Awash Ethiopian Restaurant

I've been having a serious craving for Ethiopian food and Ritesh finally gave in - he's not that much into it ("bad Indian food" he calls it) but we had a good time at Awash anyway. Very down home kind of place, total hole in the wall from the outside, hidden away as it is on a non-descript stretch of Pico (hey, there's street parking!). This is the vegetarian combo plate, which really, really hit the spot.The sizzling steak on the small plate in the back not quite so much...

I love my job!

Ever since I was upped to senior manager, my life has changed. Really. Becoming manager was nothing in comparison - more work, more complexity, more responsibility, but still, it was ultimately just me managing my territories. What is making the big difference now is people. Managing people is the best! And I don't mean this in a powertrippy kind of way at all. Managing people is challenging, stimulating, fascinating - it's worth getting up for in the morning. Maybe not for everyone, but blimey, I love it. It's made all the difference for me. I love figuring out why people do what they do (and not necessarily what they're supposed to do), and be there in a way to help them overcome their obstacles and process issues and motivational issues and even shortcomings if you will, as much as trying to figure out answers to their actual work-related questions (not that easy, considering that their territories are new to me). I love coaching people to perform at a better level, whether that involves writing (yes, go figure, I'm coaching native speakers of English on their writing :) or client management or time management or just interpersonal relations, and I love mediating between people as well. My boss frankly admitted that she thought she might have killed last week's worst offender if I hadn't been there to intervene and take her off her hands.
It helps of course that I've gotten an incredible amount of acceptance from everyone on the team - even the people with seniority who I got passed over were not only overwhelmingly gracious, but have come and sought my advice and confided in me. Everything just kind of fell into place in a perfect way, and although my workload is insane, what with all the digital and iTunes and Xbox deals, and although I'm spending more hours at work than ever, I'm actually enjoying it. I never thought I would say this. In my world, anything not related to creative writing was never really worthy of my full attention. And here I am, all absorbed in my little niche of corporate Hollywood, aglow and abuzz over how to distribute work load and redirect work flow within the team so each member is challenged at the right level and can contribute most according to their strengths and weaknesses. Who'd have thunk? Plus I'm actually happy when I get called in to deal with a crisis situation, because I feel I really have something to contribute. Must be that counseling training I went through a couple of years ago. I finally feel like I'm being put to good use, that I'm not only using my analytical, project-management, problem-solving and language skills (two native French-speakers on the team, yay!) but that while at it, I'm also having a distinct influence on my social environment, coaching both downward and upward. I've been around here long enough to have pretty good opinions on what works and what doesn't - and to be able to actually do something about what doesn't work (mostly communication) is a thrill. Really.

Mojito Smoothie

And back to healthy living, with my best smoothie yet - an avocado mojito smoothie, with fresh lime and a ton of fresh mint leaves, some coconut water and agave nectar plus some vanilla protein powder and green superfood (but without the hemp oil for once, and certainly without the rum). Loved it. Light and summery - perfect for the beautiful weather we've been having...

Nickel Diner's Bacon Donut!

I went off the endo-diet a bit this weekend, for the first time and in a premeditated way, for the sake of Nickel Diner's signature bacon donut and potato-chips chocolate cake which I'd been wanting to try since before the surgery and never got a chance to.
It was quite a trek downtown,
but here we are inside the Nickel Diner, after a shortish wait. Prices on the wall roughly 1954.

Some pretty flowering basil on our table.And here it is! Since this was the reason for the trip out here, we decided to start off with one, afraid they might run out if we waited until dessert. Not sure if you can tell from the picture, but this was one amazing donut. The bacon in the glaze was just fantastic. The donut itself could have been a little fresher, as in straight from the fryer and piping hot but it was great anyway.

Nickel Diner's home made V8 - Riteshified w/ some tabasco sauce and extra salt and pepper. Should try this at home - very tasty, and brought back fond memories of a lazy summer weekend a couple of years ago that we spent pretty much in its entirety mixing and drinking Bloody Mary's on the balcony of a friend's house in the Marina

my BLTA on sourdough with a fried egg - fabulous! BLTA's, if they're well made, are my favorite sandwiches, and this one is one of the best I've had. Great spicy aoli, too.

a close up of my BLTA, with a great mint-lemonade and Ritesh's pozole in the back

and here's dessert: Nickel Diner's famed mile-high salty chocolate-peanut-potato chip cake! Great idea for those who love sweet-and-salty combos like yours truly. However, this was just a little too heavy on the artificial flavors - basically like a really intense Snickers bar. The potato chips are in the crusty brown layer and are mixed in with peanuts, so peanuts is really all you taste. I'm pretty sure I can make a healthier version of this at home... We just had a bite to try and then took it home, where it is still languishing in the fridge.

