Omg, so healthy!

Well, it certainly has been a healthy weekend for us. Two days in a row we have breakfasted on a soup of assorted leafy greens with poached egg, and yesterday we took radish sandwiches to the beach! I feel like a rabbit, but in a good way. On Sunday we looked up the Malibu Lagoon online and learned that there were hiking trails around and near it. So we went to the lagoon with our sandwiches and snacks, but there was no trail. After getting our feet very dirty in weird lagoon mud and watching lots of giant pelicans fly around, we decided to just walk on the beach instead. Our CSA-based fuel was radish-walnut-red leaf lettuce-mustard sandwiches and raw carrots. And we also had some pb&j and cheese and pickle sandwiches (one can't surive on radishes alone :). The vegetable sandwich was quite tasty and I think will repeated next time we hike. The rest of the radishes got braised with their greens and tossed with pasta for dinner, along with some farmer's market broccoli and mustard-panko chicken. Malibu was beautiful, but the contrast between the public and so-called private beach areas was pretty crazy. In the "private" areas (the coast can not actually be private, legally), everyone is thin, most people are white, and all the women are in bikinis. The children have surfboards and wetsuits. We saw one fully dressed woman walking purposefully with an off leash chihuaha scampering along behind her in the sand trying to keep up on its little spindly legs. In the public part of the beach, there is a more representative variety of body types and racial diversity (though it is weighted toward the white and blond, being Malibu after all). Overall, the beach was very mellow, and not crowded, and the water was actually warm. Despite my painfully sunburned shoulders, I'm glad we went.


The culinary highlight of the weekend however, was probably the least healthy -- food at El Rey de Barbacoa. To our credit, we walked two and a half miles there and two and a half miles back to get some barbacoa. Barbacoa is a very old dish that traditionally involved slowly roasting a whole animal in a put in the ground. This barbacoa was made from goat, and I don't know exactly how it was prepared but it was super soft and delicious and rich. Gretchen had a really good quesadilla on a fresh handmade tortilla, and we sampled all of the excellent salsas. We also tried a nopales salad, but concluded, as we do every time we order something with nopales, that we don't like it.

So if you have a hankering for delicious soft rich meat or fresh, thick quesadillas, you won't be disappointed at El Rey de Barbacoa at Adams and Hill. And you should call us so we can go with you :)