With all the fun clichés of the early '80s porn scene, and none of the cocaine ambulance escapades, the Summer Camp parties held by Little Radio at their downtown warehouse have been, hands down, the next best thing after space camp.

Free bands, ping pong, water slides, kiddie pools, astro turf, badminton courts — the only thing missing was vegan potato salad, which is where Hot Knives came in. We swindled a half-price grill and basically taught ourselves the most efficient way to feed 200 scenesters and scrape out a profit.

Now, sadly, we both have travel plans, a birthday, a bike tour and other stuff to attend to, so we’re done cooking for now. But stay tuned to see whether we’re able to pull off an August stint back at the Summer Camp BBQ. In the meantime, here’s another recipe addition from the Summer Camp menu and a "music video" of the whole sweaty month…

Frito Pie

Chile con Soyrizo
3 Tbs, extra virgin olive oil
2 small purple onions, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 head garlic, minced
1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
3 red bell peppers, chopped
3 jalapeños, chopped
1 12 oz. tube soyrizo
1 cup black beans
1 cup pinto beans
3 cups tomato sauce
1/2 cup vegetable stock
8 oz. tomato paste
1 small bunch celery leaves
1 small bunch cilantro
2 bay leaves'

“Pie”
Fritos
Aged cheddar (optional)
Parsley-cilantro garnish

1. In a large soup pot, add oil and sauté the onions, celery and garlic for 10 minutes. Once sweated, add balsamic and let cook off another 10 minutes.

2. Then add your bell peppers and jalapeños follwed by soyrizo and beans. Stir before adding tomato sauce, stock and tomato paste. Let cook on high until bubbling. Toss in whole celery leaves, cilantro and bay leaves and simmer for 30 minutes or until chunky. Salt and pepper to taste.

3. Pour a bowl of fritos, top with cheese if desired, pour 2 scoops of chile and garnish. Let sit for 3 minutes to gel before eating.

Beverage: Green Flash Imperial IPA
Soundtrack: Darker My Love’s “Summer is Here”

by Lake Sharp

You may have heard of the wonder tonic kombucha. It is all the rage here in LA, people scouring the city to find a place to throw down $4 for 16oz of this healthy bacteria/yeast-poo water. Yep, the liquid is the biproduct of bacteria and yeast feeding on sugar and tea, Ashby explains it a little better. Kombucha has been around since the Qin Dynasty in China (around 250 BC) and can now be yours in the good ol' DIY fashion of HK. It's really easy and fun to have these little science experiments growing in your cubbard.

How to Boocha

To harness the powers of this "immortal health elixer" you need only a few things, namely, the mother. The mother is the gooey slime that forms on the surface of tea...it is the organism. In kombucha, it is often refered to as the "mushroom," though this is purely figurative. You can buy mother and a booch kit online or from some healthfood stores. But if you are patient, you can grow your own by simply buying a 16oz bottle of your favorite brandname booch and pouring it into a glass galon jar. The strands of culture will eventually turn into a clear blob. You have to let it grow for a good month or so undisturbed, but once you feed it, the culture will go nuts and soon turn into the big brown "mushroom."

So, the groundrules for kombucha are these:
Metal kills mother, only use wooden or plastic utensils while handling the bev.
It grows best in clean glass galon jars.
Keep it stored in a cool dark place.

Kombucha food:
12 cups of black tea mixed with 1 cup sugar cooled to room temperature.

As your mother grows, the fermentation procces will shorten, but it's really just a matter of taste. If you like a sweeter booch, bottle after a week. Each batch I make tastes a little different. I am still experimenting with how long I let it ferment and bottling techniques to get the right amount of fizz. If the taste gets too strong after several batches, you can remove some layers of mother and either start new batches with them or give them to friends to start their own.

Tofu Pups suck. Smart Dogs are stupid. With the grill season upon us, those of you suckers for smoke and char are probably wondering to yourself, “How do I make a sweet ass vegan hot dog?” Glad you asked.

A killer dawg (one that can trick a carnivore, cuz really that’s the best litmus test) hinges on three things: good sauce, good heat, good brand of dog. With that in mind, listed below is the kind of dog we have been serving up every Sunday at the Little Radio Summer Camp cafeteria stand. We’ll be setting up shop for one more week, this Sunday, June 24. But if you miss it, take comfort in the fact that you can recreate it all with your computer and a propane grill (we do not recommend buying a lemon from Home Depot because its half-price).

Speaking of which, massive props to the sweeties in Asuza who flickr-cooked our seitan recipe and on the same day it was posted!

