Listen 57 min MORE An early photo of New York Times cooking writer Eric Kim, who spent an unexpected nine months back home in Atlanta with his mom during the pandemic, cooking by her side and learning some life lessons in the process. Photo courtesy of Eric Kim.
There’s something special about the relationship between a boy and his mom. In anticipation of Mother’s Day, Good Food hears from Eric Kim, who returned home to Atlanta to work on his upcoming cookbook with his mom. This week’s “In the Weeds” takes listeners to Woon Kitchen in Historic Filipinotown, where Keegan Fong and Mama Fong are making a mean bowl of beef noodles. Farmer Lee Jones shares how his family’s rags-to-riches farm went bust but rebuilt with vegetables that are sought after by the world’s best chefs. Edible flowers are blooming at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market. Artist and illustrator Lindsay Gardner pays homage to 112
“I used to say I hate making cakes,” Hannah Ziskin says. Now, slices of her slab cakes sell out in minutes, and people drive across Los Angeles for whole cakes in blood orange and carrot, crowned with minimalist flourishes of buttercream and delicate edible flower petals. She wasn’t supposed to be baking for a living anymore. But, as with so much, the pandemic upended everything.
When Ziskin, a pastry chef with a long resume in San Francisco, moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2018, she thought she was done with the restaurant industry and its long hours, low pay, and casual harassment. She even learned to code. But when a chef she admired, Melissa Perello, called to talk about a gig at her new Los Angeles restaurant the Michelin-starred chef’s first in the city Ziskin decided to take on one last pastry chef job. Several months later, COVID hit, and M.Georgina shut down.
The idea for the new Atwater Village provisions shop Wine + Eggs sprang from a simple craving. Owner and Atwater local Monica Navarro had just expanded her family and was looking for a place to pick up pasta, tomato sauce, and a much-needed bottle of wine in the neighborhood. After searching for all of those things under one roof and coming up empty, she took matters into her own hands.
A month before the pandemic, Navarro who also owns Wine & Rock Shop in Yucca Valley signed a lease on a storefront across the street from her other Atwater business, Individual Medley, and began putting together a list of items she would love to see on shelves. The Wine + Eggs team didn’t have to look far to find the sorts of delicious and exciting pantry items Navarro wanted to stock.