November 02, 2004 - 11:52 AM

This Is My Halloween

A friend of Nick and LDBL from Swarthmore was visiting this past weekend. Mimi, who is teaching in Hawaii right now, was applying for triple citizenship (already being a citizen of Japan and the U.S., and going for the trifecta with the U.K., which is where her mom is from), but had to come to L.A. to complete the procedures. We went out to dinner with her and Mer and another of their Swattie friends on Saturday night at a restaurant called El Cholo, which serves some mean margaritas. Their food's pretty good too. Even when there's a Phillips Head screw in one of the tacos. And they're nice enough to comp you the plate when you didn't ask for the screw-in-the-taco in the first place. But really, you should try the Blue Agave Margarita.

After dinner, Nick, LDBL, Mer, and Mimi convinced me to abandon my plans to see Adrianne and several other singer-songwriters cover Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album at Room 5 to accompany them to a Halloween party across town. It was a costume party where costumes were mandatory, but I decided to go as is and face the scorn and ridicule that was sure to be directed my way. The other 4 had come up with a collective costume theme that earned them much drunken praise at the party: they were the four seasons. The afternoon had been spent creating the costumes out of cheap clothes and props that they had purchased at Target- Mer was Spring, wearing green and pink sweatpants and shirt with flowers and green sprigs glued all over; Lance was Summer, blue sweatsuited with a giant cardboard sun hung, Flavor-Flav style, around his neck; Mimi was Autumn, burnt orange sweats festooned with leaves and other browniage; and Nick was Winter, looking like a crashed snowboarder in all black (including knit hat) with paper snowflakes and silver glitter glued on his clothes.

I chose not to drink at the party, and so found myself to be quite uncomfortable, what with the not knowing anyone else there, the not being in costume and thus feeling like an intruder, the trying to explain to drunken revelers WHY I wasn't in costume and going with the lame excuse that my costume was "a korean person", and the oh-god-I-don't-know-you of watching the Four Seasons rehearsing a made-up pageant presentation of what each of them represented.

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I've been trying to make chocolate lavender truffles. I had a chocolate truffle with lavender ganache last year in Larchmont, New York at a chocolatier called Cocoa that was a heavenly revelation to my mouth, and ever since then, I've been trying to figure out how to get my hands on some more. While doing a search recently for local fancy chocolateries and not-so-local ones that would ship, I found some recipes for making truffles and ganaches. The instructions seemed easy enough, so I bought supplies and various chocolates and set about trying to create my own confections. I even ordered some dried-out, organic, especially-for-cooking lavender (which kinda smells like rosemary). My first go was decent (and confusing, since I had 3 different recipes that called for wildly opposing ratios of chocolate to cream...one was 2:1, another was 1:1, and the last was 1:2), but the lavender taste didn't cut through.

I took a little break from my chocolate making, and it was during this hiatus that I began seeing commercials for a chocolate making set that included a double-boiler, molds, and special utensils. I cursed the people in the commercial for making it look so easy, and steeled myself to try again. This time, I added too much lavender and got a slightly strange taste out of the chocolate (it might have been the absolut citron that I used). However, after a week of sitting in a wax-lined tupperware container in my fridge, I think the flavor has mellowed out. The next time, I'll use a semi-sweet chocolate instead of the bittersweet, and perhaps lay off of the vodka. And dang-it if I won't figure out how to temper (melt) chocolate to coat the ganache balls, too (when I tried it this past time, the chocolate didn't melt, but seized and become what was pretty much a brownie blob).

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On Sunday, I visited Matt and Sharon's new house, which is very much sweet, with Tony and The Fabulacious One and my cousin Eddie, who just moved here from NYC to start a new job at Fabulocity's company. We had lunch at one of the restaurants in one of the classy strip-malls that Matt and Sharon now find themselves surrounded by. Such a shock, to go from the hustle and bustle of Santa Monica, where they used to live, to the lush suburbia of Woodland Hills.

We let Matt and Sharon get back to restoring furniturial order in their house. Retiring to Tony's place, Faboo Faboo and Eddie worked on dinner (several korean dishes that tried their best to kill us, both by frying our tongues and exploding our stomachs. Damn it was delicious) while Tony and I diddled around on the Playstation. He thumped me in FIFA soccer and Tiger Woods Golf, but I trounced him in MVP baseball. We tried to convince Eddie that The West Wing was a good show once (Tony just recently borrowed my First Season DVD set and is now hooked). I watched my first episode of Sex in the City and didn't see much to persuade me to come back for more.

And that was my Halloween.

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