Hasta La Gadget!

Sure, sushi and sashimi are the cat’s pajamas. But these days, we’re opting instead for another raw fish dish: crudo. In case you don’t know, crudo (“raw” in Italian) is the way Italians eat their fresh, uncooked fish: thinly sliced and drizzled with olive oil, an acid (for example, lemon) and accented with seasonings. And it’s popping up on menus across Los Angeles.

Here are 5 uncooked fish preparations even better than our Japanese favorite.

Butchers & Barbers
This American bistro’s Kampachi crudo is served with lemon, chives, cilantro, olives and a surprise ingredient, pluots (the plum-apricot hybrid). Locations.

Culina
This Cal-Ital gem has a whole crudo bar and offers a weekday “crudo hour” from 6 to 8 p.m. when the seasonal and local selections are just $6 each. Don’t miss the new salmon crudo with spring pea vinaigrette, mint and pancetta dust ($12) or halibut with strawberries, pickled shallots, chiles and frisee ($14). Locations.

Blue Plate Oysterette
At this beach-chic eatery known for its California-inspired takes on traditional New England seafood, chef Paolo Bendez`u prepares a crudo starter ($15) that changes daily and uses locally sourced fish and seasonal ingredients. Newly available: a diver scallop crudo with avocado, persimmon, orange, infused oils and micro spring flowers. Locations.

SoHo House
New executive chef Michael Magliano (formerly of Animal and Son of a Gun) brings nuance and mastery to the crudo on the restaurant’s all-day menu. The hamachi crudo with heirloom radishes and passion-fruit vinaigrette is delicious to eat in the picturesque garden setting overlooking the Sunset Strip. Locations.

Union
Among chef Bruce Kalman’s seasonally inspired dishes is a yellowtail crudo with pickled green almonds, Meyer lemon and bottarga ($24). True to Kalman’s commitment to celebrating (and respecting) the freshness of local ingredients, the Santa Barbara-sourced fish will appear on the menu pending market availability. Locations.

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Picky. It’s not a word that Stacey Ornstein usually uses, but it’s one that makes her plate too full.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Stacey is the founder of Allergic to Salad.

Picky. Stacey, who teaches after-school healthy-cooking classes to kids, wrinkles her nose when she utters the distasteful descriptive.

“I have parents who tell me their children are picky eaters and are not going to eat anything we cook,” says Stacey, the founder of Allergic to Salad. “They say this in front of their kids, so it sets the kids up to reject foods. But I have a rule: You have to try everything we make, you don’t have to like it.”

Bite by bite, Stacey’s out to direct the eating habits of budding taste buds, starting with those of Adrian, her toddler.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Stacey with her son, Adrian.

Adrian, who has golden curls that ring his shoulders, is nearly 2. His favorite food is fish. He’s also a fan of kale.

“We were making pizza the other night and when I sprinkled cheese on it, he threw it off,” she says, smiling. “When I substituted kale, he ate it right off.”

When Stacey, a statuesque woman who looks as though she walked out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, brings out a giant jar of dried figs, Adrian plops one in his mouth with as much enthusiasm as if it were a Hershey’s Kiss.

“I don’t believe in so-called children’s menus,” Stacey says. “With Adrian, I used baby-led weaning to introduce him to solid foods early on.”

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Learning about food with stickers.

Stacey and her husband, a composer/conductor, have busy careers, but, with Adrian’s help, they take time to cook together.

They are not vegetarians or vegans. They don’t shun sugar, wheat, eggs or dairy products. And, yes, on occasion, they do order in and eat out.

They are simply people who want their food, calorie for calorie, to work with them to keep their bodies fit and well.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Trying to mend a broken crayon.

Adrian, who is just learning to talk, has a small vocabulary that gives a glimpse of the variety of foods they eat: nut, pizza, butter, milk and cookie.

“We always sit down at the table for meals,” Stacey says as Adrian beats on a tambourine. “When we’re cooking, Adrian helps with the mixing and pouring.”

Stacey prepares homemade meals to actually save time.

“We cook as if we’re making dinner for 10 people,” she says. “For instance, when we make rice and beans, we hold some aside, and the next night we have bean tacos. Then we do stir-fry, then a biryani dish and then add some chicken stock to make soup.”

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Adrian likes to help out in the kitchen.

Stacey, who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, didn’t like every meal her parents prepared.

“Sauerkraut was one thing that I pushed around my plate,” she says. “There was no pressure on us to eat things we didn’t like, but we did have to try them.”

She started cooking at an early age.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Mother’s hands, baby’s feet.

“Once a week, my two brothers and I were in charge of making dinner,” she says. “We did easy dishes like spaghetti and meatballs or lasagna.”

This is not to say that everything she ate was homemade.

