A few weeks ago, AEJ and I spent a day at the LA County Fair.

We hadn’t been there since two years ago.  The highlight from the prior visit (in case you don’t want to click that full link):  We tried to see the Family Talent Show, thinking an LA talent show would be a hoot, but we got there a few minutes too late. In the same building, though, was a very weird “Time Machine” — a series of incredibly inaccurate displays for each decade. Here’s the “Time Warp Diner.” You’ll see that it’s quite authentic for the 1950s, complete with stainless steel appliances and, um, a compact microwave oven. Just like they had at Al’s on Happy Days.

The American 1960’s: The only decade that lasted 20 years.

But back to this visit.  It took us a few minutes to get our bearings — the fair (on a piece of property called, appropriately enough, The Fairflex) is enormous — but once we did, we decided to start with the petting zoo. Only a $3 surcharge (animal feed not included). (For the camera people, most of these pictures are from my new Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS lens, which replaced the 100-400mm lens. I never used the 100-400, but think the 70-200 will be a much better size — and speed. I’ll be using it for concert photography — wherever I can sneak in my 3+ pound, 9-inch monster. If you know what I mean.) But back to the petting zoo…

Goats are funny. They seem to enjoy food, so I guess we have that in common. If you are silly enough to buy some of the animal feed, the goats sense it, and won’t leave you alone.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a petting zoo with deer.

The goat has deduced from this sign that you can, in fact, feed the goats, so he waits patiently.

The wallaby was pretty cute — if not a little sad. Cheer up, Mr. Wallaby!

AEJ loved the wallaby, so she took some pictures of her own. (Moments later, she was assaulted by a goat and knocked to the ground, an innocent bystander in a tussle between said goat and a baby pig.)

Not all of the petting zoo animals are cute.

I kept making yawning faces at this guy, and being suggestible as he was, he kept yawning right back at me. (How many of you just yawned? I know AEJ did.)

Like I said, they’re not all cute.

Are you like me? Are you hungry? Then let’s find some food! Hmm… Where to begin?

There was always this option: Totally Fried. Yes, everything is fried. Corn on the cob: fried. Twinkies: fried. Oreos: fried. (Hmm, I wonder if they use Crisco.) Um, what’s Deep-Fried Coke?

That seemed a little hard core, so we went light and healthy with the fresh-cut potato chips with “cheese” and jalapenos. Doesn’t that look healthier?

The fair also has several buildings of vendor booths. There’s plenty to see! One of my favorite booths was this one. Wow! Great fun!

Some of the people at the vendor booths were a little weird about cameras. I think part of it is the size of my equipment (ha!), and it looks like I’m doing something much more serious than taking pictures for a blog. People somehow think I’m there doing re-con for my own lame-ass fair booth. We tried taking pictures of some little clay critters, but the vendor was like, “no pictures. I’ve had too many designs ripped off in China.” While I don’t deny that there are extreme copyright and licensing issues in China, I assure you that nobody was stealing the guy’s Play-doh Christmas ornament.

Or this booth, with all cat stuff. I’m unlikely to try to duplicate any of this stuff to sell it myself — although I might be tempted to buy one of those cat watches. And I know that sometimes it seems like I live in a Cat-astophy zone! Ha ha ha, LOL, etc.

Being LA, where it never seems like winter anyway, there was an excessively out-of-season Winter Wonderland building, complete with skating rink.

They even made it snow. How cheery is LA?!

I love this guy. Totally looks like he could kick some serious ass, but there he is — blowtorch in hand — making a cute little wooden bear. But he’s a bad-ass cute little wooden bear.

Sorry, kids. You must be at least this tall to log saw. ‘Cause really, height is what determines safety when log sawing. (And what’s with that graphic?)

Look! More animals! Here’s a bunny with eyeliner.

I’m thinking that maybe the best place in the whole fair to put a sink is next to the Goat Rendezvous. (I personally passed on the opportunity for a goat rendezvous.)

It started getting dark, which made things get awfully pretty.

I was using my newest camera body — the Canon 40D — and still trying to figure it out, and I ended up botching this picture and completely overexposing it. I dig the result. It was pretty dark, but this blown-out exposure picked up all of the food vendor smoke, and made it appear that a bomb had just hit. A Fun Bomb, but a bomb.

Let’s eat again! How about funnel cake? Can’t visit the fair and not eat funnel cake!

