Orange County Food Blog

My chica, in her role as a master food preserver, is at the Hollywood Farmer's Market every so often to tell folks about how to preserve food. I went with her this past Sunday, and apparently was so immersed in a magazine that I cut in front of an Orange County celebrity, one that the paparazzi were trailing. Afterward, I saw the celebrity holding bags of produce, stopping at a booth where a guy was making balloon animals for kiddies and hipsters alike.

Gentle readers: who was this celebrity? The only hint I'll give at this point is that the celebrity no longer lives in Orange County but was born and raised here. First person to guess correctly wins a batch of my gal's plum-pluot preserve, which is perfectly precious and precise. One entry per guess.

Here's one celebrity who's a Hollywood Farmer's Market mainstay and likes OC!

Sorry this isn't OC specific and for my ethnocentrism, but the idea of using tongs to flip a tortilla is just too funny to me. USE YOUR DAMN FINGERS AND BE QUICK! Oh, and I don't know where Gourmet is getting their tortillas, but if your flour variety is thicker than your corn ones, both suck.

Seems that Vince Shlomi (also known by his sophisticated stage name, Vince Offer) is in the news again!

I'm not even going to comment on his recent arrest in Miami, because it makes me feel ill just thinking about it, but here's the link if you're interested (WARNING: it includes shots of Vince without makeup and hair gel).

I'm surely not the only one who finds his Slap Chop and Graty ads strangely mesmerizing. Aside from the bonkers product names (is it me or do they sound like Japanese cartoon characters?), there's the digustingness of the things he's chopping. Who would eat that crap?

And the testimonials of the "satisfied customers" whose lives the products have seemingly revolutionized. Get a grip, people!

But, wait, there's more!

Someone with waaaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands has put together this hilarious rap, complete with snippets from the Breakin'... There's No Stoppin' Us video.

It gets no better.

Sorry for the sparse writing this week, folks: my hands hurt with the carpal and the tunnel and the syndrome. But got a lot of great posts next week. In the meanwhile, Doner G--the county's only true Turkish restaurant (or is it? Tune in next week!)--in Anaheim!

Check in every weekend for O.C. YouTube foodie madness!

What can't this guy do? The producer, director, writer, composer, editor of Sin City, Desperado, and Planet Terror has made two cooking shorts, produced as extras for his DVDs.

There are only two of these "Ten Minute Cooking School" segments in existence, at least on YouTube. On the first -- created in 2004 -- he makes puerco pibil, the dish that Johnny Depp's character lusts after in Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

Due the positive reaction this first one elicited, he did a second a little later where cooks something simpler: breakfast tacos. Except he does his own flour tortillas...from scratch.

Being that he is a filmmaker, the shorts are often shot with a moving camera, and edited like an action movie. You'll wish all cooking shows are done this way.

And in both he repeats his catchy mantra: "Not knowing how to cook is like not knowing how to fuck".

Please to enjoy, Chef Robert Rodriguez.

An uninterested pooch. An affable narrator. And a Japanese mom-type doing the cooking. These are the simple components that make up one of my favorite cooking shows, called "Cooking with Dog".

You won't find it on the Food Network or even PBS. It's only on YouTube.

The shows started last year, and cover the gamut of Japanese dishes, from sukiyaki to its current episode where they make sanma takikomi gohan. Each one breezes through at a fast clip (no show is more than 5 minutes long). And it is shot, lit and edited crisply. The directions are spoken in perfect English without an ounce of snootiness and just a touch of a Japanese accent.

By the end, even if you don't intend to replicate what you just saw, you are always educated.

I've had numerous AHA-so-that's-how-they-make-that moments watching the show. I guarantee you will too.

The only thing that will leave you puzzled is how they manage to keep that dog sitting still.