Monday Bites - Lou etc

I'm starting my first "Monday Bites" of the fall with a little silliness.  I have been craving hamburgers all summer.  I've been eating alot in the neighborhood of faster-food variety.  I guess I really need to go the best hamburger in L.A. (that's for another post) and get it over with already!

Meanwhile.  Loved this picture from the WaryMeyers blog. Who are the WaryMeyers, you might ask?  Apartment Therapy posted about them here, two years ago and these couple years on, this is what their blog and shop look like. I especially like this page that best gives you the idea of the special things they do.  I know, I should be doing a whole separate post about them.  Cause I'm going off on a tangent, I should be telling you about: FOOD!

HOW'S THIS?  BETTER?

because you can never have too many variations on  FULL SPECTRUM CAKE!  Have you made one yet?  

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Can I now share my Discovery of the Summer? LOU

You might think it verges a little too towards the "Portlandia" style eating experience judging by the blog post that follows, but not at all, not at all!  It's in a teeny strip mall off of Melrose next to laundramat.  It was probably once a Chinese take out place.  The prices are GENTLE!  The staff are really nice and just regular people who love food.  If you have ever been to La Merenda in Nice or Villandry in London and enjoyed yourself, you will really like this place.  The food is impeccably fresh, flavors simple and direct but l-o-o-o-v-i-n-g.  The wine is delish.  European soul food.  I wish I had known about Lou last winter. Because this is what they served:

January 10: Chanterelle-stuffed rabbit, Anjou rouge from Agnes and René Mosse

Prize winning Arshyre cow

With our first course this Monday, Dungeness crab cake, I am pouring a bone dry Cava rosé made for our favorite importer of Spanish wine, José Pastor. The wine is from organically grown fruit and the winemaker adds zero sugar to it (most Champagne, unless it is bottled as a special zero dosage cuvée, has a dose of sugar added during bottling). The blend is made mostly from Trepat, a grape variety that is unique to Penedès, with a little bit of Garnacha thrown into the mix. At only 11.5 percent alcohol you could glug a whole bottle, but please do not, as I have several other wines I want you to try this evening. 

Our second course is chanterelle-stuffed rabbit, with which I am pairing a 2008 Anjou rouge from Agnes and René Mosse. The Mosses are associated with and, in a way, are disciples of the great risk taking natural vigneron, Thierry Puzelat: following his lead, they farm organically, employ wild yeasts, little sulfur, and use quasi-Luddite techniques. Their Anjou rouge is a medium-bodied blend of the two cabernets from vines that are between 30-50 years old. It smells of freshly turned earth, cherries, and grass, and it has boatloads ofminerality. If you cannot perceive it in this red wine, all hope if lost for you and you will never understand minerality. 

Our cheese course is a nice piece of Bayley Hazen Blue, made from whole raw milk by Mateo and Andy Kehler and aged in the cellars at Jasper Hill Farm. This farmstead cheese, produced out of milk from the Kehler’sAyrshire cows, has a flaky-dry texture, and here, the penicillium roqueforti that makes blue cheese blue is not a poke in yer eye, but more subtle, revealing the underlying nutty, herbaceous flavors of the superb milk from which it is made. I am pairing the cheese with a little sip of Michael Wenzel’s wonderful Gelber Muskateller, a wine made from nobly rotten fruit. 

Dungeness crab cake, citrus salad, mustard vinaigrette
German Gilabert Cava rosé NV

Chanterelle-stuffed rabbit wrapped with lardo and prosciutto,
beans, Brussels sprouts, bitter greens
Mosse Anjou Rouge 2007

Bayley Hazen blue, red walnuts, apple
Wenzel Gelber Muskateller Noble Selection 2006 

Warm chocolate cake, crème anglaise

Actually, you know why I love Lou?  Because their food tastes of the earth and the sea!

So what about yourself?  Any food discoveries this summer?