Or maybe you’d prefer a big sausage the size of your forearm? (I’m half expecting Fosco to make an inappropriate joke here.)

I was somewhat disturbed by the wall of slaughtered Elmos.

So we played skeeball, and I won one for AEJ.

Then we played again — and I won another. Here they are, back at our house, rather excited about discovering their own feet.

Slow shutter speeds are fun.

It was an excellent day, and we left exhausted and stuffed. The fair is fun for everybody!

Well, almost…

Saw “Michael Clayton” at The Arclight cinemas tonight. Good movie. Henry Winkler — ie, The Fonz (or Barry Zuckerkorn, the attorney from Arrested Development, if you prefer 2005 rather than 1975) — was sitting a few rows in front of us. That was kind of a cool sighting.  I wanted to show him the Fonzie “aaaayyyy” thumbs-up, but thought better of it.

And does this look anything like Henry Winkler? Who the hell is this supposed to be? Maybe it’s not licensed, since it doesn’t mention Happy Days — only “star of TV.”

Tomorrow’s big agenda : the Rose Bowl Flea Market. Maybe I’ll find something awesome — like a rip-off Fonzie toy of my very own.

AEJ and I were in NYC last week for the wedding of our friends Ray and Tania. The wedding was fun, and while we were in town, we also met MiniNewSchlachtMan (they call her “Amelia”), and ate a lot of incredible food.

I think the craziest Only-In-New-York day was on Monday. We slept late, then headed out looking for a simple lunch. Our hotel was right across the street from the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, so we headed there to see what we might find. (It’s basically a fancy shopping mall — and the building that houses Jazz at Lincoln Center, the flagship Whole Foods, condos, and the Time Warner corporate offices. But really, it’s a shopping mall.)

Chef Thomas Keller has a restaurant in the Time Warner Center called Per Se. Keller is one of those superstar chefs. He has a restaurant in Napa called French Laundry, and it’s considered one of the best restaurants in the US, if not the world, and it takes 6 weeks to get a reservation. Per Se, his New York restaurant, just received three stars in the fancy-pants Michelin Guide. Only three restaurants in New York received three stars (the Michelin top rating), and Keller had one of them. (One of the other two 3-star restaurants, Jean Georges, just may be coming up later in this entry…)

Before any food freaks reading this get too excited, no, we didn’t have lunch at Per Se. It’s not even open for lunch, and I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have afforded to eat there had it been open. However, Keller has another restaurant — a restaurant for us common folk — and it was open. It’s called Bouchon Bakery.

Bouchon Bakery is not nearly as fancy as even, say, the brunch at Bouchon, Keller’s restaurant in both Napa and Las Vegas. I’ve written about (and photographed) the incredible breakfast at the Vegas Bouchon. What it is, though, is what I suspect to be the best food ever served at a mall food court. The crispy on the outside, warm on the inside rolls that came first were a fine start.

For my appetizer, I had the chicken and dumpling soup. I can only describe it as delicious and… earthy. It tasted like it could have been prepared the same way 200 years ago, with free range chicken, fresh herbs, and dumplings made from scratch.

My main course was the beet salad. I know it doesn’t look like much (AEJ described it as looking like rabbit food), but it was fresh and light.

It’s not that my salad wasn’t good, but AEJ had the much better idea: grilled cheese with tomato soup. Best grilled cheese ever? Possibly. It was pretty exceptional.

The tomato soup, by the way, is for dunking. (Duh.)

For dessert, we had the apple parfait with green apple sorbet.

Very tasty meal, all around. It’s not the same as Bouchon, and I’m sure if you expected Per Se, you’d be a mighty sad panda, but it was fun and yummy. Here’s a shot of another grilled cheese, waiting to be picked up from the kitchen.

We also picked up some food from the carry out area — to take on the plane the next morning. (That was AEJ’s brilliant idea. I gotta say, a Bouchon coffee cake for breakfast on a plane certainly beats a nasty airport Starbucks bagel.)

Oh – and here’s a shot from the floor below the restaurant. (The view from the restaurant was like this only, you know, one floor higher.) Central Park is purdy.

Speaking of Central Park, we had some time to kill before dinner (thank god — I was stuffed), so we went to the park for a bit. We met this old dog. Hello, nice old dog.