PS: So I just went to the fridge and had another couple of bites of this cake, and honestly - it's not worth it. Not that this is a bad cake, it's great for what it is. It's just that sugar is really overrated. As is dairy and flour. If you're off it for a while and get sensitized to how it actually affects you when you have it you don't really want it anymore. Seriously.

Chef Rawsheed's Sun Power Natural Cafe

Chef Rawsheed makes some very awesome raw chocolate cookies (consisting of little more than raw nuts, raw chocolate powder and agave syrup) which you can get at Whole Foods if you're lucky because they tend to be out. So I felt compelled to trek across the mountains and check out his cafe in Studio City, stock up on some healthy cookies and try some of his main dishes.

Here's the fabulous smoothie I got while waiting for our to-go order: a sweet kale smoothie, with kale, bananas, almonds, agave nectar and almond extract. This raises the art of smoothie making to a whole different level. Very impressive.
And here's the raw pesto pizza - crunchy sunflower seed crust with creamy pesto, cashew cheese, green onions, tomatoes and marinated olives. And that's a side of the kale salad with pine nuts on top.

And finally the raw Mexican torta - spicy raw veggie sausage, pico de gallo, avocado, pickled cabbage, raw basil ranch dressing and a side of greens w/ raw ginger-orange dressing

all very yummy and super-filling, in a healthy, nutty kind of way. I did stock up on the cookies, too, but I'm embarrassed to admit that they have already been demolished, and no picture was taken... :(

How I make it through the day...

What's a 12h work day when you have the excellent Royal Himalayan Bliss Mix, consisting of Himalayan goji berries, mulberries and raisins (them Himalayan raisins are tiny and tart), raw chocolate nibs, pistachios, cashews and Brazil nuts to sustain you? Awesome stuff.

Real Food Daily

Real Food Daily is an LA institution, a fantastic vegan cafe and coincidentally the place where Ritesh took me on our second date back in the day about a decade ago, ahem. I love the place way more than he does so we don't go all that often together, but recently with the endo-diet and all we've been back a few times - so these pictures are not all from one visit...

fantastic vegan nacho appetizer plate, with cashew cheese and tofu sour cream

raw living foods roll
Kung Pao tempeh with stir-fry veggies and pineapple rice

Ritesh's one RFD favorite: the ranchero style burrito with a great chipotle bean filling and saladthe Jamaican special for the month of June - fried plantains, some Caribbean empanadas filled with tempeh, rice and beans and some fruity salsa. Not so great this one, just a bit dry.

and check this out: vegan banana cream pie, with tofu whipped cream and a spelt crust! This almost deserves its own post. Not that I had more than a bite of it since I was sure there was sugar in it, but Ritesh was happy. And the presenting hands are Anisa's, who's moving to LA from Atlanta to attend acupuncture school. Very cool.

More Avocado Smoothies

Sorry I've been incommunicado for a little while. It's been a trying, tumultuous, traumatic, toll-taking and turmoil-y few weeks is all I can say. Maybe, hopefully, some day I'll be in a position to talk about this time and its vertiginous array of life-changing options with the wisdom of retrospection and some lightheartedness, but today is not that day, and since I feel like talking anyway, I'll talk about smoothies instead. You know, the kind with avocado and protein and a bunch of other goodies that I'm continuing to whip up every morning.

