Notebook on Cities and Culture - Audio Interview

Play the audio interview here.

From Seattle to Santa Barbara and finally landing in Los Angeles, interviewer and podcaster Colin Marshall has traveled far to finally end up eating greasy fried chicken and chugging brews at the glass kitchen table in the Chintzy Chateau. I received an interview request by email from Colin a few months ago and after checking out his list of aural contributors so far, needless to say, I was quick to respond "when and where?"

I like to ask how media movers find me -- Colin said his girlfriend turned him on to my blog. He especially enjoys when I get out the the kitchen to explore and document Los Angeles's culinary city scene, quote: "Your combination of food enthusiasm, creative buying, cinephilia, and urban exploration (especially by rail, which I use all the time) has certainly kept me interested." 

His website is called Notebook on Cities and Culture (click here) and he's interviewed all manner of local cultural creators including literary, music, design, film and comedy mavins. It's an amazing roster he's compiled since the first  listed podcasts from 2007. I guess I fit in there somewhere. The screen-grab above (from his website) are his musings about our chat. Of special note are a bunch of links to click on as the audio plays!

(If you want to see the writeup clearer than my frame-grab above with access to all the links, click here; where there is a "Pod" audio button link as well -- just under the date and next to the interview heading.)

Colin peddled over from the Westside (where he now resides) to here in Baldwin Hills on his bike at around sunset. Our plan was to do a "walk and talk" in the aisles of my local 99c only Store on La Tijera Boulevard, followed by my typical Tuesday constitutional of a two piece Popeye's Fried Chicken Special for 99 cents, and finally retiring to the Chintzy Chateau's kitchen to chat, dine and sip on Evil Eye 24 ouncer Ice beers.

You can hear it all by just clicking on the play button below (also, at top of post.)  It's a fun listen, especially as Colin's conversational chops smooth the way. 99 thanks to Colin Marshall for including me in his entertaining podcasts.

Play the audio interview here.

Time Magazine Articles on The 99 Cent Chef

 I've never made the cover of Time magazine, but I've been name-checked on their Time Moneyland and interviewed by them in their Business & Money website.

For Time Moneyland, they referenced my love of shopping at ethnic grocery stores, especially Latin markets. I took a screenshot below.

Click on the image to read.

The longer Time Business & Money article was an in-depth interview, where the writer, Brad Tuttle (who calls himself a fellow "cheapskate"), submitted questions to me (whom he calls "blogger-cook-cinematographer-jester"). I provided my blog links for recipes or reviews mentioned in the interview. Check out the whole enchilada below.

Click on the image to read the introduction.

And for the full text of my Time Business & Money interview, read it below.

How to Cook with Under a Buck: A Talk with the 99-Cent Chef

By Brad Tuttle @bradrtuttleSept. 17, 2009Add a Comment

Follow @TIMEBusiness

Up today in the cooking-on-a-budget series, a Q&A with a blogger-cook-cinematographer-jester who puts together recipes using ingredients that cost $1 or under. It’s not quite as difficult as sticking to $1 a day for your entire food budget. But it’s certainly interesting, and you’ve got to be creative to pull off a meal using only foodstuffs that cost 99¢. On occasion, he even tries to imitate Julia Child recipes, liberally subbing in less expensive alternatives, like 69¢ a pound chicken leg quarters instead of duck confit.

Once again, I’ll repeat: Eating on a budget is not a contest; it’s a conversation. I’ve asked several other bloggers who write about their low-cost food adventures to answer questions similar to those posed to the 50 Bucks a Week trio, which started the entire conversation. The responses will be posted here to keep the conversation going.

Los Angeles-based blogger Billy Vasquez, a.k.a. The 99-Cent Chef, cooks with ingredients that each cost under a buck. He’s particularly a fan of 99¢ Only Stores, which recently hosted nine couples for weddings that each cost (yep) 99¢.

Cheapskate: How and why did you start writing about eating on a tight budget? Did it spring out of necessity, as a lark, or what?

Billy Vasquez: It all started in my childhood in Texas when Mom would dump her waitress tips on the kitchen table, and my siblings and I would count and stack the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters — thus began my “penny pinching.”

We have 99¢ Only Stores in Los Angeles that I’ve frequented for what seems like forever. I work freelance as a cinematographer and digital effects artist in the film and video business, so economizing during slow work periods has often been a necessity. I have a special fascination with finding cooking ingredients from 99¢ Only Stores. My workmates began to tease me as I talked more and more of all the cheap foodstuffs I would find and cook with. I started challenging myself to create delicious entrees — I would prepare an evening meal for my date and gleefully announce, after receiving compliments, “I made everything using 99¢ ingredients!” Her jaw would drop; then a smile would take over. It was funny, after all! Soon I began calling myself “The 99 Cent Chef” as a lark.

