East in Little Tokyo

So Saturday was an unusually food-centric day. I got up in the morning and decided it was time to actually go down to La Española Meat, Inc. in Harbor City. So first thing was to look through the new Spanish cookbook that I stole from my mom. That helped me to get a sense of what types of products I would need to make the recipes. Then I went online to check out what they have and what their prices are like. It was a good approach, because it made shopping much less confusing and much more efficient.

Ok, so I can't do much with this Flock blog editor, like paste photos or change the font, so this review is going to sort-of suck. Oh well.

So I got all kinds of Spanish meats and cheeses, but it was friggin' expensive. Like $16 for a half kilo of beans! Ok, so I should have asked the price before I went to the register, but who would've thought. The beans are these special Asturian beans for making fabela asturiana. I also got this nice packet of meat called a champango, which has chorizo, blood sausage, lacon, and tocino, which are both types of salt pork. Yum!

I took the bus all the way to Harbor City. It was actually pretty fast and really nice to have the time to read the whole paper. On the way back, I had the whole bus to myself a lot of the way. Talk about traveling in style!

At Tony's we baked all day. I was going to make a fruit cake, but I didn't time things well, so I didn't actually have time to cook it. Later, we all went over to a gallery opening downtown. It featured some of my students' work on street vendors, so I was proud, of course.

After the opening, it was long overdue for us to eat something more substantial than cookies. After some discussion of pho, thai, and Spanish, we ended up in Little Tokyo. The original goal was to go to the new izakaya, Yazu, which we had tried and liked a few weeks ago. Instead we ended up at East, because Yazu was too packed.

East is a cute little place on First Street. They have dark wood tables, and a menu that has a lot of sushi, especially rolls, and some grilled, baked, and fried dishes. At my table, we ordered a bunch of different dishes. Overall the quality was good and the prices were decent.

That's all I have time for.