Southern California Cooking from the Cottage (18 page)

Note:
This rub is delicious on beef.

SANTA BARBARA SPICE RUB

O
nce we perfected our Santa Barbara Spice Rub, we found we couldn't live without it. We put it on a variety of meats including the Santa Barbara Tri-Tip Sandwich (page 102), the Santa Fe Fire-Grilled Chicken Sandwich (page 101), and the Fire-Grilled Steak Salad (page 76). I recommend making some to keep in your pantry. I am sure you will find other uses for it and come to like it as much as the La Jollans do.

2 tablespoons salt

2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 tablespoons ground cumin

2 tablespoons chili powder

2 tablespoons black pepper

2 tablespoons cayenne

¼ cup paprika

Mix the salt, sugars, cumin, chili powder, black pepper, cayenne, and paprika together in a bowl. Whatever is not used can be stored in an airtight container for future use.

MAKES ABOUT 1 CUP

PAPAYA SALSA

T
he flavors of tomatoes, onions, and cilantro are enhanced by the sweetness of papaya in this colorful, refreshing salsa. We serve it with our signature Fish Tacos (page 104).

½ ripe papaya

3 cups tomatoes

½ cup red onion

½ bunch fresh cilantro

2 avocados

Juice of 2 lemons

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon black pepper

Chop the papaya, tomatoes, onion, cilantro, and avocados. Combine in a glass bowl and drizzle the lemon juice over the mixture. Sprinkle with the salt and pepper. Gently stir, being careful not to smash the fruits. Keep refrigerated.

MAKES 4 CUPS

Note:
This stays good for up to 2 days.

HANG 10

L
a Jollan Peter Morris, longtime friend of the Cottage and co-proprietor of the local graphic design firm, Smashing Designs, says nothing stokes an appetite like riding waves. “You surf for a couple of hours and you are exhausted. You are soaking wet. And you are starving. How great is it to come in here—you can walk from the beach—find a place on the patio, and have a smoothie and fish tacos! Surfers like to eat healthy and not spend a lot of money. That is one reason the Cottage is so appealing. And it doesn't hurt that the waitresses are all so pretty.”

While it is by no means a beachside snack shack or surfer burger bar and while customers feel perfectly comfortable dressing up a bit to eat here, the Cottage is supremely casual. Like La Jolla itself, which is in some ways as upscale as a village can be, it also has an easy, carefree attitude that harmonizes with the culture of surfing life. In no small part, this is because proprietor John Wolfe is himself a surfer who grew up hanging 10 off La Jolla Shores, and it is also because the Cottage is very much a part of La Jolla, the character of which has always been affected by surfing.

The first person to surf the Pacific off the California shores did it at Redondo Beach. Irish-Hawaiian George Freeth was hired in 1907 by the Pacific Electric Railroad to ride waves as a stunt to promote the good life in the Sunshine State. Freeth's feats inspired a small but devoted coterie of sun-and-wave-loving “watermen” to begin traveling along the shore, hunting great waves to ride. There is no documented historical moment of what the first of these pioneers thought or said when they saw the breakers at Boomer or North Bird Rock in La Jolla, but it had to be something like
Kowabunga
!

In the earliest days of the sport, a surfboard was a huge, cumbersome plank of carved redwood or pine that could be well over twelve feet long and might weigh as much as the man who rode it. Around 1930, when the number of California surfers had grown to nearly one hundred, all of whom knew each other, one surfer named Tom Blake devised what he patented as the Hawaiian Hollow Surfboard, weighing an easy-to-carry sixty pounds. The legend is that in the process of trying to make a normal sixteen-foot board, Blake drilled his plank full of holes. Rather than discard it and start anew, the Waikiki surfer (who had originally come from Wisconsin) simply sealed up the holes. He found that he had a board that was long, light, and nimble.

In the 1950s, surfers began experimenting with boards made of polyurethane. While the hard plastic foam didn't dramatically change the design of boards, it made their manufacture infinitely easier. The exact same streamlined board could be reproduced over and over again without concern about wood grain and varying weight. Among the pioneers was Bob Simmons, an aerospace engineer who had taken up surfing as physical therapy to recover from a motorcycle accident (which made him unable to hoist a heavy board). Simmons used his knowledge of physics to design boards that were lighter, streamlined, and more maneuverable. Serious surfers coveted a Simmons board, which was in such demand that the waiting list to get one was up to a year. In 1954 Simmons died while surfing at La Jolla's Windansea, and to this day surfers speak of him with reverence.

Beyond advances in board design, the whole character of post-war pop culture made the 1950s a growth decade for surfing in particular and California in general. It was a time when different subcultures began to define themselves outside mainstream norms; these groups ranged from motorcycle rebels to folkniks. What they all had in common was a yearning to set themselves apart from the middle-class conformism that was such a bugaboo to restless mid-century Americans. The surfing life was a shining example of a burgeoning rebel lifestyle. These guys didn't punch time clocks. They didn't live in ticky-tacky homes. They went where the waves were whenever the surf was up, and the only things to which they conformed were the rising of the sun and ebb of the tides.