As for creating The 99 Cent Chef blog, it started about four years ago, when I made a video called “The 99 Cent Chef Goes Shopping” as part of a performance piece for an art gallery (at the opening, I presented my video while serving the 99-cent hors d’oeuvres from behind a cooking table while dressed as a chef – basically, I catered the art opening!) The video performance was a hit, and I felt I was onto something.

Around that time, I became interested in blogs and how they combine all the artistic disciplines I’ve explored: photography, video, film, graphic design, and prose. Almost 2 years ago I decided to go legit and put it all that together with my interest in the culinary arts to create this food blog.

I am a great fan of comedy films from the silent era and screwball’s Golden Age. This informs how I present my blog – I strive to make my entries clever and humorous, short and unpredictable. My cooking style is straightforward, and my recipes are fun to make. One blogger called me “Rachael Ray on Crack.”

CS: What are your ground rules? How exactly do you define what’s in your budget and what meets your standards and restrictions? Give us the fine print, including how you deal with beverages and dining out (that is, if you ever dine out).

BV: I create recipes with ingredients that each cost 99.99 cents or less. It can be anything from 99.99 cent 6 oz. frozen salmon fillets from The 99¢ Only Stores, to poblano chiles and other stuff at 99 cents a pound from my local Latin market. I’ll forage in Armenian Mom & Pop neighborhood delis, big-chain grocery store bargain bins, neighborhood farmers markets, strip-mall dollar stores — anywhere and everywhere.

I read the grocery mailers that come every Tuesday to find fresh vegetables and fruit on sale for the week. I’ve recently started reviewing restaurants, zooming in on Happy Hours and the cheapest entrees on the menu. As an example, I hit the cheapest Happy Hour in Beverly Hills, which included martinis and appetizers for $3.60 each. Here in Los Angeles, the lowly taco truck is now preparing the hippest cuisine. Cheap is the new haute!

CS: What has been the hardest thing to do, or to go without, since you started cooking and eating on a supertight budget? What are you dying to splurge on and eat right now?

BV: The hardest thing to do is turn a fancy recipe into a budget one. I look at all the ingredients and try to find inexpensive, appetizing substitutions — it should be cheap, but mainly it has to taste good. If I want to splurge, I love barbecuing rib-eye steaks, but at $4-$6 a pound, it is an infrequent treat. As for dining out, I love to eat sushi anywhere and anytime –- and I do have a couple of 1/2 price & budget all-you-can-eat sushi restaurants that I patronize every once in a while. I am frugal most of the time, but I save enough to indulge.

CS: When you tell people about your food budget, what sort of reactions do you get?

BV: I do enjoy pushing the boundaries of skeptics. Nothing is better than seeing diners go from being apprehensive to asking for seconds. It can be a hard sell, but I take it as a challenge to my creativity, and I have good instincts for turning typical and classic dishes into 99-cent budget entrees. Julia Child’s take on the French classic “Cassoulet” uses duck confit; well, I can’t afford that, but I can substitute chicken leg quarters for 69 cents a pound, and white navy beans are less than a dollar a pound anywhere. Does it taste the same? Well, it tastes pretty darn good, and I’ve had no complaints so far.

CS: What have you learned about yourself, and about how people in general consume food and function as consumers, while you’ve been blogging about cooking and eating on the cheap?

BV: The main thing I’ve learned about myself is that I love to blog! Also, cooking can be fun. When you take away the anxiety of spending a bundle for expensive ingredients, you’ll find that there are many cheap and creative alternatives to a typical recipe. I’ve “favorited” dozens of recipe sites and food blogs, and I always stop at magazine racks to peruse the latest Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines for ideas. My blog visitors frequently comment about how their cooking has grown boring and how I’ve given them fun and cheap ideas for their next meal.

To find the freshest ingredients at discount stores, you do have to be selective in your shopping. I also stay away from overly processed food and steer my readers to healthy fare like my Black Bean and Corn Salad, but I’m not above a fun party recipe like Vienna Sausage Corn Dogs or super-indulgent Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. Now and then I’ll splurge on something like lobster tails to cook for my wife on Valentine’s Day, and sometimes that favorite rib-eye steak for barbecuing on a summer day, but most of the time I enjoy creating low-cost cuisine. I strive to create easy and cheap dishes presented with scrumptious and sumptuous photography and clever videos.

Consumers will eat healthier and cheaper if they cook more at home. I hope my blog prods my audience in this direction.

Brad Tuttle @bradrtuttle

Brad Tuttle covers business and personal finance for TIME. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and four sons, and also teaches journalism at UMass-Amherst.

Meet Your Food Blogger - Magazine Bio

Here is a cool article on yours truly, recently done by LA's excellent (and my personal favorite) local magazine, LA Weekly (website here.) What a great way to end 2011 -- or start 2012!)