Hot Dawgz!

4 Yves brand jumbo vegan dogs
1 quart pale ale
4 Van de Kamp buns
1 cup sauerkraut
2 jalapeños
whole grain mustard
“special sauce”
ketchup

1. Fire up your propane grill.

2. Slice jalapeños lengthwise and add to your sauerkraut. Prepare “special sauce”

3. In a large bowl, soak the hot dogs in your pale ale. Let sit for at least 20 minutes. (By boozing up your hot dogs, you will incur much more flame from the grill, meaning the dogs will blister and pop more like meat.) When choosing a beer, go for something mildly hoppy and a little bitter: Anderson Valley’s Poleeko Gold would work well).

4. Remove dogs and slice lengthwise without actually cutting dogs in half. Brush with extra virgin olive oil and place on grill with tongs, making sure dog is diagonal on the grill bars rather than perpendicular (makes for better grill marks).

5. Roll dogs around, hitting each side for about a minute. On the last turn throw the bun onto the grill. Assemble and sauce. Top with sauerkraut and/or onions. Eat in a bikini.

Beverage: White Trash Mimosa (Miller High Life and Sunny Delight)
Soundtrack: Live’s "Lightning Crashes" (long story)

For this sixth month of ’07 we’ve been enrapt in a brutal but amazing ritual of acquisition, fabrication, distribution and finally worship. We rise at ungodly hours, after traversing vague and ungodly markets to concoct beastly succor for earthly…hipsters.

The following is our rosemary’s baby of fake meat. A creature that devours the mind, enslaves the tongue and dominates the stomach. Henceforth let no vegetarian shyly throw still stiff Boca burgers on meat-slicked hibachis. Kneel in awe and admiration of Seitan: Dark Lord of the Underbelly!

Ingredients

3 cups gluten flour
1.5 cups whole-wheat pastry flour
2/3-cup brewer’s yeast
3 tsp. ground coriander
4 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. cayenne
3 tsp. smoked bittersweet paprika
3 tsp smoked salt
1 tsp. ground sage
2 tbs. freshly ground pepper
4 cups water
1 ⁄ 2 cup soy sauce
1 ⁄ 2 cup canola oil
1 ⁄ 4 cup plus 2 tbs. extra virgin olive oil

Equipment Needs

1 3-4” deep bread loaf pan
1 roasting pan, at least 2” deep
Wax paper
Aluminium foil

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

2. Combine all your dry ingredients and whisk to blend in a large mixing bowl.

3. In a separate mixing bowl, combing your wet ingredients one at a time in the
order listed above, whisking all the while to emulsify.

4. Rub the inside of your bread pan with 1⁄2 tbs. of olive oil. Now line the pan with wax paper making sure the entire inner surface area of the pan is covered—this will keep your loaf from carbonizing. Rub the wax paper with another 1⁄2 tbs. of oil, and grind one tablespoon of pepper into the bottom of the pan.

5. Add the wet stuff to the dry stuff. Mix with your hands, making sure to integrate all the dry ingredients into the brown blob you are creating. While the end result should be very similar to wet bread dough, you shouldn’t kneed it too intensely.

6. Dump the doughboy into its iron coffin. Sprinkle with the remaining extra virgin blood…oil, and finish with one more tbs. of freshly ground black pepper.

7. Seal the deal with aluminium foil, place the bread pan in the roasting pan, fill the roasting pan with as much water as you feel comfortable with sloshing awkwardly about in 90 minutes when its damn near boiling, and gingerly place the whole mess in your oven.

8. Bake for 90 minutes.

9. When the loaf is finished, turn it over on a cutting surface to dislodge it, and pull away the wax paper—as it cools it becomes much harder to remove. Slice and sear, sauté, grill, mash, braise, or worship as you see fit.

Evil Accoutrements While You Wait

Animal Style Onions

2 onions, minced
1 tbs. extra virgin olive oil
1 tsp soy sauce

1. Heat a nonstick pan on medium heat while you dice the onions.

2. Throw the onions into the pan. Agitate them so they don’t burn, and sauté for approximately 8 minutes or until they have begun turning brown and smelling sweet.

3. Add the olive oil and toss to coat the onions

4. Crank the heat to high and add the soy sauce. Cook it off.

Special Sauce

1 ⁄ 2 cup diced pickles
1 ⁄2 cup vegenaise
1 ⁄ 2 cup ketchup

1. Mix it.

2. Use with reckless abandon.

Beverage: Avery Brewing Co.’s Quadrupel: “The Beast”
Soundtrack: Christian Death’s Theatre of Pain

Happy Fathers Day, dad dudes! It’s the only day of the year where your kids won’t give you a hard time for finishing the whole Sunday paper on the pot or commandeering the remote control! And you deserve it. But is it weird to have Richard Nixon to thank for your special day? From what we understand, the dick proclaimed Fathers Day a permanent, national day of observance back in 1972, right when Vietnam was freaking you and your buddies out.