“I had my share of McDonald’s Happy Meals and liked them,” she says.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
They eat their meals at the dining table.

It was college, not cooking that brought her to New York City. After earning a degree in mass media communications with a minor in studio art from New York University, Stacey got a job with a publisher.

While she worked on a master’s in the history of education, she took a variety of nonprofit jobs, including one with an art education organization.

“We prepared high school students for art school, and one of my tasks was ordering lunch,” she says. “I was only allowed to order pizza, hamburgers and chips. When I asked to change the menu, I was told the kids wouldn’t eat anything else.”

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
Adrian snacking on pistachios.

After cobbling together a series of part-time freelance jobs, Stacey founded Allergic to Salad in 2010.

“I got the name from one of our students, who not only declared herself allergic to salad but also threw herself on the ground to prove her dislike of green vegetables,” Stacey says. “I told her that that was too bad because we were going to make chocolate salad the next week and she would have to sit out on that, too. Miraculously, she was cured.”

Today, Allergic to Salad, which offers cooking classes for children and adults as well as cooking parties and food tours, is more than a full-time job for Stacey and her four employees.

The work, she says happily, is all consuming.

Photo by Nancy A. Ruhling
A helpinig hand for children.

“I’ve changed the lives of many kids,” she says. “I had one student whose parents always made gazpacho, but she would never even try it. After we made it in class, she liked it and made it for her family.”

It is success stories like this that excite Stacey, who wants to initially expand Allergic to Salad to Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey.

If nothing more, Stacey hopes to keep the art of home cooking alive for Adrian and his generation.

He’s already way ahead of his peers.

Just this morning, he “fried” some plastic eggs in his Melissa & Doug play kitchen.

Nancy A. Ruhling may be reached at Nruhling@gmail.com; nruhling on Instagram.
Copyright 2015 by Nancy A. Ruhling

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For years, government agencies have chased technologies that would make it easier to ensure that vehicles in carpool lanes are actually carrying multiple passengers. Perhaps the only reason these systems haven’t garnered much attention is that they haven’t been particularly effective or accurate, as UC Berkeley researchers noted in a 2011 report. Now, an agency in San Diego, Calif. believes it may have found the answer: the Automated Vehicle Passenger Detection system developed by Xerox.

Read more…

There are a few different teams out there that spend their time creating fascinating versions of popular fictional items and movie props, and one such team is the folks behind Super-Fan Builds. We previously saw them create a version of the Batman tumbler vehicle as perhaps the most unique stroller ever, and now they’re back with another build for a … Continue reading

NEW DELHI, April 28 (Reuters) – All of the climbers who had been stranded at camps high up Mount Everest by a huge earthquake and avalanches have been helicoptered to safety, mountaineers reported from base camp on Tuesday.

Taking advantage of Monday’s clear weather, three helicopters shuttled climbers all day from camp 1, above the impassable Khumbu icefalls, while others trekked back from camp 2 to be airlifted out.

Around half of the tents at Everest base camp were destroyed by an avalanche unleashed by Saturday’s 7.9 magnitude earthquake, killing between 17 and 22 climbers, according to separate accounts.

Canadian Nick Cienski said many of the returning climbers’ tent camps had been wiped out by the avalanche which, surging at speeds estimated at up to 300 km per hour, cut a swath through base camp, hurling gear, people and tents hundreds of feet.

“Many of these people have no camps, no tents, nothing left – everything is strewn all over the glacier,” Cienski said in a video dispatch recorded on Monday and posted on his Facebook page.

“The only thing they’ve got is what they land with in the helicopter, what’s in their packs.”

Around 350 foreign climbers, and double the number of local sherpa guides, had been on the 8,850-meter (29,035-foot) mountain when the worst ever disaster on world’s tallest peak struck.

Danish climber Carsten Lillelund Pedersen said his team had been trekking on Saturday down from camp 2, which is at an altitude of 6,400 meters, when it was caught in a whiteout and had to turn back. He eventually made it to camp 1.

Three helicopters shuttled 170 climbers from camp 1 to base camp on Monday. Because of the high altitude and thin air, the aircraft were only able to carry two climbers at a time.

“Everest, above base camp, is now empty,” Pedersen posted on his Facebook page.

With much of base camp devastated and many sherpas having returned home to see if their families and houses are safe, some expeditions have been forced to cancel their attempts to scale Everest this year.

Some, like Cienski, who plans to set a world record by scaling six 8,000-meter peaks this year, have yet to abandon their quests, despite the disaster that has overwhelmed Nepal and killed at more than 4,000 people.

“A lot of gear, tents, oxygen, fuel etc is stashed a camp 2 ready to ‘rebuild’ later this season,” said Pedersen.

(Writing by Douglas Busvine; Additional reporting by Clara Ferreira Marques and Andrew MacAskill; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

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