Their online magazine carries a food blog section called Squid Ink that covers the city's vast and bustling cuisine culture -- everything from a review of ink., the happening new restaurant from Top Chef Michael Voltaggio, written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jonathan Gold, to a month long series "30 Burger in 30 Days" by Elina Shatkin, along with daily national and international food headline coverage. I have Squid Ink bookmarked under Favorites. (If you want a great foodie resource, I would recommend you bookmark it as well, here.) The editorial slant is progressive and eclectic, just like my frugally-fashioned unconventional food blog.

I was contacted by LA Weekly journalist Daina Solomon just after Christmas. She wanted to revive a series the magazine last published in February of 2010 called "Meet Your Food Blogger." And, she wanted to resuscitate the series with an interview of the chintziest of culinarians, The 99 Cent Chef.

We first discussed it on Tuesday - did the interview at the LA Weekly on Wednesday - and the article was online by Friday.  Daina is a great interviewer, and she fashioned a comprehensive article in which she wrote about my blog origins and influences, while at the same time creating links to some favorite recipes and video posts from my last four years of blogging.

I especially like that she embedded a video from Restaurant Nocturnes, my  noir-lit nighttime collage of Los Angeles eateries from high-end to humble. I'm up to Restaurant Nocturne VII in this series and was wondering when the local media would pick up on it. It's an evocative photo/video/art series like no other. So, be sure to play Restaurant Nocturne I, which Daina embedded on page 2 of the article. (The other six Restaurant Nocturnes are linked on the right side of this blog - just scroll down to the heading "Restaurant Reviews - Videos & Photos" and click on any of them.)

This journalistic piece covers everything you wanted to know about The 99 Cent Chef (but were afraid to ask.) The first page is below. Click right here to see the original LA Weekly post or just keep reading:

Squid Ink: Just who is the 99 Cent Chef — where are you from?

Billy Vasquez: I'm from Port Lavaca Texas, on the Texas gulf coast and moved to Louisiana in grade school. I've been in L.A. for 36 years, and live in Culver City.

SI: I'm sure the 99 Cent Chef keeps pretty busy. How about a day job?

BV:I'm a freelance digital artist and do postproduction effects for commercials, TV, and film — everything from “Return of the Jedi” to “Vampire Diaries.” I've worked as an editor, cameraman and director of photography.

SI: How does that fit with your blogger life?

BV:I've always been interested in literature and writing. Blogging is a perfect way to combine all the media disciplines.

SI: What are your other interests?

BV:I'm interested in L.A. I like to walk through neighborhoods, take the subway, check out art, scope out things and see classic films. That feeds the creativity. The food blog is a perfect filter. Blogging and interaction with the city feed one another.

SI: Where did the 99 Cent Chef idea come from?

BV:I'm cheap by nature! The 99 Cents Only Store always had a decent canned food selection — olives, clams, tomatoes, but not fresh items. Then they started stocking produce and dairy and more frozen foods. I could make Italian pasta dishes with everything from the 99 Cent Store. I would make them for dates. They would dig in, and later I'd say, “By the way, this is all from the 99 Cent Store.” Their faces would drop, but then they'd start laughing.

I began calling myself the “99 Cent Chef” on a lark. It was a silly thing to talk about at work. Then I made a video of “the 99 Cent Chef Goes Shopping” for an art show. Everything clicked – the concept and the tongue and cheek approach. I was break dancing in the aisles. Showing five different kinds of Vienna sausages. People saw the video and were fascinated! I decided to start a blog using videos and the recipes I had been writing down. The first post was a video of me feeding people at the writer's strike.

squash blossom quesadilla; Credit: Billy Vasquez

SI: You've been writing the blog since 2007. What keeps it fresh and interesting for you?

BV:I'm inspired by L.A. I'm an enthusiast. I'm always amazed at the stuff that's out there. I can go to a Latin market and decide to cook with cactus or poblano chiles. By being open and enthusiastic about my surroundings, ideas pop up everywhere. You don't have to try too hard.

SI: How did you learn to cook?

BV:I grew up on the gulf coast in a family of shrimpers, so I was exposed to great seafood. We couldn't afford hamburger or steaks, but we got all the seafood we could eat — blue crab, oysters, jumbo shrimp. In grade school we moved to Louisiana where there's a wild, imaginative, crazy food culture – crawfish, alligator. Here in L.A., every neighborhood is a different food culture. I have no culinary schooling. But I don't need it. The kind of stuff I do isn't haute. Like on my blog I say, “I take the haute out of cuisine, I cook for the people.”

SI: You make a lot of recipe videos to go along with your blogs. What is their appeal?

BV:It goes back to Julia Child; videos show much more than just words. People can see the techniques and your flubs or how bad you cut an onion. People realize, “I don't need to be an expert to do this.” Also, they can see how it comes together in real time.

SI: Could you recommend other food blogs with videos?

