A trip to Casablanca 💖 & a new nu metal queen

Hi friends!

How are you? I hope you’re doing well. Happy June and HAPPY PRIDE to all of you in the LGBTQ+ community!! Sending extra love your way.

When this goes out, I will be in the New York area, visiting friends and family and friends and coworkers and family and friends. Honestly, I’m already exhausted. It’s particularly bad timing–this month is going to be especially busy, work-wise, for my husband Ross and I, so we’ll be taking a couple days off to see family but mostly trying to work from the east coast. But it’s a milestone birthday for my father-in-law, so we’re making it work.

I’m not trying to be a martyr or anything, but I often feel like my dear friends and family on the east coast don’t always appreciate how much effort it takes to be there for certain things. My dad was grumbling about how we’re only spending a couple days in New Jersey, but like… it took me weeks to figure out how it would even be possible for me to go at all during this time. I try to put myself in his shoes, though. In his experience, I just show up in New Jersey. He doesn’t see the jet lag and the 6-hour flight and the hour and a half-long train ride and the time off work and the money and coordination it all takes and everything else.

And look, I know, I CHOSE to live on the opposite side of a large country from my family, I get that. It’s just frustrating to make so many sacrifices and compromises to even be there sometimes and then get guilted about why we’re not staying longer. Like, dude, you should just be happy we’re even here! (What’s that saying about how true compromise means no one is happy?)

So, bitching aside, there’s probably going to be a longer than usual gap between newsletters after this one since, oh yeah, less than 48 hours after I get back to L.A. I have to shove off for a work convention for a couple days. I’m actually super excited for it! I’ve never traveled for work before! But when I get back from that, I’m basically going to lie immobile on the floor in my home and not leave my building for a week.

That said, I am excited to see everyone on the east coast and meet my friend’s baby for the first time and eat pizza on the street and see a Broadway show and gobble down as many bagels as I possibly can. I sometimes have recurring dreams that I’m in New York, and in them I’m always trying to find a bagel shop. Someone decode that for me. Or maybe its “deeper meaning” is that I just really like bagels?

Let’s get into some things:

- AI. This is kind of stupid, but it’s recently come to my attention that people are now looking at the humble em dash (—) as a telltale sign that someone has run their writing through ChatGPT, and since I use that ol’ “—” bitch a lot, I just wanted to make sure you all know that I have never and will never use AI to write this newsletter, because jesus fucking christ that would be sad!!! Can you imagine??? What would be the point? I actually avoid using AI as much as humanly possible for a number of different reasons (ethical, environmental, creative integrity-al), but just like bacon in the 2010s, now they’re putting that shit in fucking everything. But yeah, I don’t even run these newsletters through spellcheck, I am damn sure not going to run them through ChatGPT! Gross!

- Linkin Park. Look, I know, I didn’t think I would be here in the year of our lord 2025 writing about Linkin Park either, but the radio in my car is usually turned to KROQ (“K-Rock”) here in L.A., and they have an undying love for the band. Well, it turns out I’m glad for that, because that’s how I learned that Linkin Park just added a new lead singer who is un-fucking-believable–and she’s a woman!! You can watch them unveil her in this live performance of their first new single in forever, “The Emptiness Machine.” Emily Armstrong comes in at around the 1:00 mark, and she starts screaming around 1:40.

I don’t know, I think I’m getting my period or something, but watching her makes me emotional!! After Chester’s death, the band was left in such a dark place, and she has truly breathed new life into their music. It’s just very, very cool to see a woman (and member of the LGBTQ+ community!) in the mainstream metal space, especially one who is as undeniably talented as Ms. Armstrong. Watching the crowd lose it after her first live performance… well I might just have tears in my eyes!! I think I might actually go to my first Linkin Park concert this year!

- Cooking. I have to catch you up on some things I’ve been cooking lately! Way back on Cinco de Mayo, I made chicken fajitas with a slightly different technique than usual. Normally, I slice up the chicken into strips before cooking it, but this time, I pan-seared the chicken breasts whole, then sliced them up after resting and added them back to the pan at the end. I have to say, the chicken was much juicier this time! Fajitas are a top five easy meal for me, especially when I buy the peppers pre-sliced.

A few weeks later, I’m not sure why, but I had such a craving for chicken marsala, a dish that I don’t think I’ve ever made before. I used the RecipeTinEats recipe, and it was so damn good! I love the way adding wine to a pan makes my kitchen smell. My grocery store didn’t have marsala wine, so instead, I replaced it with half a cup of a red wine blend and half a cup of the ruby port I bought for the Barefoot Contessa’s Easter ham recipe that of course I’ve had no use for since. I served it with mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli, and buttered peas. I always forget about peas because I rarely look to the frozen section for vegetables, but they are so lovely.

I used a similar half-and-half wine combo for this sausage and pepper sandwich recipe from Giada de Laurentiis that was far more complicated than any sausage and peppers I’ve ever made before, but was SO good!! So much depth of flavor. You could also easily make it vegan by using plant-based sausages. I served it with this semi-sheet pan salad of roasted cauliflower with feta and dates, which I guess you could make vegan by omitting the feta, but I’ll be honest, the combo of the salty feta with the sweetness of the roasted onions and dried dates was kind of the best part. That salad was so freaking good.

