Do you have a favorite hamburger bun? When we make cheeseburgers at home the buns vary, and indeed, happening across a likely-looking specimen in my travels can provoke cheeseburgers where none was planned.

Tustin’s famous Cream Pan desultorily makes a fantastic hamburger bun, perfect for four ounces of meat. Dean Kim sells his OC Baking Company’s fabulous brioche buns, a familiar conveyance for high-end restaurant burgers, at the Saturday Old Towne Orange Farmers & Artisans Market. We’ll sometimes use the very good, made-in-Garden Grove Maisano’s buns carried at El Toro Gourmet Meat in Lake Forest, since we’re already there procuring the peerless, freshly ground 22 percent with which our burgers are ALWAYS made.

Often, though, I’ll bake buns, using a recipe that years ago gripped the baking foodosphere in a powerful mystique. It’s from a baker who called herself Moomie on the King Arthur Flour Baking Circle online community, though ...

Have you seen the expanded bulk department at the Tustin Whole Foods? It was already really good, and is, as I’ve said (perhaps multiple times) before, my very favorite part of the store. Now, it’s positively magnificent—if that word can be applied to things like dried beans and wheat bran, and I think it can. I know that new Whole Foods are to have bigger bulk departments, with an increased emphasis on home cooking, but it was a wonderful surprise to see evidence of this program in the established (can it be 5 years old already?) Tustin store. I couldn’t resist beautifully mottled scarlet runner beans, and, those aren’t just any lentils up there, but the elusive French green lentils. I foresee saucisson et lentilles in my cooking future.

From Orange Coast’s wine writer, Anne Valdespino, a dispatch about a don’t-miss:

Some of Paso Robles’ finest vintners are coming to town and they’re on board—literally—with our O.C. lifestyle. Yes, dozens of vintners want to impress by inviting locals to a walk-around tasting aboard the yacht Majestic called Grand Tasting Tour: Newport Beach, on Wednesday, Feb. 29.

Adelaida Cellars, J. Lohr, Justin, L’Aventure, Tablas Creek, Terry Hoage, and more of your Central Coast favorites will be pouring bold Paso wines from sassy to sophisticated. Catch up with the big boys, like Eberle, and find some new favorites. I had an eye-opening tasting last time I was up there at Victor Hugo Winery, they’ve got some delicious wines and some great stories to tell after decades in the area. Tickets ($60) will go quickly because as we seafaring folks know, there’s only so much room on a boat.

If you miss ...

Chef Cathy Pavlos of Irvine's Lucca Café has been busy—not only demo-ing for doctors (read about that, and get her quick-and-good pasta recipes here), but also rolling out a new menu of small-plate bar snacks, which I guess can be called snacks if your understanding of that word includes succulent cured and braised pork belly landed on a pillowy mound of corn kernel- and mascarpone-enriched polenta, or a they-ain’t-kidding “intense blue cheese tartlet” with sweet-sour agrodulce cipolline.

To go on: Salmon crudo with homemade potato chips, a dish so good that any thoughts of the fish tartare concept being sort of overexposed didn’t even burble up to consciousness, and a delicious bite of Pacific sand dab with “killer” tartar sauce and accompanied by fennel slaw that was like a miniature still-life of the kind of California coastal cuisine you find in San Francisco. Tri-tip, another California classic, appears in a ...