B-Day Waves. Plus A Vegan Lunch at Santa Monica's Erven.

Winter swells (and lots of winter rains -- a very good thing for California) have been keeping me out of the water the last couple of weeks. It's not just that heavy storms have a tendency to stir up a lot of junk, much of which is best avoided for a couple of days, but also the swells that accompany these storms are just too big for this Kook. Yes, still. I will remain, probably always, mellow day surfer, and I'm good with that. So what do you do when you can't get in the ocean? Well those same storms brought a lot of snow, so you head to the mountains, and you ski. I hit up the very old-school Mt. Baldy, which is barely an hour from LA, this past weekend.  Conditions were just awesome -- the best on Baldy in years.  Maybe the best I've experienced there ever.  The only drawback?  Huge crowds!  So lesson learned: hitting Baldy is only for sneaking off on a weekday after big snows. Otherwise there's just too many people.

But I keep my eye on the surf reports daily, eagerly searching for those conditions that are in my sweet spot and, lucky for me, some nice conditions popped up. On my birthday! It was one of those days, though, where I got to the beach, and things were a little different than the Surfline report. Yeah, it was pretty mellow but every once in a while, a bigger set would roll through. I paddled out anyway, sat out the bigger ones, and had some fun trying to go after the smaller ones.  After getting out of the water I was, of course, hungry. Since I knew the b-day dinner was going to be not exactly healthy (we were going for French bistro fare), something lighter was called for. I'd been reading a lot about the recently opened Erven (for chef Nick Erven) in Santa Monica. The restaurant is Vegan and I like to eat Vegan as often as possible, especially for breakfast and lunch, so that's where I landed, and I had the delicious sandwich you see here--

Tucked inside the excellent bun was shaved squash, Thai basil, golden raisins and some kind of creamy sauce, made with some kind of nuts certainly. Those blue corn tortilla chips came on the side and to drink I had a fresh juice made of carrots, ginger, turmeric, fennel, orange and apple. Can't get much healthier than that, huh? The juice was amazingly delicious too, though. Here's the thing about eating like this at lunchtime. You eat a lot, but you feel great after, not bloated or weighed down in any way. Also, it's good for the planet. I will return to Erven and try a bunch of other stuff because everything looked great.  

Here's more info. about Erven.  Go!

http://ervenrestaurant.com