Holy cannoli, the Irvine Global Village festival is upon us again. TOMORROW. I completely forgot until I looked at my calendar.

It’s a day when all of Irvine’s diverse ethnic communities share their proud food traditions with their neighbors in a spirit of peace, generosity, and humanity. Then afterward, we leave the parking lot and break out the ethnic slurs about Asian / Mexican / Persian / whatever drivers.

Fellow blogger Chubbypanda wrote up this report on last year’s event. Did I? Nooo. But I did go, and pass on these tidbits o’ wisdom. Some of the restaurants ran out of food, so go early. Parking at Bill Barber Park is extremely limited, so plan on using one of the remote lots and using the free shuttle to get to the festival.

Bill Barber Park
4 Civic Center Plaza
Irvine, CA 92606
Hours: 10am - 5pm

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Southern California’s blessed with locally grown fruit throughout the year. Citrus is king during these cooler months. Even a mid-sized farmers market like the one at UC Irvine boasts many vendors selling different varieties of lemons (sweet Persian; extremely tart Lisbon; mild aromatic Meyers), oranges (pink and juicy Cara Cara; tart, sanguine blood oranges, several kinds of mandarins; the ever popular navel), and grapefruit scions.

Last weekend, I spied Cal Poly Pomona’s ag school selling a hybrid called a frua, an heirloom love child of a grapefruit and a mandarin orange. It’s the size and shape of the former, its skin color somewhere between the two. Its flesh tempers the tartness of a grapfruit with the juicy, not oversweet flavor of a mandarin.

Most interestingly, the frua’s thin skin is tender and edible, with a mild and pleasant bitterness that might make a terrific marmalade. I bought four of these mongrel fruit with that intent. If you happen to have Grandma Tildy’s killer marmalade recipe in your clutches, help a brother out and post it, willya?

The UC Irvine farmer’s market is held every Saturday morning in the shopping center parking lot at Campus and Bridge. While there’s a wide variety of vegetables and fruit for sale, right now, citrus rules the roost for flavor, variety, and low prices.

I’m not one to post press releasy information, but these free classes caught my eye on the King Arthur Flour website. Starting this week in Southern California and moving eastward through Colorado, Iowa, and Nebraska, the Vermont based baking gurus are taking their bread seminars on the road. I’ve not taken these demonstration classes, so this is not an endorsement, more like a neighborly heads-up on a reputable outfit. And it’s free. I like free.

King Arthur runs the oldest continuously operating mill in the United States, and is the largest of the artisanal milling companies. They make flours for both retail bakers and the commercial trade, such as 50 pound sacks of Sir Lancelot high gluten flour I prefer to bake bagels with. They also sell all manner of baker’s needs through their catalog, publish highly regarded baking books, and offer great information on their website.

Click on the first link above for full details:

Pasadena: January 31, 2007

Ventura: February 1. 2007

Ontario: February 2, 2007

Irvine: February 3, 2007

Mexican restaurants in Mexico cover the gamut from prehistoric peasant cooking to world class sophistication. Yet despite the vast number of Mexican restaurants in Orange County, they fall into three basic camps: great grubbing at the low end of the scale; old school Gringo Mex smothered in greasy yellow cheese and red sauce; and Nuevo Gringo Mex, the sort of overpriced fare decorated with ancho or cilantro colored crema fresca spooged from a squirt bottle. Very few wade deeper beyond those familiar and overcrowded waters.

Orange County Mexican food lovers deserve to fill some of the missing gaps in that spectrum, and the quietly lauded Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen leads the counterstrike with traditional, yet gussied up Mexican food.

How many places serve the Yucatecan bar snack panuchos, and a delicious version at that? This one’s served with a pickled red onion relish supposedly spiked with habanero peppers that lacked any of that chile’s distinctive flavor or heat. Those cebollas moradas added complexity to the terrific dish, but it forebode a tendency toward too much sweet and not enough heat in the three other antojitos I sampled on this first visit. If there’s a gabacho compromise in the very likable food, this might be it.

Now let me puff up the churro maker’s head a little. Its crisply fried, cinnamon sugared crust yields to an ever-so-slighly loose, custardy center. They’re served with a not-too-sweet, dark chocolate sauce and a crackalicious, sweet-bitter burnt caramel sauce. The menu should simply say: “Sugar coated, deep fried, hot sex dunked in liquid crack.” If you see some destitute addict hanging out at the back door in dessert withdrawls, that would be me.

Orange County craves sophisticated Mexican food without dumbed down flavor profiles, and the CIA trained Gabbi Parker might be our best hope yet. But please, Chef Gabbi, bring on the heat. Bring on the funk!

Gabbi’s Mexican Kitchen
141 S. Glassell
Orange, CA
714-633-3038

Gabbi’s occupies an unmarked storefront next an Army Navy store on the east side of Glassell.