And most recently, I ordered a thing of extra flour tortillas when I was getting breakfast tacos from HomeState (delicious), and decided I wanted to use them to make fish tacos later on. Well, the grocery store was out of mahi mahi, so I pivoted and used this recipe’s beer batter technique on some shrimp instead. It worked well! I didn’t deep-fry them, though, because I’m scared of deep frying. Too much hot oil! Besides, what am I supposed to do with all that oil once I’m done frying up my shrimps? “Put it in a jar” Sorry, I don’t have garbage just laying around my home!! (Ross is laughing at me because we definitely do have garbage laying around our home. But let she who does not have empty cardboard boxes on the floor cast the first stone!)

But I digress. The point is, whenever a recipe calls for me to fry something in an inch or two of oil, I will just coat the pan in a thin layer of oil instead and pan-fry with that, adding oil to the pan as needed. It works well! And so did my shrimp tacos.

Oh yeah and I also made the baked chicken and spinach meatballs that I named as the best recipe of 2024. But I make those all the time.

- Restaurants. I recently went to two restaurants here in L.A. that I think are worth writing about, and I also went to Bacari (I kid, I kid, Bacari was good too, but everyone in L.A. knows about Bacari since they have like 10 locations). First, after doing some afternoon drinking and Catan-playing on our buddy’s roof on the west side, Ross, said buddy, and I ended up at Casablanca, which Google describes as a “Humphrey Bogart-themed Mexican restaurant.” 

Google is wrong. Casablanca (the restaurant) is deeply, deeply committed to its Casablanca (the movie) theme, and ONLY its Casablanca theme. This restaurant is filled to the brim with Casablanca decor and memorabilia. They have a replica of Sam’s piano, they have a life sized statue of Humphrey Bogart, they have copies of every Casablanca poster that’s ever been made covering the walls.

Now, does it make any sense at all to theme a Mexican restaurant around Casablanca, a movie which famously takes place in Morocco? No. No, it does not. But the margaritas were decent, and I actually quite enjoyed my birria quesadilla. Sometimes, dinner at a sort of medium-quality Mexican restaurant can be so satisfying. And if it comes with a side of kitsch, well, I’m in.

We made another pilgrimage to the west side the following week to meet up with some buds at Alibi Room, which I thought was a bar that happened to serve food but is really more like food that happens to be at a bar, if that makes sense. This is apparently the brick-and-mortar location for the Kogi BBQ food truck, which has become very popular on the west side of L.A. and serves a sort of Korean-Mexican fusion. You know, like, bulgogi tacos and kimchi quesadillas, that sort of thing. I had their Special "BlackJack Crispy Burrito" which was filled with spicy pork, cheese, and green salsa and was incredibly delicious, though quite greasy. One thing I appreciated about that burrito was that it didn’t have rice in it. It reminded me of the burritos from La Taqueria in SF in that way. To be clear, I don’t usually mind rice in a burrito, but it is nice to have one without it once in a while. In conclusion: there’s lots of good Mexican and Mexican-adjacent food and drink to be had on the west side.

- Rewatching The Wire (HBO Max). I haven’t done a prestige TV rewatch in a long time, so Ross and I decided to watch one little episode of David Simon’s Baltimore crime drama The Wire, and of course now we’re well into the second season, which is one of my favorites. I’ll tell ya, it’s pretty different watching a show that’s half about cops that was written in the early 2000s now, post-2020. There’s so much police brutality on this show, it almost becomes a joke. But I guess, at least they’re not showing the police as the sanitized, copaganda version like Brooklyn 99 or something. (I enjoy Brooklyn 99, but c’mon. It’s fairy tale land.)

I have the most empathy for the characters on the “drugs” side of the show, though. There are certain characters that just break my fucking heart: Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo. In an episode we just watched, a really minor character, more of a featured extra really, died, and I had to tell myself, “it’s not real” to stop myself from crying!! He was a dude incarcerated at a prison with one of the main characters who lent him comic books and had like two lines. But it made me so sad! Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m watching fiction if I’m watching a movie or TV show and get too upset, like if a cat gets hurt or something. But then, if it’s an old movie, I remember that the cat on screen is probably dead by now anyway, and get sad again. Life is vicious!

- Hacks, season four (HBO Max). How is it possible that I have not written about this season of Hacks yet?? I LOVED it!! Probably the show’s best season yet, and it’s a great show. No spoilers, but what I liked about this season is that it had a lot of character growth, which honestly, is very hard to do with a half-hour comedy. A lot of times, you kind of need the jerk to keep being the jerk to keep the machine running, so to speak. But the Hacks writers are so talented, they’re excellent at continuing to raise the stakes while also maintaining character development. If you’ve never seen Hacks before or haven’t watched this season yet, you’re in for a treat.

- A small rant. Why does everything on Amazon come in enormous quantities now?? (I know I’m not supposed to be shopping on Amazon, but I’m also trying to avoid other problematic retailers, so sometimes an Amazon order is necessary. Pick your poison). I recently went to shop for a present for a friend’s baby and thought that maybe I’d get him some magnetic blocks or something, but jesus, every set came with like 100 pieces! He’s one year old, he’s not building the fucking Taj Mahal! And some of the setups they showed in the pictures for these blocks were absolutely ridiculous. Like, look at this one:

There’s no freaking way a toddler is putting that together, I don’t care what percentile he’s in! (Parents love bragging about their kids’ percentiles.)

Alright, that’s enough outta me!

If you have a second, I’d love it if you’d like or comment on this post–just click this link to go to the post page. This post is public, so feel free to share it on social media, or forward it to a friend.

Until next time—see you in Casablanca New York City!

Love,

Liz

XOXO

XOXO