This is the thing about the great big wonderful world of blogs– are you listening? Blogs can open you up to a whole great big wonderful world!

Yesterday I was over at No Recipes. He posted a delicious and very Marc looking Aloo Gobi, which is an Indian dish of spiced cauliflower with potatoes. Something about it hit me just the right way. So I decided right then that I would make it for lunch– immediately.

This is not the type of thing I usually cook. In fact this is the kind of thing I usually reserve for restaurants. It’s not that I can’t cook food like this. I just proved (at least to myself) that I can. But for some reason I just don’t… but I guess that is a question between my pantry and me.

Speaking of my pantry, my pantry gets a lot of the credit for the success of today. I keep my pantry in tip-top shape. You never know when it’s going to get a strong work out from a difficult challenger. This Indian spiced dish is a perfect example of the kind of preparedness I am talking about because I was able to read Marc’s post and look at his pictures and start right in on cooking my version with in a few moments. So I am pretty proud of that fact.

For this entry into my Panamanian Cooking Series I want to feature Wolfgang Puck and Spago. You can’t really talk about iconic Hollywood restaurants without including Spago. But Spago is not all that it used to be. The new Spago in Beverly Hills represents a certain kind of dining in Los Angeles. Solid, dependable and perfectly delicious. It’s not where you would go exclusively to see stars. The food is too good for that, and while the occasional star certainly dines there, the new Spago seems to have the attention of the serious Los Angeles foodie.

But you know what? I preferred the old Spago, even though I rarely went during it’s hey days of the 1980s and early 1990s. In my mind there is something so elusive about the old Spago in West Hollywood, I can’t quite describe the vibe of the place. Though in my photos here I did try to capture the extravagant starkness mixed with a neon glow that seemed to pulse through the restuarant's windows. It sat on a cliff above Sunset Blvd in old wood frame building with windows all around. In a city that puts a premiuim on views it had one of the best. Not that I ever got a window table there.

I have not bored you to tears much lately with the saga of my broken jaw. Well it’s mended, mostly. I still have some soreness, my teeth are slightly out of alignment, and I get weird headaches. But those problems are small and getting smaller everyday. In fact I predict a full recovery by the time you see me at the FoodBuzz Bloggers Festival. Did you nominate your favorite bloggers yet? There is still time.

Even though I have been unwired for quite sometime I have not been in fully functioning mouth mode. Today marks the day I go back to eating whatever I like (except: nuts, ice, corn tortilla chips, beef jerky, and hard candy, especially– pardon the expression, jaw breakers).

In honor of this great event I am making ribs. I have never made ribs before. But I was skulking around at Dash of Stash a while back. He made some lip smackin’ good lookin’ ribs. I commented about my fear of cooking ribs and he offered a challenge. He would cook “something from the sea” if I made ribs on the grill.

Sup! is up for most any challenge; especially challenges that expand my experience regarding food. So I accepted the challenge with the caveat that it would have to wait until I was mandibularly mobile enough to eat ribs.

I like spicy food. I like spicy hot food. So it goes to follow that I like Mexican food. But I'll tell you something. Mexican food does not have to be spicy hot.

Here in Los Angeles we get some of the best Mexican food in this country. As much as I like spicy versions of authentic Mexican cuisine. I have eaten enough really great Mexcican food to know that the best of it uses heat in a very beguiling way. That's because there are all sorts of chilis used in Mexican cooking and not all of them are blazing hot.

In fact the best recipes layer the flavors of more than one chili pepper in complex ways in order to build a ceratin taste sensation.

I am going to attempt something like this today. I am making quesdaillas. But rather than starting with and emphasising the heat in chili I am going to use three different chili peppers and bring a distinctive chili flavor, but it's not going to be overtly "hot".

Though it will be spicy and there is a difference.

Okay, okay, okay. Okay, okay.

I get it! Some people are afraid to cook fish at home. But I can’t really figure out why.  My friend Dash of Stash who is an excellent cook even admitted some trepidation recently. In fact he and I have made a deal. I'll cook ribs on the 'cue if he'll cook something from the sea. So I have compiled some information to help him (and you) along that road.

Statistics show that people like to eat fish. Americans are now eating 30 lbs of fish (per person on average) a year in restaurants, but they eat half that amount at home. And of the home-consumed fish, half of that is canned tuna fish.

Now, unless my math skills fail me, that means people eat more than 3 times as much fish in restaurants than they do at home (if you exclude all that canned fish). It's like 10th grade PSAT's!