What better way to celebrate our dads, we thought, than to toast to them — their support, their advice and all their lessons in sensitive masculinity — with a high-class glass of malt liquor.

It may just be the one day of the year where beer can really say “I love you.” Evan looks back fondly on turning sixteen in Berlin, Germany and sharing a couple of cold Warsteiners with his father, Roger, at a Steglitz beer garden. And Alex holds memories dear to his heart of dad, Billy Brown, drinking the occasional King Cobra 40 oz. (That classy brand of brew is a whole other post entirely.)

So, this weekend we cracked a frosty brown bottle of Dad’s Little Helper, a malt liquor from Rogue Brewery — think Mickey’s brewed to strict purity laws. The kitsch value of this beer makes it as corny as our dads’ jokes: off-color and endearing. No, literally off-color: Dad’s Little Helper, true to form, is piss yellow. Held up to the sun, it looks like a foughty through and through. There’s no head to speak of, no nose save for scant scents of sweet starch. The carbonation is surprisingly subtle. And the stuff feels strong. As for taste, the syrupy corn and malt flavors hit the middle of the mouth nice and straight-forward. The result is a familiar foughty taste without the sting of acrid booze. If Rogue set out to imitate, and perfect, the actual taste of mediocre malt liquor, by George they have done it. For the most part the beer is pleasantly smooth and guzzlely, assuming it is frosty.

Even if your dad has better taste in beers than this, we think its worth bonding over. For memory’s sake if nothing else. Cheers dads!

Dairy Pairy: Chive Double Gloucester
Soundtrack: Billy Joel's Glass House

Let’s cut to the chase, get the niceties outta the way shall we? The Library Bar in L.A.’s Downtown Financial District is one of the few beacons of proper beer culture in our city. If you haven’t been, we highly recommend it.

The 7-tap, European draft system they pour from is expert; the beer choices are striking without being too showy; the bartenders are all painfully attractive and they serve their bevvies in proper glassware. If you like your Belgian ale in a pint glass, don’t bother coming here. Ruin your beer on someone else’s time. And (if it isn’t too full of suits) the swanky bookish vibe is more than pleasant to lounge around in. Which is exactly what we did earlier this week for their “Bloggers N’ Beer” event.

Now, not to paint ourselves as drunks or illiterates or anything, but we actually showed up a little confused having read it as (no joke) “Beer Bloggers.” So here we are thinking, “Shit, we better have our game faces on right?” Neither of us are used to discussing brews with anyone except each other and our friends and the occasional beer clerk we’ve interviewed for the beer store series. We’re not kosher. We even went out of the way to ask Christina “the Beer Chick” Perozzi, who organized the event, which of the illuminati were showing up. In case we found time to cram.

You can understand our surprise when half of citysearch.com is sidled up to the bar at 8 pm, asking poor Christina why the Inversion IPA tastes like dirty socks. Turns out, the admittedly tech-brilliant PR firm that handles the Library Bar was behind the party, even sending out the evites and compiling all the blogger’s sites and everything. Hey, more power to them. But a beer symposium it was not.

That said, it was a great idea for an event, some killer viral marketing and it actually brought us full circle in a couple ways. Back in November when the bar opened, Evan wrote about it for his newspaper. Because Christina created the bar’s beer menu, he interviewed her. Since then we’ve had her on our radar. Last time Alex spoke with her, the event came up and voila: small world. Besides managing the infamous Father’s Office, Christina has a consulting business that seems to often involve the mad genius of Pasadena: Mark of Craftsman. In our minds, one of her biggest accomplishments as L.A.’s beer sommelier is single-handedly convincing L.A. pubs to carry multiple kegs of Craftsman. That’s her legacy right there.

In any case, it was rad to finally meet the “Beer Chick” and totally amusing to peruse the random blog personalities dutifully trying to learn about beers, taking notes and snapping pictures.