Simply put, riding waves equaled freedom. “Surfing is a release from the exploding tensions of twentieth-century living,” wrote Frederick Wardy in
Surfer
magazine, “[It is an] escape from the hustling, bustling city world of steel and concrete, a return to nature's reality.” The Beach Boys sang it more simply: “Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world.”

Surfing and all it symbolized helped define the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. “It's a fever,” proclaimed the liner notes on
Surfing
, a record album by the Ventures. “Teenagers everywhere are succumbing to the surfing way of life. Surfing has become a state of mind . . . a wild, uninhibited existence that revolves around the sun, the surf, and the sand.” The craze encompassed not merely the sport of wave-riding but a whole carefree cosmology of twanging guitars, hot rod cars, the smells of suntan lotion and sizzling cheeseburgers at a beachside drive-in, and girls in bikinis and guys in tight white Levi's dancing the Twist and the Surfer Stomp.

The image of surfing swelled into a way of life, a point of view, a pose. The image of Southern California was a crucial part of it. Well before the rapture of the San Francisco hippies, the surf-riding, partying beach people helped crystallize the image of the Sunshine State as an ideal place to exit the button-down grind and find ecstasy in Nature. “Basking in the lush foliage and mild climate, the Westerner never knows constriction,” Gael Greene wrote in her 1964 analysis of
Sex and the College Girl
. “The flowers (girls) on the beach wear polka-dot bikinis and mouse (neck) in the sun, inhaling hedonism with every breath.”

In
The Pump-House Gang
, Tom Wolfe's well-known portrait of the surfers who hung around La Jolla's Windansea, Wolfe identified a surfer exclamation,
Mysterioso
! The word, he explained, refers to the mystical undercurrents of surfing. “Oh Mighty Hulking Pacific Ocean and everything,” Wolfe called it, noting how surfers tended to experience all of life on a cosmic scale that made them immune to mundane worries. Total awareness, feeling everything with all one's being and senses, was a condition towards which so many unsettled souls of the 1960s strived. Surfers had it. They fashioned their whole lives around ideals of adventure, freedom, fun, and the quest for sensory absorption.

That full-bore passion remains a surfer's credo, even if the waterman no longer shreds waves like a surf rat. As we sat in the morning sun and ate buttermilk coffee cake listening to John Wolfe and Peter Morris rhapsodize about the sport they love, Peter held the table rapt with a story of some breakers he rode a while back at Rincon. “I caught a wave and was cruising when I realized I wasn't there alone,” Peter recalled. “There were dolphins with me, to the left and to the right. Huge ones. You have no idea how big they are until they're close enough to touch.
And they were surfing with me.
They weren't swimming; they were on the same wave I was, propelled by the same force. We were surfing together.”

PICO DE GALLO

M
aking salsa doesn't have to be a complicated or time-consuming task. Fresh lime is a key ingredient, so try to squeeze your own instead of using the kind that comes in a bottle.

½ cup chopped red onion

½ jalapeño, seeded and diced

1 cup diced Roma tomatoes

1 garlic clove, minced

¼ cup minced fresh cilantro

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

½ teaspoon dried oregano

Juice of 1 lime

Salt and pepper

Mix the onion, jalapeño, tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, wine vinegar, oregano, lime juice, and salt and pepper to taste in a small bowl. This can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

MAKES 2 CUPS

SALSA FRESCA

T
here are many differences among salsas. Every good Southern Californian restaurant, and every Mexican restaurant, will have a variety of them. Whereas the ingredients in pico de gallo are chopped into small chunks, salsa fresca blends the ingredients in a food processor so they become more of a liquid. It can be served hot or cold depending on the meal.

2 Roma tomatoes, coarsely chopped

½ cup coarsley chopped yellow onion

1 jalapeño, seeded

½ cup chopped fresh cilantro

Pinch of cumin

Pinch of salt

Pinch of black pepper

½ teaspoon chopped garlic

¼ teaspoon white vinegar

¼ cup tomato sauce

Juice of 1 lime

2 cups Clamato juice

Combine the tomatoes, onion, jalapeño, and cilantro in a food processor. Process until smooth. Pour into a medium mixing bowl. Add the cumin, salt, pepper, garlic, vinegar, tomato sauce, lime juice, and Clamato juice. Mix by hand.

MAKES ABOUT 3 CUPS

GUACAMOLE

T
here is nothing more Californian than guacamole. I believe it should not be complicated, just simple and yummy.

3 avocados

1 small Roma tomato, diced

1 tablespoon diced yellow onion