There's nothing better than celebrating with friends, is there? My favorite part about visiting LA is seeing my old pals, just surrounding myself with a big group of them and basking in their familiar and fabulous auras. I also love to cook for my friends so that's what I did yesterday. Made enchiladas, a dish my mother often served at large dinner parties. Although I love them with red chile sauce, I decided to make the ones with green tomatillo sauce. You can see the recipe here. I bought out all the tomatillos from the Whole Foods on Fairfax.

I served the enchiladas with canned refried beans that I doctored up with crumbly white Mexican cotija cheese and fresh jalapeños, and a butter lettuce salad with sliced oranges and avocados. It was a rich dinner, so with the cocktail-hour margaritas we just munched on radishes dipped into a blend of salt, sugar, cumin and chile powder. Simple but addictive. For dessert, Miranda brought an amazing coconut cake with a ribbon of passion fruit puree running through it. So divine. We ate that with a big bowl of fresh pineapple dressed with grated ginger and lime juice. It was a fun party.Today we went to the farmer's market in Santa Monica. I LOVE it there. We went late and it was nowhere near as bountiful as it would have been in, say, May. But still, there were beautiful dates, tons of citrus (mandarins, satsumas, pomelos) and the guy with the incredible dried fruits: whole persimmons (both hachiya and fuyu), tart cherries with no sugar that taste of cinnamon and sunshine, luscious prunes. The highlight was unbelievably fresh oysters—like the sea turned to flesh, in the words of Pat Conroy. We sucked down half a dozen (I splashed a few with Tabasco), standing there in the California sunshine, the ocean breezes ruffling our hair. Ahhh...