Bread

Guests at the Costa Mesa Senior Center can thank Bill Mills and his team for the bread and baked goods that he stacks on the tables that line the center's bingo room. The 84-year-old Costa Mesa resident picks up donated loaves of bread, cakes and pastries from local shops and supermarkets. Mills has been a volunteer at the center for the past 12 years. For the first eight years, he worked solo. Since then, he has recruited a team that helps make the rounds.

Newport fourth-graders go native in food-based project to study colonial life on California's early 19th century missions.For her class project on life in the California missions, Melia Spooner-Heath decided to cook an authentic mission meal, circa 1800. And that meant forsaking Betty Crocker. Nine-year-old Melia, a fourth-grader at Newport Elementary School, baked corn bread and served it to her class last week. She and her older brother had ventured to the San Bernardino Mountains to pick acorns, then cracked them with bricks, leached the tannin from them and ground them into dust with a Native American pounding stone.

COSTA MESA — Adriana Guaradado lost count of how many loaves of Rosca de Reyes bread her bakery made Saturday. Suffice to say that her kitchen contained many cases of dough, many bowls of fruit and many tiny statues of the baby Jesus. La Espiga de Oro, a Westside bakery at 805 W. 19th St., bakes dozens of loaves — at least — of Rosca de Reyes bread every Jan. 5 in preparation for the Twelfth Night holiday the following day. During the Catholic holiday, which celebrates the arrival of the Magi, families in Mexico and other countries serve circular loaves of bread with cinnamon, figs, cherries and other toppings.

Marcell the Monkey, or Katie, as she goes by off screen, was the highlight of the evening at Diedrich Coffee in Newport Beach Thursday night for the STAR 98.7 FM "Friends" finale party. Fans of the show lined up to take pictures of, and with, the famous monkey who plays the Anaheim Angels' Rally Monkey. At around 8 p.m., Katie was brought out for the public to see. To help keep her calm, she was given some pizza bread to eat and that's when the opportunity for a picture came.

Surfas has come to Orange County, and it is a paradise for gastronomes and cooks of every stripe. It's also a great place to pick up a gift for your foodie friends. Located at the OC Mart Mix, its official title is Surfas Culinary District. It is a restaurant supply dealer but is open to the public, and what a plethora of fabulous gourmet treasures are to be found there! You can get an entire iberico ham or a few slices of pancetta. You can buy a 50-quart stockpot or a larding needle, plus everything in between.

"I would kind of like to do something like this to test how good certain foods are." ALEXA LOPEZ, 13 Costa Mesa "I would like to test different kinds of breads. ... There's a lot of different types of bread." KATHERINE SCHWINGEL, 13 Mission Viejo "I'd try to do something that would determine what kinds of reactions different chemicals will make ... which ones will blow up." COREY WILLIAMS, 14 Santa Ana "I'd use all the elements on the periodic table and [do experiments]

Rachel Klemek is coming to Costa Mesa to make bread. Lots of it. The Irvine resident's Blackmarket Bakery is expanding her business to a second location at the Camp. Unlike the original Blackmarket - "hidden away" for nearly eight years on Sky Park Circle in Irvine, near John Wayne Airport - this one off Bristol Street is going to have a rotating rack bread oven. With it, Klemek and her team plan to be going "heavy duty" on rolls and buns as well as selling Kéan coffee, items from the Marché Noir line, Blackmarket favorites and some new desserts.

Last week, a Roman Catholic bishop in New Jersey declined to reverse a decision, barring a 9-year-old girl from consuming a rice wafer as part of communion. Haley Pelly-Waldman has celiac-sprue disease, a genetic condition that prevents her from eating gluten -- a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, but not in rice. Catholic teaching is that priests can turn bread and wine into Jesus' body and blood, and that the bread Jesus consecrated was unleavened wheat.

Editor's note: Starting Saturday, the Daily Pilot will regularly publish The God Squad column by Rabbi Marc Gellman, who offers practical answers to questions about religion, faith and spirituality. "In Theory" will continue to be published on occasional Saturdays. Be sure to catch the Pilot's new "On Faith" column, which appears on the Sunday Forum page. Q: I'm a Jewish woman and wonder if you can suggest something meaningful I can do when sitting next to a Christian silently saying grace before a meal.

Greer Wylder When Corona del Mar's Caffe Panini opened in 1995, it instantly became an "in-spot" for the breakfast and lunch crowd. A few years later, it was sold to local restaurateur Moe Ghazi. He then redesigned the kitchen and spiced up the menu with satisfying Mediterranean and Italian entrees. It resembles an upscale European coffee shop. Ghazi's involved with a corporation that successfully runs "in-restaurants" with diverse cuisines. On South Coast Highway in Laguna, there's Mosun Sushi/Sake Bar and Club M, a hip, multilevel sushi bar/night club with live music and dancing.

