My friend Karen and I have shared a lot of great memories. I've known her since we were just freshly graduated from college and since those youthful days, we've lived together in New York, gone to Hawaii for her wedding and among other silly girl miscellany I can now tell our children one day that their mother and I stuffed ground pork with fennel and orange zest into pig intestines called hanks. We made sausages by hand.
Karen and her husband Nathan have opened a butcher shop on Hillhurst Ave. in Los Feliz. If you are a discerning carnivore, you must stop by to marvel at all kinds of meaty madness, carved and curated by two professional chefs who love food. When Nathan cuts a steak, he thinks of the final dish as he guides his knife. How many butchers do you know that can say they've worked in three Michelin star restaurants? It's like your school nurse telling you she was a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic before she came to hand out band-aids and condoms.
Every morning, before I even begin to have weird dreams about orange blue cheese (true story), Nathan is headed downtown to the fish market. By 6:30am, he's given a humble nod to Mr. Nozawa, yes, of Sushi Nozawa, an unofficial mentor and a McCall's customer. Traffic isn't even an issue this early as he heads back with incredibly fresh seafood that's in season. Salmon, tuna, oysters, scallops, mussels...they're all sitting in the case early everyday, shiny and briny and begging to be devoured. The array changes every day so if you're on Twitter, you can follow them to know what's wriggling. I follow them. And Lady Gaga.
I bought a tiny bit of Alaskan black cod the other night and poached it. I concocted a simple sauce of soy, mirin, rice vinegar and sesame oil in which the black cod was dipped. After the first white flake of fish met my taste buds, I immediately wished that I had bought a pound of it. All for me. The texture was silky with a slight bounce. It possessed a hint of fishiness, mainly from the skin, that was beautiful with the acidity of the rice vinegar.
On dry land, they're sourcing cuts from purveyors that only sell to restaurants. So when you wonder why you're such a bad cook because you can't seem to get things to taste like what they serve at your favorite restaurant, know that not all ingredients are created nor available equally. A flimsy Vons pork chop isn't a Berkshire pork chop. One night before they opened, we were all chatting when they told me that they could find super-foodie ingredients like white truffles and foie gras...things that you can't normally get at the market. My mind started to wander into the land of things I can shave white truffles onto. It was an endless landscape dotted with pretty much anything edible.
If farms were strip clubs, Nathan and Karen would be bouncers who can get you into the champagne room while discreetly slipping you your $100 bill back in ones. I've now discovered my new food love: the very hard-to-find natural certified angus beef prime dry aged short loin (where you get a T-bone from). Nathan had fried up a tiny bit to test and the flavor was complex with notes of Parmesan. As I chewed and let the juice seep out from the sinews, I knew that some people won't ever get to experience a steak like that. You know, an extra lap dance from the hottest stripper at the strip club type of steak.
And not to go on and on even though I am, I just have to tell you about the eggs. I haven't had them personally but the chickens and the eggs are apparently the most incredible tasting chickens and eggs that both of them have ever tasted. Kendor Farms is in Van Nuys so the which came firsts are local. But the best tidbit is that they mix a little olive oil into the chicken feed. Uh, I'd be pretty delicious if I ate olive oil every day. I'd be fat-astic.
And of course...the sausage. As a bonus for randomly being there the night sausages needed to be stuffed and helping Karen while Nathan butchered some fish, they gave me a sausage I had "made." Nathan's mixture of pork butt, orange and fennel was amazing. A little salt, a little love and into the pig intestine it went. I fried it up at home one night along with a little bit of extra, unformed stuffing and I had to stop myself from eating the entire pound of seasoned juicyness in one sitting. The fennel is potent and the orange comes in towards the end and the fattiness of the pork just made me want to hug someone.
At any rate, I'm always excited to pop-in to their tiny, maroon shop on Hillhurst. Where my best friend Karen wraps up protein jewels in brown paper and sends me home with little projects. I gave them an old book I found at a used book store simply titled Meat. I hadn't paid much attention to the author but upon presenting them with it, we took it as a sign that it had in fact been written by the Lobels of the eponymous butcher shop in Manhattan; the shop that sold them the steak that inspired them to do what they did. I'm fortunate to have them be my culinary guides but we're all lucky that they've put the entirety of their time and energy from the past year into an endeavor that I hope will change the way people shop for meat and fish...and eggs...oh my.
