Greetings from chez moi

Southern California holds a forever place in this food-lover's heart.

Happy weekend, happy cook!

We’re just back from Southern California, having popped down to pay our son Wylie a surprise visit — my Mother’s Day gift to myself, and a hilarious, jaw-dropping moment for him when he came home from work and found us sitting in the kitchen. What followed was five glorious days of wildflower hikes, long walks at the beach, cooking together and dining out — mostly in strip malls, where we found bento boxes, seafood tostadas, stir-fried water morning glory and Laos-style som tam (papaya salad).

One small, delicious highlight of the trip was biting into my first peach of the season: gorgeously ripe, already, a harbinger of summer! First, dinner outside on the patio: silky scallop ceviche, followed by steaks and asparagus charred on the grill, the steaks sauced with chimichurri. Molten chocolate cakes for dessert. (Recipes for most of those shortly.) The menu was designed to treat Wylie and his girlfriend Nathalie to little luxuries. Nathalie loves scallops, and dreamily reminisced about a recipe I’d tested when she and Wylie were living with us in Dallas — Olivia Lopez’s Scallop Ceviche Tostadas; I riffed on that, sans tostada. Wylie adores a good steak, usually with béarnaise sauce, but once he spotted oregano, fresh and herbal spoke to him more convincingly. (We’re both of the opinion that menu planning is often best done while you’re food shopping.) Molten chocolate cake because it’s quick and they both love it.

Here’s the thing: We didn’t go to L.A.; Wylie and Nathalie live in Orange County, an hour south of my home town. Or in rush hour, maybe three hours south of my home town. So it wasn’t exactly chez moi, but it feels so much like chez moi: same brilliant blue sky, same rolling hills, same ocean, and (as in L.A.), an extraordinary mix of cultures. With so little time, and wanting to spend every available moment with our kid, we didn’t even call family or friends in the actual home town. (Forgive us, dear friends and relations!)

Figuring out what to cook at home was easy. Where to dine out? Not so easy. At the more upscale end, the O.C. — especially the beach cities — is a hotbed of overpriced, pretentious places with mediocre food. It may be just an hour or so from L.A., but ambitious restaurant-wise, it’s a world apart. Taco Maria — Carlos Salgado’s renowned masa-focused place in Costa Mesa — is a notable exception, but we didn’t plan ahead far enough to grab a table there this time.