If the calendar function should stop working on your iPhone, and you happen to be occupying a table at Palate Food + Wine, you could probably get a pretty good fix on the week of the year by looking at the contents of these vegetables roasted with herbs and olive oil in a bag. The cooking method brings out the sweet freshness of baby carrots, asparagus, onions, peppers, whatever's in season, in a straightforward, spectacular way. Palate, 933 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale. (818) 662-9463.
Akasha's Quinoa With Edamame
When I was in a Lima slum a few years ago, sitting in on a class where Quechua-speaking migrants were taught to make dinner from indigenous Andean grains, what impressed me the most were the looks of absolute misery on the faces of the students. "I walked across three mountain ranges for this?" they seemed to be thinking. "I didn't come to the city to cook fucking quinoa, I came to the city to escape fucking quinoa. Wake me up when you get to the part about french fries." But quinoa, especially the sprouted red kind, can have a certain nutty charm, at least if you don't have to cook it yourself. And that bowl of steamed quinoa with edamame at Akasha, a fleeting reminder of the chef's vegan roots? Ascetic but not bad. Don't forget to get an order of onion rings on the side. Akasha, 9543 Culver Blvd., Culver City. (310) 845-1700.
Donut Man's Strawberry Doughnut
PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
PHOTO BY ANNE FISHBEIN
Border Grill's green corn tamales
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Have you ever seen a strawberry doughnut from Donut Man? It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a heavy, flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates aid, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness — oozing from the sides — forming frozen whorls, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home. The tawny pastry itself is only lightly sweetened, dense and slightly crunchy at the outside, like most good doughnuts, with a vaguely oily nuttiness and an almost substantial chew. It is the only doughnut I have ever seen that is routinely served with a plastic knife and fork. The stand is on the way to nowhere, but the doughnuts are worth all the irreplaceable fossil fuel it takes to get there. Donut Man, 915 E. Route 66, Glendora. (626) 335-9111.
Chili John's Chili
What Chili John's serves isn't Cincinnati chili or Texas chili or Detroit Coney chili but a spicy, all-but-extinct Wisconsin style (and I for one am thankful for that), dense and comforting, lean and hearty, with a cumin wallop and a subtle, smoky heat that creeps up on you like the first day of a Santa Ana wind. Do you go to Chili John's for Three-Tequila Rattlesnake chili, for Mango-Habañero chili or for Gee, Your Hat Smells Terrific? No, you do not. This is the kind of chili you get here: chili. But you can get it with beans if you want, with spaghetti, or with spaghetti and beans if you're feeling a little racy. The day Chili John's comes back from its annual July vacation is one of the happiest days of the year. Chili John's, 2018 W. Burbank Blvd., Burbank. (818) 846-3611.
101 Noodle Express' Beef Roll
If you keep up with Chinese cooking in the San Gabriel Valley, you may have heard of the beef roll, a steroidal composition of fried Chinese pancakes, cilantro and great fistfuls of thinly sliced meat wetted with sweet bean sauce and formed into something like a Chinese burrito the size of your arm. A specialty of Shandong, half a day's drive south of Beijing, a proper beef roll may be big enough to feed a family of four but is also oddly delicate; it may taste of crisped pastry and clean oil but also projects the muscularity of the braised meat. 101 Noodle Express, 1025 S. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia. (626) 446-8855. Also at 1408 Valley Blvd., Alhambra. (626) 300-8654.
Eva Solo-Brewed Coffee
Somewhere in the back of a hall closet is what's left of three dozen INAO tasting glasses, crystal designed to expose a wine's virtues and flaws in total, excruciating detail. It wasn't long before I realized that I didn't necessarily want to taste wine quite that carefully. But I have fallen hard for the coffee equivalent, a willowy brewing carafe encased in tight, zippered neoprene, like a fitted wet suit on a supermodel, which brings out all there is to know about a roasted bean. Of course, the beans have to be pretty good, and at La Mill, L.A.'s best homegrown coffee company, they are. When you order that single-estate Kenyan, there is clear, limpid coffee in your cup, light-roasted, tart, smelling rather more of fruits and flowers than like whatever it is you're getting at Peet's. La Mill, 1636 Silver Lake Blvd., Silver Lake. (323) 663-4441.
Oki Dog
The signature object — a couple wieners, some chili, a scrap of pastrami and fried cabbage wrapped up in a tortilla — may be Mexican-Jewish-Chinese food prepared by Okinawans for a largely African-American clientele, but nobody who lived through the early years of the Hollywood punk-rock scene will ever think of it as anything but a continuation of the West Hollywood stand everybody used to haunt after Germs shows. Okinawans are famous in scientific circles for their longevity — could Oki Dogs be the key? Oki Dog, 5056 W. Pico Blvd., L.A. (323) 938-4369.
Comme Ca's Cheeseburger
