This year was more of the same and we also got to watch the Dodgers beat the Mets on television. To celebrate the win, I stuffed myself with a third plate of food (tri-tip, pork chops, baby back ribs, rib eye, potato salad, macaroni salad, BBQ beans, and pancit).
I would’ve done the same if we’d lost.
Pictured above: my wife’s annual edible flag.
