Microsoft

It's been a wild ride, Bill. :) Otsukaresama~

the Getty

3 years living in southern California, and i finally made it out to see the Getty Center in LA last weekend. it's beautiful! a bird's eye view of LA in every direction from the top of one of the loveliest constructions in the city. i was inspired.

pizzilla!

in case you were starting to worry about my blog content going down the gutter, i made sure to photograph my latest favorite dish for the lazy. i love pizza, it's so fast and easy to make, but making dough and waiting for it to rise doesn't work out so well when i get a sudden craving for it. sure, i could prepare dough way in advance and freeze it or save it in the fridge, but then that may very well have balked the advent of... dah dah dahdahhh!! pizzilla! otherwise known as tortilla pizza! mmm. tortilla and pizza goodness all rolled into one. flawless.

and just so you know, i just made up the name right now, so you may not want to go around asking your friends if they've tried pizzilla just yet. but maybe one day, my friends, maybe one day! (i just googled it, and all this other fonkay stuff comes up. word.)

what you do is take 2 flour tortillas (2 for thickness), spread on a little tomato sauce, sprinkle on some onion and garlic powder if you like that stuff (i love it!), then throw on whatever goodies you like! in this one, i sliced some tomatoes, crimini mushrooms, arugula, and 3 kinds of cheese: gruyere, sharp cheddar, and asiago. top that off with a light sprinkling of oregano, and voila! c'est pizzilla! just kidding. you have to bake it first.

luckily, this little gem of the lazy can be cooked in a toaster oven! set it to 350, pop it in until the cheese melts and the tomatoes look cooked- the edges where the skin is will be wrinkly like the lips of an aged smoker. delectable thoughts, que no? and then switch it to broil for a few minutes to give the top layer of cheese a nice kind of crispness to it, and maybe a little beautiful brown color. be careful putting it in and taking it out since even once it's done, the tortilla won't be stiff like a regular pizza pie.

so here is my pizzilla. it was totally tasty!! give it a whirl!

HB Belly 'n' Bazoombas

I went to a belly dancing show last week in Huntington Beach at the Pelican Isle. It was a pretty interesting show, with a menu that listed anything you could possibly imagine ordering at any given restaurant at any given time. I suspect from the food I had ordered, that the chef had once worked on a ship. I'll leave the ambiguity of that statement up to your imagination. :) Given that I once dated my very own Bulgarian babe who had abs that could roll like ocean waves, and had met several women throughout the 7 seas who know their way around a hip scarf or two, I can't say the show was the most authentic of performances I'd seen, but it was great to see the tradition so passionately reinvented in the western world. I wonder only now, if I've ever seen a belly dancer without ginormous bazoombas.

Or a man who didn't totally dig them.