BV:Hilah Cooking. She's from Austin, an ex-punkette chick with a thick Texas accent who does humorous takes on recipes. She'll do trashy kinds of stuff. Also, The Perennial Plate. He does travel logs. His videos are very stripped down, documentary-style. He'll go to Texas and Louisiana, where they had the oil spill, and talk to people. But because he's also a chef, he'll find ingredients and come up with something.

SI: How has the blog developed over the years?

BV:The videos look better. But the concept has been consistent. Cheap ingredients, creative recipes, sense of humor and variety.

SI: Can you tell us about the “Restaurant Nocturnes” videos?

BV:For 10 years I did a lot of street art-photography all over town, totally random stuff. Now I'm doing the exteriors of restaurants at night. I take 200 stills and turn it into a film. I show people coming and going. And then I talk to people at the restaurant about the food, and play that audio recording over the photos. It's a video-audio-collage. I've done seven so far; they show nighttime L.A. like no one's ever shown it before.

SI: Which are the best 99 Cents Only Store locations?

BV:The La Tijera location is great for booze and veggies, and has a great deli case. The Hollywood store has lots of produce and deli items. Wilshire and Fairfax is one of the largest. I've seen Rolls Royces in the parking lot. There's a smaller one around the corner at Fairfax and 6th. Those are the ones I frequent the most.

SI: What can you tell us about 99 Cents Only Store shoppers?

BV:On Sundays, at the La Tijera store, African Americans dressed in their finest stroll the aisles, possibly just out of church. At the Wilshire/Fairfax store, I saw an older, well tended, lady loading her 99 Cents Only Store filled bags into a Rolls Royce. (Did she get her Rolls because of her thrift?) Three stylishly hip Japanese girls were on their phones and going through a cardboard bin of cantaloupes. (Were they tourists?) A young couple with Scandinavian accents pored over their shopping basket. (Were they staying at a nearby hostel?) An old man leaning heavily on his grocery cart slowly scanned rows of canned goods. (Retired and on a budget?) A 30-something well-groomed lady in a tailored suit waited in the checkout line. (Just off work from a Wilshire office tower?)

The most eclectic mix of bargain hunters is found at the Hollywood 99 Cents Only Store on La Brea and Willoughby. Rocker-tattooed types in impossibly tight black jeans. (Starving musicians?) A man wearing a yarmulke with a modestly dressed pregnant woman in a wig keeping a close eye on their two kids in the toy section. (Married a few years and now must budget for more on the way?) Young porcelain-faced actress types in loose sweats. (Broke, new to town, and between auditions?) Women with too broad shoulders and too thin hips and muscle men in tight tee shirts going through the fresh produce. (Fitness freaks?) Homeless types just wandering the aisles. An international assortment of Guatemalans, Mexicans, Armenians, Thais and more – everyone looking for a deal and trying to stretch their meager earnings.

Of course, there are some who know what kind of deals they can get, and go to supplement their regular chain grocery (Ralphs, Whole Foods, etc.) shopping. And some are just cheap, like me.

SI: What about people who don't shop at 99 Cent Only Stores?

BV:I think people who have been to other discount stores — the 98 Cent Store or The Dollar Store — have been turned off by the battered and dented canned goods, lack of selection, and unappetizing appearance. So they think all 99 Cents Only stores are the same – only soap, paper towels and cans of beans. I've talked to 99 Cents Only Store converts who are surprised by the selection of fresh produce. Others wouldn't be caught dead in a 99 Cents Only Store and look down their noses at me when I mention I shop there.

the 99 Cent Chef at the Donut Summit; Credit: Billy Vasquez

SI: Who is your blog intended for?

BV:I've been a struggling artist all my life. That colors everything I do, even food blogging. My frame of reference is this: Who are the students who don't have any money? Who are the struggling filmmakers? People on minimum wage? What would they eat, and how can I give them ideas? I came from a single parent-family and I know the struggling class out there. I'm never going to be too far from that. I want to show how anyone can make decent food. And most things are pretty healthy. I use a lot of fresh produce. Mostly, you work with what's in the neighborhood.

SI: What's the blog post you're most proud of?

BV:When gay marriage was legalized in 2008, there was a mass wedding in West Hollywood Park. My wife thought we should go and check it out. As a blogger, I thought, “how can I incorporate this into my blog?” I decided to make cupcakes and hand them out to people. The video starts with people in line waiting to get married. There was another cupcake purveyor there, so we did a throw-down for the comedic element. I got food, comedy, social issues, progressive politics, civil rights and real people into the video. It's pretty powerful.

SI: Can you point out some of your favorite recipes?

BV:I've done some film-themed recipes. Russ Meyer Lemon Chicken, Film Noir Ribeye steak, John Cassavetes red pepper, olive oil, garlic and pasta, and Ingmar Bergman Swedish meatballs.