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The Ginger Shot

November 16, 2015

how to make a ginger, lemon and cayenne pepper shot for wellness

Blu Jam Cafe | Los Angeles, California

So apparently when I go to Los Angeles I turn into a completely different human being and actively seek out things like carrot-celery-cucumber juice. (The most annoying part? The damn juice tasted like heaven on toast, thereby very much not supporting my lifelong theory that healthy rabbitish food of the sort typically eaten by denizens of the Organic Coast tastes like sandpaper. Ugh.)

Francesca and I went to breakfast at the Blu Jam, in West Hollywood, because we were in need of blueberry pancakes...but then I (completely inexplicably) ordered that carrot-celery-cucumber juice. And so I figured what the hell, while I was at it I might as well get super weird and get The Ginger Shot, because I'm at the start of a cold and Francesca assured me that the shot would fix it.

Eat

Peanut Noodles With Stir-Fried Chicken

October 26, 2015

I've made different versions of peanut noodles from time to time over the years - some good, some not especially. This one is the best. It's the ultimate comfort food - peanutty and soy saucey and pasta, I mean come on: what more do you want? And you can also do lots of variations on it: add more vegetables or a couple of handfuls of coleslaw lettuce if you want to make it lighter; add chili sauce to the dressing if you want it spicy; throw in chow mein noodles if you want some crunch. All good.

PEANUT NOODLES WITH STIR-FRIED CHICKEN (adapted from this recipe)

What You Need:

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Bad New Yorker

September 30, 2015

Erin and I were making pizzas for dinner the other day and she said, "Oh, we should use the extra dough to make calzones for lunch tomorrow." And when I replied, all offhand-like, "Sure, that sounds good. I've never had one before," there was this long silence, and I looked over to see Erin staring at me like I had just burst out into a rousing rendition of "Don't Rain On My Parade."

So apparently never having eaten a calzone is kind of strange. And apparently it's extremely strange for someone who spent the bulk of her life living in various New York City apartments, all of which were located approximately ten feet away from a pizza place (or three).

(If we're being totally honest here, I'm not even sure I could have told you what a calzone looks like. I had a vague impression of it being lumpy and bready with...something or another inside, but I think that's also a decent description of a gyro, a.k.a. another thing that I couldn't have described very well even upon pain of death until five minutes ago, when I googled it. And since we're tangentially on the topic of gyros, I also feel that it's important to let you know that up until the age of twelve I confused the word "gyro" with the word "orgy," which means that I had an extremely skewed interpretation of that photo of a woman eating a meat-filled sandwichy-thing that's posted on the door of every Italian to-go place in New York.)

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Asparagus with Prosciutto and Poached Eggs

September 2, 2015

Mostly Pinterest functions to make me feel bad about myself. My hair, my nails, my smoky-eye abilities, the scarcity of silk trench coats in my closet, and oh my god my dinners.

It's not that my dinners are bad; they're usually pretty good ifIdosaysomyself - they're just not...I don't know, accessorized. Surrounded with little trimmings of locally sourced flower buds, or resting on snow-white plates with attractive little drip-drops of olive oil scattered about the edges, or whatever. (A caveat: lately my dinners have actually been rawther lovely, but that's because of Trader Joe's, not because of any exceptional food-styling abilities on my part.)

Anyway, this dinner - actually a "brinner,"* if we're being specific - is, like, the Kirsten Bell of meals (I'm watching Frozen with Indy right now - try not to be shocked - and this is the first cute actress who popped to mind, but it actually makes sense because she seems like, were she a food, she would be quite delicious).

DIARY

Back In The Day

June 30, 2015

Back in the day, I wrote a whole bunch of movies and TV show pilots. It's a byproduct of being an actor; you spend your days reading script after script after script, and at some point you start thinking to yourself: "Dude. I could TOTALLY do this." And so you pick up a copy of Final Draft and start tapping away on your keyboard, and sometimes what comes out is an extremely unfortunate (but not autobiographical at all, oh no no) tale of a girl who moves to Los Angeles to be an actress and ends up wildly disillusioned (oh yes; it was as bad as it sounds). And then sometimes you end up with is something that's actually sort of...okay.

I've written a lot of stuff over the years, but I still think that one of my favorite things that I've ever written is a script that I wrote for a college course I took on the 1950s, and that was read by exactly two people: my professor and Kendrick (the latter only because he found a copy of it at some point and asked to read it). It's a coming-of-age story (because that tends to be what people who are still coming of age themselves write), but it's - shockingly, I know - not about me, which is a bit of an achievement in and of itself.

Something you learn very early on in Hollywood is that every script has to have a "log line" - a punchy, easily-digestible, 1-2 sentence explanation of what, exactly, the film is about (or what, exactly, you think will make people want to pay money for said film). So Armageddon, for example, could be "Die Hard meets Independence Day, with asteroids." Pirahna 3D would be...well, actually in that case the title pretty much does the trick. My script, Meridian Planet, was The Wonder Years, but with a girl.

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