Left, Right and Center’s Neighborhood

For the first time ever honeybees have been allowed to flourish on the White House Lawn.  They've provided the White House with a bumper crop of honey.

Tomorrow on Good Food, check out my conversation with Good Food listener Natalia Goldberg, who lives in Paraguay.  Here she is making bread pudding

Think about getting Dad some bread slippers:

Green skinned sapotes, also known as custard apple, and wrinkly purple passion fruit are found at Coleman Farm.  Sapotes soften and turn yellow, then the skin can be rubbed off and the sweet soft fruit can barely hold its shape while eaten.  Delicious, delicate and rare.  Bumpy passion fruit is full of crunchy seeds and yellow-orange fleshy fibers.  Puree for drinks or eat with a spoon.  Wednesday, Saturday Santa Monica

Frisee and radicchio, bitter greens also found at Coleman Farm go great with sweet persimmons, salty cheese, almonds, walnuts and pecans in salad.

Chestnuts are very scarce this year.  Nicholas Farm has them for about 2 more weeks at $8 per pound.  Pierce with a knife and roast them in the oven or over the fire and eat them out of the shell, or use them in stuffing.  Wednesday, Pico Santa Monica, Sunday Beverly Hills.
 

Savoy cabbage from Flora Bella is sweeter than regular cabbage and the huge outer leaves can be used for wraps.  Wednesday, Saturday Santa Monica; Sunday Hollywood

Bucheret goat cheese from Redwood Hill, a farmstead goat cheese maker from Sebastopol.  Redwood Hill is a small family owned farm that produces prize winning goat cheeses including Camelia, Crottin, Cheddar, Raw Feta and 4 kinds of Chevre.  Wednesday Santa Monica; also Whole Foods, Co-Opportunity and other Health Food Stores.

Walter Hole Avocados from JJ’s Lone Daughter Ranch.  These are a rare winter variety similar to the Mexicola, which is primarily a root stock avocado.  The thin skin is edible.  Wednesday, Saturday Santa Monica; Sunday Hollywood

Speaking of Otis, below, that school has a completely different role to play Sunday, November 8, when it and some other sexy 60s buildings will star in the LA Conservancy's one-time-only tour of gems of that decade, part of a nine-month celebration of the 60s architectural heritage of Greater LA. In keeping with the jetset era, the tour has a distinctly aviation-related flavor: it includes the fabulous LAX Theme Building (1961) (note that the observation deck will be open for the tour for the first time since 2001), the Proud Bird Restaurant (1967), an aviation-themed "destination restaurant," as well as the Imperial Terminal (1969 addition) Flight Path Learning Center & Museum. Celestiality of a spiritual kind is on show in St Jerome Catholic Church (1966), complete with intact polygonal sanctuary, original terrazzo floors, gold mosaic tiles, and a soaring folded-plate roofline. For information about time and tickets, click here.

LA's creativity not only makes this region an exciting place to live; it is also a significant driver of the economy.
Otis College of Art and Design (in tandem with The Kyser Center for Economic Research of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp (LAEDC) decided a while back to determine just how much of a driver, and next week will present its third annual report on LA's Creative Economy, offering up numbers on creative industry revenues in the region, as well as projected job gains and losses, in sectors ranging from Digital Media through Toys to Fashion. Joion Otis President Sammy Hoi next Tuesday, November 10, at a breakfast meeting about the report at the Omni Hotel in downtown; as part of the proceedings I will host a discussion with some creative industry leaders, Andy Mooney, Sir Ken Robinson and Laura Zucker, about the report and how best we can sustain Southern California's creative engine.

 

My friend Frank Gruber, author of The Urban Worrier: Making Politics Personal, Life and Politics in an American Town, a collection of his columns about land-use and life in Santa Monica, is sure that it's the local land-use and political issues that matter as much as, if not more, to many citizens than the more abstract national and international conflicts and debate. This has been borne out to date at two "Directions and Controversies" panels about architecture and urbanism in Pasadena, held over the past two Saturday afternoons at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, and that have attracted a large and passionate crowd. The previous panels have looked at that city's past and present; this Saturday I will moderate a discussion about its future -- with architects Michael Maltzan (designer of Kidspace Children's Museum in Pasadena, among many notable projects) and Kevin Burke of William McDonough + Partners (Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena) and artist Edgar Arceneaux (Watts House Project). 

 

On Sunday afternoon, I'll be at MOCA, with Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, two highly poetic exponents of the new language of digital design. We'll be talking about their installation, Feathered Edge, on display for one more week at MOCA PDC. And we won't just talk about it; we will sit in the space itself and have them explain the high-tech-meets-handmade design and fabrication process that transformed over 21 miles of colored strings into an ethereal, almost chapel-like space of catenary curves. This installation, commissioned by former MOCA design and architecture Brooke Hodge, is a must-see before it finally close November 15.

Did you know Tim Robbins’ father was a singer in a popular folk group? Neither did I! The actor has music in his blood and dropped by our studios to talk about how much it has defined his life – from the song his mother sang to him as a child to a track about the stark realities of “adult” love. He also pays tribute to his time living in LA, where he founded one of the city’s most accomplished theatrical institutions, The Actor's Gang. They are currently hosting a series of both free and fundraising events called the WTF Festival.

Hear the full set here

RR