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Everyone knows that putting up posters or paint on public property without permission is illegal. If you pay to place your message on specific spaces, it is advertising. But what if you don’t pay, and put your ad under someone’s windshield wiper? The Supreme Court will decide if what you’re doing is protected by the first amendment later this year.

Rus of Rus Pix writes: Here is a pic of my friend’s son Lance. 7 year old ripper skating East LA skatepark. We went to El Teypiac and got tacos and machaca after…

Cafe Antigua Guatemala: Worth a U Turn in Hollywood

You know how you have one of those days when you rush to get to an appointment only to find out that you got the times mixed up and are actually early? So now you have time to kill and then you realize that you’re also hungry? What’s a girl to do, except look for some place to have lunch, so I decide to take a drive and tell myself to stop at the first place that looks interesting. I’m cruising down Santa Monica Boulevard and of course, a small Guatemalan restaurant with a red facade catches my eye and I proceed to drive right past it. Unfortunately, the street was pretty busy, so it took me awhile, but I managed to do a U Turn and was soon on my way back.

Part of the appeal of this restaurant laid in the fact that I’ve never had Guatemalan food before and feeling a little adventurous decided that day was the day to check it out. Walking in, I noticed that this was indeed a small hole in the wall restaurant with only about 6 tables in the space. The menu was also quite limited, so I just asked the Owner for a recommendation. One dish she mentioned was a stew, but the weather was just too warm for that, so I went for her other suggestion, the Chili Relleno Plate. While waiting for my food arrive, I tried one of their Guatemalan Soft Drinks. The company is Tiky and I went for the pina flavor. Two words. Super Sweet. Letting the ice melt actually helped a little bit.

The tortillas arrived first. and I loved how thick and pillowy they were. If I had some butter, I could have just eaten them on their own.

Finally, my Chili Relleno Plate arrived. Now with this dish, it comes with black beans, sour cream and rice and your choice of 1 of 2 different salads. I had asked if I could have a small portion of each salad and the Owner was fine with my request.

Since I’m not familiar with the Guatemalan cuisine, I was surprised at some of the foods that were served. One of the side salads was Pickled Cabbage, Beets and Carrots, which I absolutely enjoyed, but it’s a dish that seemed to me, more Eastern Enropean in nature.

The other salad option was a mayonnaise-based Beans, Carrots an Potato Salad. First, I’ve never had green beans as part of a potato salad before, let alone carrots, but in general, I wouldn’t think to associate mayonnaise with South American or Central American cooking. So if anyone has information on how these two particular salads would have made it in a Guatemalan restaurant, I’d love to know. As for the salad itself, it was tasty.

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Artesia ~ CA

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Los Angeles ~ CA

Local culinary superman J. Gold recently checked out Eagle Rock’s Cacao and filed the following report:

Here is the topic for today’s discussion: Why isn’t duck carnitas on every Mexican menu in town? Because if you think about it, the dish is almost inevitable — duck meat simmered in fat until it nearly collapses, perfumed flesh arranged atop crisply fried sopes, a shotgun marriage of traditional and European cooking techniques of the sort that have been going on in Mexico since the conquest. If life were fair, you would be able to get duck carnitas from every respectable taco truck on the Eastside.

Carnitas, of course, is made from pork shoulder boiled slowly in its own lard until it is difficult to discern the medium from the product being cooked, and the magnetic pull of the giant copper kettles traditionally used to prepare the dish sometimes seems sufficient to pull the whole of the Earth toward Michoacan. Duck confit, its equivalent from Southwest France, involves salted duck legs cooked in their own fat for many hours until they, too, achieve concentrated flavor and extreme succulence.

Read the rest at the LA WEEKLY

Photo by Express Monorail

Hollywood ~ CA

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