Beer Tasting Line-up

1. Craftsman 1903
2. Unibroue Blanche de Chambly
3. Saison DuPont
4. Unibroue Maudite
5. Deschutes Inversion IPA
6. Deschutes Black Butte Porter
7. Flying Dog Road Dog Porter Scottish Ale
8. Westmalle Triple

Every beer on the list, except the Flying Dog porter, is a fine choice if a bit standard. Truth be told we got psyched about a preliminary list Christina sent us that had 2 beers we’d never had — both were replaced with ones we had. Still, we totally dug swilling our way around these beers for free and toasting Christina on a job well done.

The highlight of the night, however, had to be running into the only other serious fucking L.A. beer blogger in the room (in the city, as far as we know) Dave of hairofthedogdave.com. A sweet guy with great taste, we shared a bottle of Westmalle triple and made him promise he’d participate in the upcoming Great Beer Ride we’re going to get around to organizing one of these days. If you haven’t checked his blog out, do so. To be honest, he covers SoCal beer better than we do.

As for the more, shall we say, pedestrian coverage, it’s good PR. But we wouldn’t link to it.

If we were skiing down a black diamond hill in the Alps and we hit a tree trunk and blacked out unconscious and woke up buried in a snowdrift with no use of our legs and an aneurysm that was slowly filling our skull with blood, it would all be A-OK if only a St. Bernard rescue dog was standing over us with a barrel of St. Bernardus Abt. 12 around his neck, the spigot frothing forth.

This premium Belgian brewery, with its tagline “Heavenly nectar within reach,” churns out biggy ABV bubble brews with extremely high fermentation levels, meaning fruity and yeasty kicks — OG Belgians to be sure. Pouring these bastards takes foreverrrrrrrr, just cuz the froth is so kicked up. The wait, however, is worth it.

The Abt 12, St. Bernardus’ highest achievement and priciest export, is a smooth and crisp but extremely dark ivory-colored pinnacle of traditional brewing. There are notes of ripe bananas and lemons and a yeasty, earthy nose. The taste is like pure gold looted from the layman by dirty, stinking drunks of the cloth. The irony is this shit is so good, we'd be giving ourselves concussions just to be rescued.

Dairy Pairy: Aragones
Soundtrack: Darkane’s Rusted Angel

A while back we posted about the heady nether-region-esque delights of the most over-your-budget fungus, truffles. Recently we got our burn-blistered hands on the cheaper, subtler cousin to the brutally perfumed tubers of the wintertime: T. aestivum.

A fraction of the cost of the late bloomers, these little dirt bombs have a much more delicate flavor which requires very little effort to coax into something wonderful. Instead of the super potent-garlicky bliss of white truffles (well over $70/oz) or the blood-sex-death flavors of Perigord Black truffles ($40/oz), summer truffles will cost you about $20 per ounce. They taste more mushroomy than their pricier counter parts, but still impart a sweetly sexual flavor to simple dishes.

Shell out a Jackson, buy some fresh corn from your local farmer’s market and blow your own mind without the hot kitchen and bloated belly you’d regularly get from slaving over some silly risotto.

Sweet Tuber Sweat Salad

1 summer truffle
2 ears of sweet corn
2 Tbs Spanish XVO (look for Arbequina)
1 bunch watercress
1 red jalapeno
1 green jalapeno
1 Tsp. fleur de sel
1 Tsp. ground black pepper

1. Using a mandolin, a very sharp vegetable peeler or, in a pinch, a cheese grater, shave the truffle into oblivion over a bowl. Cover the shaved truffle with olive oil and set aside.

2. Shuck your corn. Now, carefully slice off all the kernels. Combine with the truffle and oil and toss.

3. Wash the watercress, and snip off all its leaves. Serve the corn-truffle combo atop the watercress. Garnish with sliced Jalapenos and Black Pepper.

Beverage: Jolly Pumpkin's Oro De Calabaza
Soundtrack: Yo La Tengo's cover of "Little Honda"

Calling all L.A. mouths,

Hot Knives will be grilling this Sunday, and every other Sunday in June, at an outdoor party series called Summer Camp, hosted by local web-radio station/venue Little Radio. Their warehouse hangar in Downtown’s industrial district gets transformed into an oasis of slip n’ slides, cocktail lounge kiddie pools, astro turf and badminton courts. The event is free, the beer is “donation only” and most importantly it’s a unique chance to taste the food that we talk up and glorify in pictures all over this blog — so you can tell we’re cooking real food here. (Bring cash to eat.) Best of all, you can keep us company grill-side while everyone else is watching bands play. We may even offer an impromptu beer tasting to offset the free piss beer. Shhhhhh… preliminary menu hints: Made-from-scratch seitan burgers, veggie chili cheese dogs, vegan potato salad and tabouleh salad.

If you come and you read the blog, please say hi!
HK