Cooking

After Mark Gold left Leatherby's Café Rouge in Costa Mesa, where he earned three stars for the Patina Group restaurant in the Orange County Performing Arts Center, he started looking for a space to open his own place. Not easy. I heard he was scouring the Westside, looking here, there, everywhere. But then he got lucky. Karen and Quinn Hatfield of Hatfield's in L.A. decided they wanted a larger space and nabbed the former Red Pearl restaurant, (i.e., the original Citrus) on Melrose Avenue.

There were too many cooks in the narrow kitchen aisle in Chinatown's Grand Star Jazz Club on Saturday, but they cheerily squeezed past one another to peer into the braising pot where chunks of pork shoulder simmered in a piquant sauce of red wine, rice wine, garlic, scallions and ginger. In front of an industrial-size wok, Jet Tila, a restaurant consultant and radio and television chef, demonstrated how to steam whole striped bass.

GREAT cooking equipment -- copper pots, high-tech gadgets, anything manufactured by European car companies -- can set you back some. So now, while we're waiting for Ben Bernanke to cook up something in his kitchen, is a particularly good time to appreciate a chef's tool that's as inexpensive as it is versatile. Parchment paper is a cook's hide-in-plain-sight secret.

ANNE WILLAN is shopping at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market when out of the blue an attractive young woman comes up to introduce herself. "I met you at a Les Dames [d'Escoffier] dinner," she says earnestly. "I just wanted to say how glad I am that you joined our market."

WITH the strike over, the Academy Awards on and a brighter late-night TV future ahead, we can reclaim a spot on the couch, armed with popcorn, the snack nominated as America's perennial audience favorite. But first, it's time for an equipment check. Will your popcorn popper make the cut? "We're sold out," was the refrain I heard at every department store and cookware store when I recently went in search of a new popcorn popper. There's no question -- Americans love making popcorn at home.

WALK into almost any taqueria and you can get agua de tamarindo, a refreshingly tangy Mexican drink made from tamarind fruit. But tamarind is not just Mexican, and tamarindo is not just a drink. Wonderfully zingy, tart and piquant, with an intriguing herbal-floral note, the fruit's flavor shows up in a wide-reaching array of cuisines -- Southeast Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, Chinese, Eastern and Northern African, and Caribbean.

GRATINS have a bit of seasonal affective disorder. They turn up in fall and winter but disappear when the sun comes back out in springtime. Which is surprising considering how well everything at peak of green right now goes with cheese and sauce, and how easily a quick pass through the oven makes them all rich and bubbly together. Asparagus, artichokes, green garlic, dandelions, even not-so-green new potatoes can be transformed by the gratin treatment.

TWENTY-FIVE years out of restaurant school, I should know how to cut up a mango. But it wasn't until I was noodling around online recently that I finally learned why I make a mess of every one. In a video on iFoods.tv, an Irish chef in a T-shirt used a small knife to slice off each end of a mango so that it would stand upright, then pared away the skin in downward strokes before carving the flesh off in chunks down to the seed.

SOMETIMES A sauce is more than, well, just a sauce. Discovered for the first time -- on the menu of a restaurant, amid the pages of a cookbook -- it looks ordinary enough. But in one bite such a sauce transforms the dish, then the meal, then the diner. If you think I'm overstating (food is not always alchemy; sometimes, as Michael Pollan has famously observed, it's not even food) then you've never experienced a good romesco sauce.

PHIL ROSENTHAL and Monica Horan have had a love affair with Italy and la cucina Italiana ever since they first flew there as couriers for DHL in the early '80s. They are especially enamored of the cooking done in the wood-fired ovens once found outside so many farmhouses across the Italian countryside. These ovens still show little variation on the original Roman design: a round, domed chamber built out of brick or local stone and vented in front.