Here's a whole Osterizer's worth of my avocado-honeydew-kiwi-lemon-hemp protein-maca-and coconut water smoothie that I made for breakfast when Ro and Anisa were in town and staying with us last week

strawberry-cantaloupe-OJ smoothie with some berry-flavored protein powder and a red superfood mix (goji, pomegranate etc.)

chocolate-avocado-smoothie! With dates and hemp milk. Very tasty but too rich for breakfast. More like a dessert.

apple-cinnamon smoothie w/ avocado, honeydew, a fuji apple, coconut water, some apple-cinnamon flavored protein-superfood powder and some almonds. Great one this one, made it several times.

the crowning smoothie glory of the week: tulsi-marzipan smoothie, made with tulsi juice extracted from Ritesh's mom's tulsi leaves (tulsi is an Indian sweet kind of basil that makes a great tea, too) , avocado, banana, almonds, some agave nectar and the ultimate secret ingredient: almond extract! Amazing!

and this morning's strawberry-pineapple-banana-protein powder-coconut milk smoothie. I don't use avocado when I'm making a red smoothie because red and green just ends up looking brown. Can't have brown mush for breakfast unless it involves chocolate...

Sunset on the Seine

I love Judith's missives from the City of Lights - here's another one from late April that brought back fond memories of balmy nights spent by the Seine...although I think Aline needs to move, or talk to a good therapist. Phobias are actually curable.

A beautiful, sunny, spring day in Paris. Aline picked me up in her car and we drove to the nearby Luxembourg Museum, which is just a few blocks from my apartment. Drove around and around trying to find parking on the packed streets and finally did. Would have been faster to go on foot, however, Aline lives on an island, the Ile de la Cite, and has a phobia about walking across a bridge and can only leave the island by car. So though we live 5 minutes apart, she needs to drive. The exhibit was Fralippo Lippi and his son Fralippino Lippi who was conceived with a beautiful, young religious woman in a scandalous liaison in the 1400s somewhere in the Tuscan hills. The paintings, with many, many Madonnas and baby Jesuses, were lovely to me only for their vivid colors after many centuries, excellent awareness of perspective, and three dimensional quality in some. We then went to lunch outdoors at a cafe and talked about our book on France, the men, the women, the story. Sat for hours, no one bothered us, didn't even bring a tab. So it is - the table belongs to you.

Decided to go to the theater in the evening to see two Albee plays and then Robert called and said rain was coming in the next few days and we should spend this evening on the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge over the Seine where people congregate on warm evenings and spread out on the planks and have picnics, with wine, and live musicians. So upon his arrival at my flat I took took a blanket and flatware, paper plates and cups stuffed into a big canvas bag and we went to the fabulous food store and bought roast chicken, a big slice of pate, a bottle of wine, bread, salads, and and off we set for the bridge. We found a good spot, spread out, and got out all the goodies. People gathered all through the evening with parties of 2, 4, 20 all picnicking, sharing wine, listening to music from the live saxes, and watching the setting sun turning the river red. Both Robert and I felt that we were in Paradise - the beauty of the river and the big tourists boats sliding under the bridge, the palaces along the banks, the people who know how to enjoy, without much fuss or much money, just good food, wine, and friends. We sat and ate and drank for about three hours and when the sun set and it got chilly, we walked to his flat a few blocks away and watched Pan's Labyrinth while outside his windows the boats on the Seine with brilliant night lights floated up and down the Seine looking like big space ships landing on the river.

Everyone should picnic on the Pont des Arts on a warm night sometime in their lives.
xxx
J

Not the Pont des Arts. Not even the view from the Pont des Arts. But the only picture of a Parisian bridge that I have in iPhoto, so it'll have to do.

Obama in Paris

Earlier this week, my friend, mentor and role model, the fabulous Judith, emailed the following missive from Paris, where she lives six months out of the year:

Last night as my friend Michael and I emerged from the metro at St. Germain into the Paris white nights, we found ourselves in the midst of a huge crowd clustered on either side of the Blvd. St Germain and lots of police vehicles and security officers with automatic weapons. Michael asked a Frenchman Is this for Obama's arrival? Bien sur was the answer. Of course, they were gathered to greet Obama as he sped down the boulevard. Then the police escorts started to wizz by, with lots of unmarked vehicles with tinted windows, and the big cheer went up . What a thrill, what a feeling of pride Michael and I had that France loves Obama and that everyday people turned out and waited for just a possible glimpse of the man and to show their enthusiasm. Thrilling!
J

A week's worth of smoothies...