It was miserably hot the entire time we were in NY, so we could only stand being outside briefly. We decided to head back to our hotel to hang out in the game room. We played pool…

… and chess. (Okay, we didn’t play chess, but we played with the pieces.)

Then it was time to get liquored up. I got us a few glasses of wine and decided to be skeevy. I’m so happy to see myself looking cheesy. “Why, hellllloooo, ladies… Care for a drink?”

No, ladies, you can trust me. I’m such a good listener.

(Some day, I’m going to figure out how to be earnest, I really am. This look fools no one.)

Then it was time for dinner. Earlier in this entry, I mentioned that Per Se was one of three New York restaurants to receive the top 3-star rating from Michelin. One of the other two is Jean Georges. That’s where we went for dinner…

The amuse-bouche (the expensive name for the pre-appetizer course) was fig with homemade mozzarella, a tiny corn fritter, and chilled cucumber mint soup. I hate cucumber. I don’t know what my deal is with it, but I hate it. Love pickles, hate cucumber. But I loved this soup. If cucumber always tasted like this, I’d be down with that.

Course number one: egg caviar, with vodka-infused cream.

Course number two (for AEJ): kanpachi sashimi, sherry vinaigrette, and toasted pecans. This was a new item, and it was the best thing I tasted that night. Just insane. AEJ described it as sushi that tasted like bacon but had the texture of butter. I love sushi, and this was like… jesus sushi.

My second course: Sea scallops, caramelized cauliflower, and caper-raisin emulsion.

Often at the restaurants of the big chefs, the Big Chef is nowhere to be seen. Uhh… that guy in the white? That’s Jean Georges, talking to a visiting chef at the table across from us. (The visiting chef is the chef at Oro at the Emily Morgan Hotel in San Antonio. I’ll be looking him up when I’m out there for TMEA in February…) I can’t believe Jean Georges was actually working in the kitchen on the night we were there. He kept stepping out into the dining room to see what was going on. It was a little intimidating

Course number three: thyme! What do you expect for a $200 dinner, people?!

Ah, I see. That wasn’t the actual dish. It was pretty funny, really. The waiter brings out the bowl with a metal hood over it, raises the hood dramatically to reveal… fresh thyme. But then she pours broth over the thyme to reveal the actual course: young garlic soup with thyme and sauteed frog legs.

You eat the frog legs with your fingers. Then what are you supposed to do? You have fried frog leg juice on your fingers! No worries; they bring you a bowl of rose water.

Course number 4: Turbot with Chateau Chalon sauce. This Jean Georges guy knows how to make fish, I gotta say.

I substituted the 5th course (to have been lobster tartine) for our favorite Jean Georges course, the black sea bass crusted with nuts and seeds and a sweet and sour jus. (Sorry for the focus problems; it was mighty dark in there, and this Sigma lens just couldn’t lock focus.)

Course number 6: Broiled Squab, onion compote, and corn pancake with foie gras.

And then… dessert. AEJ went with the “Market” dessert tasting: brandied cherry souffle’ with dark chocolate chantilly; sweet roasted tomatoes with blackberries, a tomato-sweet basil sorbet, and almond; fresh peaches with balsamic glaze, crispy pistachios, and farmers cheese; and Santa Rosa plum sorbet. (To clarify — that’s four things.)

I think it’s worth taking a look at one of the most radical parts of her dessert — the peaches with balsamic glaze, pistachios, and farmers cheese. It was one of those combinations that strikes you in layers, each one surprising and amazing. Who puts balsamic on peaches — and then puts cheese on top?! A. Maze. Zing.

I opted for the “Strawberry” dessert tasting (clockwise, from lower-right): chocolate spaetzel with balsamic-strawberry and a chocolate meringue; orange brioche with almond cream and roasted strawberries; strawberry ice cream with lavender fruit leather (sort of an expensive — and insanely yummy and slightly crispy — Fruit Roll-Up); and strawberry soda with birch beer cream.

The strawberry soda was my favorite. It was like fresh strawberry juice with a root beer foam on top.

Some people opted for a cheese course.

And when you think you can’t eat anymore, they bring you homemade marshmallows (hand-cut at your table), and other little treats like homemade chocolates.

What could top a day like that? What’s better than Bouchon Bakery for lunch, Jean Georges for dinner, and a game of pool in between? Is there any way to add excitement to that day?
Why, sure — if a taxi slammed into your hotel 20 minutes before you got back from dinner. Only in New York.