Ben Mesirow

The easiest way to gross out those friends of ours who are less inclined to adventurous eating is to serve them something that actually looks like what it is. Ground mystery meat in a Jack-in-the-Box taco goes unquestioned, but things like whole fish, crab legs, and sometimes even chicken wings......

The Place: The Hungry Cat, 1535 N. Vine St., Hollywood. The Hours: Weekdays, noon - 6 p.m. The Deals: Half off beer and cocktails The Digs: The Hungry Cat Hollywood is tucked away into a strange sort of pedestrian alley on the Vine side of the Sunset and Vine complex......

One of our earliest (and greatest) culinary discoveries was that putting almost anything we find in the fridge over rice makes it a complete meal. Harvest hodgepodge? Add the sauce of your choice and put it on top of some rice and it's perfect. A spare chicken and apple sausage......

Why is it that when life imitates art it always seems to mimic the plot of some terrible horror film? Like that time we went on a field trip from our space station and brought back cryogenically frozen specimens from Earth One, only to discover that one of them was......

At first glance, the taco truck posted up nightly in the car wash at Sunset and Alvarado in Echo Park looks like a poser. The garish orange paint, the flame decals, the flat-screen TVs, and the chrome wheels make El Flamin Taco seem a little like a taquero trying to......

This SoCal-NorCal rivalry thing is totally overblown. We're all Californians, and they've got some great stuff up there, like beer, book publishers, and hyphy rap. Who cares that they use obnoxious words like "hella," that they have their own stupid logo, or that they root for a baseball team full......

In much of the nation, the ground has only recently thawed and temperatures still dip down to horrifying depths. (A high of 47, is that some kind of sick joke? How could anyone live like that?) Meanwhile, here in Elysium it's already hitting 90 and might as well be summer......

Even though Hipsteropolis has completely arrived as a desirable part of town (at least if celebrity residents and real estate prices are any indication), it hasn't yet lost that little-brother, underdog feeling. Like UCLA football (not arrived) and USC academics (arrived, though someone apparently forgot to tell the students), it......

When is a beer not a beer? When it's a gimmick, of course. And almost nobody makes more gimmicks (and fewer beers) than notorious Scottish brewery Brewdog. The most well-known of their efforts is Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a 32% abv imperial stout made by freezing their standard imperial stout until......

It is probably no surprise that being thrifty about food is extremely difficult for us, no matter how the economy is doing; even our vast knowledge of happy hours and hole-in-the-wall Mexican food can't save us. With that in mind, we set out to discover some cheap, readily available treats......