Surfas has come to Orange County, and it is a paradise for gastronomes and cooks of every stripe. It's also a great place to pick up a gift for your foodie friends. Located at the OC Mart Mix, its official title is Surfas Culinary District. It is a restaurant supply dealer but is open to the public, and what a plethora of fabulous gourmet treasures are to be found there! You can get an entire iberico ham or a few slices of pancetta. You can buy a 50-quart stockpot or a larding needle, plus everything in between.

Rachel Klemek is coming to Costa Mesa to make bread. Lots of it. The Irvine resident's Blackmarket Bakery is expanding her business to a second location at the Camp. Unlike the original Blackmarket - "hidden away" for nearly eight years on Sky Park Circle in Irvine, near John Wayne Airport - this one off Bristol Street is going to have a rotating rack bread oven. With it, Klemek and her team plan to be going "heavy duty" on rolls and buns as well as selling Kéan coffee, items from the Marché Noir line, Blackmarket favorites and some new desserts.

COSTA MESA — Their presence creates a scene from a wildlife painting. They wobble and wiggle, following one another en masse. But the ducks, geese and other water fowl at TeWinkle Park are polluting and damaging the park, requiring thousands of dollars in cleanup and repair costs. In response, the City Council voted last month to make it illegal to feed ducks, fish and other wildlife in or around the lake at TeWinkle. The ordinance is scheduled to come back to the City Council Tuesday for a second and final vote before adoption.

Editor's note: Starting Saturday, the Daily Pilot will regularly publish The God Squad column by Rabbi Marc Gellman, who offers practical answers to questions about religion, faith and spirituality. "In Theory" will continue to be published on occasional Saturdays. Be sure to catch the Pilot's new "On Faith" column, which appears on the Sunday Forum page. Q: I'm a Jewish woman and wonder if you can suggest something meaningful I can do when sitting next to a Christian silently saying grace before a meal.

Handsome and refined but not stuffy, Pinot Provence is the South Coast outpost of Joachim Splichal’s Patina Group, along with Leatherby’s Café Rouge. This Los Angeles chef is slowly building an empire of attractive restaurants with consistently good food. Authentic Provençal French food is the star here, with classics like escargots, soupe a l’oignon, moules frites and magret de canard. The high-ceiling dining room looks like the great hall of a chateau in Avignon.

One of my first stops when I am in San Francisco is to head to Fisherman’s Wharf and grab a sourdough bread bowl full of steaming clam chowder and go sit by the edge of the dock and watch the boats with Alcatraz in the distance. The sourdough and the chowder are a perfect mix, and looking out onto the water is the ideal way to begin a trip to one of my favorite cities. Boudin has been making a majority of those sourdough loaves since 1849 and I can still remember my mother instructing my father to bring home as many as he could carry whenever he would go on business trips.

COSTA MESA — Adriana Guaradado lost count of how many loaves of Rosca de Reyes bread her bakery made Saturday. Suffice to say that her kitchen contained many cases of dough, many bowls of fruit and many tiny statues of the baby Jesus. La Espiga de Oro, a Westside bakery at 805 W. 19th St., bakes dozens of loaves — at least — of Rosca de Reyes bread every Jan. 5 in preparation for the Twelfth Night holiday the following day. During the Catholic holiday, which celebrates the arrival of the Magi, families in Mexico and other countries serve circular loaves of bread with cinnamon, figs, cherries and other toppings.

Sage Hill School has played some of its best football of the season in its first two league games. The Lightning want to keep that trend going even as they step outside the Academy League realm for a week, playing host to Animo High tonight at 7 in a nonleague contest. Sage Hill Coach Tom Monarch said the game is a good chance for the Lightning (4-3, 2-0 in league), ranked No. 8 in the CIF Southern Section Northeast Division, to practice fundamentals. "My primary concern is just fundamentals and execution," Monarch said.

We agree with Jeff Parker of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce. The Saturday night of this year's Taste of Newport ? Sept. 16, to be precise ? is "just going to be the place to be in Newport Beach." The chamber last week announced the line-up for the main performers at the Taste, which runs Sept. 15 to 17 in Newport Center, and the Go-Go's ? the Los Angeles all-girl band that is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its first album ? play Saturday night. Friday night's headliner is alternative rock band Smash Mouth, and on Sunday ?

Newport fourth-graders go native in food-based project to study colonial life on California's early 19th century missions.For her class project on life in the California missions, Melia Spooner-Heath decided to cook an authentic mission meal, circa 1800. And that meant forsaking Betty Crocker. Nine-year-old Melia, a fourth-grader at Newport Elementary School, baked corn bread and served it to her class last week. She and her older brother had ventured to the San Bernardino Mountains to pick acorns, then cracked them with bricks, leached the tannin from them and ground them into dust with a Native American pounding stone.