Part of my new and improved diet are mega-nutritious smoothies for breakfast - with one surprise ingredient: avocados. The basic idea for this is not from the Endometriosis cookbook, but from a different book (the somewhat lamely entitled but informative "Spent - How to Overcome Exhaustion and Feel Great Again" by Frank Lippman) - but the recipes are all endo-safe and I love them and make them in endless variations. Each of these smoothies contains different kinds of fruit, fresh squeezed lemon juice, some hemp oil, protein powder or flax seed meal, green food powder and either coconut water or orange juice or aloe vera juice or a combination - plus 1/2 an avocado for the healthy fat and creamy texture.

This was one of the very first ones I made, and it doesn't have any extra fruit, just avocado and coconut - kind of like my avocado-coconut ice cream from a year ago, but with all the added powdered superfoods and protein

avocado-blueberry smoothie
avocado-blueberry smoothie on a rainy dayavocado-honeydew-kiwi smoothie
mango-coconut-smoothie (ok, no avocado in this one, the next batch isn't ripe yet)
raspberry-cantaloupe-banana smoothie with red superfood powder (goji, noni, pomegranate etc)this was yesterday's pineapple-banana smoothie with hemp seeds (no avocado)
and this was this morning's pineapple-peach-avocado smoothie, again with hemp seeds. Looking a little chunky because our blender is so loud and our walls so painfully thin and our neighbors so cantankerous that I'm terrified of causing them grief at 8am in the morning. So I blend for a maximum of like 12 seconds, holding my breath. The weekends, when we get up later, are a different story, hence creamier smoothies on Saturdays and Sundays...

Settling in

Along with the promotion came a new office... I'm working too much right now to do much decorating but have at least unpacked and am settling in. Since I'm in one of these air-conditioned high-rises where you can't open the window (and since I'm there an ungodly amount of hours a week) I got myself a plant and a very fancy air purifier - and here's Ritesh sacrificing his free time on the weekend to help me carry both to my new digs.

and here's the view from my window. Sorry for the crappy iPhone pics, will try and take 'real' photos soon. That beige fancy building on the left btw is allegedly the ultra-luxurious home to Tori Spelling's mom whatever her name is - Candy or something appropriate like that. Not that I care, but it was pointed out to me as one of the perks of my office...ah, the privilege!

Bienvenida Trail

Already time for another Sunday hike - where did this last week go? At least the weather had cleared up - check out the blue skies over the bluest of oceans. And doesn't it look like someone is growing wine on that hill above the pine trees?

From the top of the trail (which connects to the Temescal Canyon ridge), you can see all the way to what Ritesh thinks is Venice and I think is Marina Del Rey...

And this is the trail seen through my sunglasses...

I have to say, I love these glasses. Life is just beautiful when I wear them...

Trisha's Birthday

Lovely Trisha is one of my co-workers from the old MGM, from before we got sold to Sony and 85% of employees were laid off. Knowing how passionately we all felt and continue to feel about the old MGM (as opposed to the new one, and every other studio in town), it came as no surprise that this get together turned into another MGM reunion. So lo and behold here are former MGMers Suzie and Chris, Chris' boyfriend John plus a photographer, at Trisha's pool in her mindblowing new house in the Hollywood Hills.

The view of downtown LA from Trisha's rooftop

nice fish bowl of sangriaan amazing catered buffet of Thai food

my own little pad thai, with some flower decoration provided by the chef himself when he saw me wield the cameraoops - caught the caterer in flagranti, adding the flowers I brought to the buffet centerpiece

the birthday girl being feted (on the right, Natasha, another former MGMer)

the birthday girl about to do the deedand yours truly with the birthday girl, who had set up a photo booth, thus providing no end of fun and countless group pictures of former MGMers in silly poses that will hopefully find their way onto facebook...

Bar Food on Wilshire

We have a new neighborhood bar! Yay! Aptly named Bar Food, very stylish but low key at the same time and run and owned by the nicest and most amiable Irish exilee ever, Jason (who is the chef, and is behind the bar). They have the most amazing sweet potato fries (with chipotle dip)...

...and thanks to Jason's Thai girlfriend, Thai bangers & mash! How cool is that? The sausages are Northern Thai (Issan) style (did he say pork and rice based? I can't remember), the mash is made with cilantro, and the glaze that pulls the dish together is spicy ginger. Fabulous! We'll so be back for this...