Day 23: Goodbye Cali

Well today is my last day in California for a while...I'm off to Louisiana in the morning! I thought this would be a great time to talk about any California dishes that are favorites or originate in the Orange State.

California Style Pizza-This is a style of single-serving pizza that combines New York and Italian thin crust with toppings from the California Cuisine cooking style. The distinguishing feature of California-style pizza is the use of nontraditional toppings that derive from cuisines other than the usual Italian-style tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, and especially incorporate fresh vegetables such as artichokes. For example, California-style pizza might include Thai pizza topped with bean sprouts and peanut sauce.

California Roll-This is a maki-zushi (roll), a kind of sushi roll, usually made inside-out, containing cucumber, crab meat or imitation crab stick, and avocado.

Cobb Salad-First made in 1937, a man named Bob Cobb combined a head of lettuce, an avocado, some romaine, watercress, tomatoes, some cold breast of chicken, a hard-boiled egg, chives, cheese and some old-fashioned French dressing and finally some chopped, crispy bacon.

Avocados-In 1871 the judge of Santa Barnara introduced avocados to the U.S. with trees from Mexico. In the early 1900s, growers were seeing the avocado's commercial potential and have grown them ever since.

Sourdough Bread-A white bread made with sour starter made from flour, water, and sugar. The use of a sour starter is a method of bread baking that goes back at least six thousand years, for yeast had to be sustained from bread batch to bread batch.

Ciopinno-A fish stew cooked with tomatoes, wine, and spices, and associated at least since the 1930s with San Francisco. The word is Italian, from a Genoese dialect, ciuppin, for a fish stew, and the dish seems to have originated with the Italian immigrants of San Francisco, who often used the crabmeat available in the city's markets.

My favorite of these foods would have to be the California Roll which is available everywhere in the country so I won't have to go without that for a while.