Green Beans

The wind and rain sweep us through the door to a table at the new Pecorino Restaurant in Brentwood. Yes, the former Zax has gone Italian, like half the neighborhood. Toscana, Palmeri, Sor Tino and Latini Osteria are all within shouting distance. In fact, two of Pecorino's owners, Mario Sabatini and Giorgio Pierangeli, were waiters and managers at the long-standing Toscana across the street. Everyone coming in the door seems to know either Mario or Giorgio.

Cooking is such a personal thing that I've always wondered about books written by more than one person. What if there's a disagreement? Do they compromise (meaning you get neither person's ideal version)? Do they vote? Do they slug it out? In the case of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin's "Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home" (Alfred Knopf, $40) by Child and Pepin, it's the last.

Chinese Seasons by Nina Simonds (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95, 267 pp., illustrated with Chinese paintings and calligraphy). Nina Simonds lived and studied in Taiwan for several years. She escorts gourmet tours there and knows Mandarin well enough to cope with Taipei taxi drivers and to translate cookbooks by noted Chinese authors. Thus, she is a splendid source of information on Chinese cooking. In this, her second book, Simonds branches out from the traditional, incorporating ingredients and ideas from other cultures with Chinese recipes and vice versa.

Last spring, Minnie Katherine Pomerinke planted beans. Brand-name seeds. Nothing magic. "Green beans is all I can tell you," she says. "That's all they were." The beans grew past the top of her one-story house, with leaves the size of pie pans. Minnie Pomerinke, 77, says she has planted a vegetable garden every year since she was 18. But she says she has never seen a bean like the one she planted last spring. She recounted her steps.

How expensive has iceberg lettuce gotten? So expensive that Campanile's Nancy Silverton, tired of paying the restaurant price of $60 a case (that's more than $2.50 a head), banned it from staff meals. Let them eat arugula. It's getting almost spooky, watching the careening lettuce prices in the wake of the devastating March floods in the Salinas Valley. The cost of a 24-head case at the Los Angeles produce terminal swung from $36 to more than $50 before ending at $30 last week.

The spirited crowing of Bruce the rooster, the mascot of the Kendor egg farm of Van Nuys, serenades visitors to the Encino Farmers Market, the largest one in the San Fernando Valley. Customers were crowing too Sunday when they tasted samples of the Honey Crisp stand's luscious Snow Queen white nectarines, speckled by sugar spots, with a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, and intense, lingering flavor.

Ninety-eight point six percent of the time when a menu arrives in my mailbox, it's tethered to a giddy press release. A few weeks ago the Little Orchids restaurant menu sailed in with a note from a friend. "I come here all the time," it said. "Incredibly cheap, the people are dolls, the coconut soup is great. Want to review it?" I called her the next day. "You really like it?" "Love it," she said. "The fish cake's incredible. And all my friends go there." "OK," I said. "You're on."

Not long ago, this was Caioti, the only pizza place between Hollywood and North Hollywood, located downstairs from the venerable Canyon Market in Laurel Canyon. Now it's Pace (spelled with an accent on the "e" in the hope that you'll pronounce it as the Italian word for peace: PAH-chay), and it's still moving pizza. And the same sort of people still come here--slim young women, guys in jackets talking about screenplays, people who probably throw pots or do stuff with stained glass.

NOTE: This is a blog about two guys attempting to lose weight over a six-week period.  They kicked off their weight loss "strategies" on Jan. 10 . I stopped eating food from windows. I stopped drinking sugary sodas right from the bottle. M&M's were off the menu. Midnight tacos were a distant memory. And still I was only a few pounds lighter than I was when I started this madness over three weeks ago RELATED: Jimmy hopes Nutrisystem is "so easy, a caveman can do it. " Could it be that all the fat I was losing was being replaced with much-heavier muscle due to my few visits to the gym?

Ratatouille, an aromatic casserole of eggplant, zucchini, peppers, onions and tomatoes, is a classic that has withstood the test of time. Originally from Nice on the French Riviera, this luscious vegetable stew is often made at home in France and is popular in restaurants and charcuteries throughout the country. Vegetarians make a meal of ratatouille with bread, rice or pasta, or roll it in a crepe. Meat-eaters serve it with grilled or roast chicken, lamb, beef or veal.