Read Online Southern California Cooking from the Cottage by Jane Stern - Free Book Online Page B

the package instructions. Drain and toss with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil and the Thai base.
    To make the dressing, whisk the Italian dressing, peanut butter, Thai base, honey, oil, and cayenne. Add a little water at a time to get desired thickness. (We like it to be as thick as heavy cream, but you can make it as thick or as thin as you want.)
    For the salad, toss the carrots, zucchini, bell pepper, cilantro, and green onions in a bowl. Divide the salad greens among four individual salad bowls or plates. Sprinkle the veggie mixture over the greens. Placecup of the noodles onto each salad. Add ½ cup of the sliced grilled chicken. Pour the dressing over the salad.
    MAKES 4 SERVINGS

WINDANSEA
    T his is one of the best-known surfing beach on earth,” John Wolfe says as we stand over a palm shack on the sand at the foot of Nautilus Street just north of Big Rock and south of Simmon’s Reef. Known as Windansea, it has been a surfers’ Mecca since the 1940s. Its rickety beach hut, built by surfers returning from World War II and blown away by storms, but rebuilt, is a landmark (and a designated historical site). Peter L. Dixon in The Complete Book of Surfing (1965) noted that Windansea was a place watermen treasured for its big surf , meaning twelve-foot waves. “The change from riding small, shore-break surf to big surf is like stepping from a skateboard to a 500cc motorcycle,” Dixon wrote. “When a surfer conquers the big waves, it becomes “a day to remember for the rest of his life.”

    Underwater reefs and offshore canyons create the surf breaks, and they are deceptively flat-looking from the shore. But according to The Surfer’s Journal , “The peak is thick and can unload more water than most any other wave in Southern California.” Even swimming here can be tricky. An official description from the City of San Diego warns, “Much of the beach at Windansea experiences shore-break, a condition on steep beaches which results in hard breaking surf right at the shoreline. Swimmers should enter and exit the water carefully to prevent spinal injuries.”
    An epicenter of surfing life, Windansea was—and continues to be— home of the world-renowned Windansea Surf Club, a group of watermen who first got together in the early 1950s and became the pantheon of American wave-riders. Little John Richards, one of the earliest members, is quoted in La Jolla: A Celebration of Its Past as saying “Almost every other surfing club around the world has copied Windansea. The Windansea guys started it all.” He noted that an organized surfer club is a kind of oxymoron, since surfers tend to be free spirits and not joiners of anything. But everyone who surfed in mid-century Southern California wanted to be part of it. Among its founding members were Buzzy and Joey Cabel, who started the Chart House Restaurant. The Chart House is where John Wolfe was able to succeed in the food service business by night . . . and surf all day.
    It was a loose-knit group until 1963 when the Malibu Surf Club sent out an invitation to compete in their last surfers’ challenge. (Their water was about to become a yacht basin.) Competitors had to be members of an organized surf club. And so La Jolla beach regular Chuck Hasley recruited a team of Windansea’s top surfers to compete at Malibu, and they became an organized club. Their wild road trip up to Malibu that year has become an epic surfer tale of devil-may-care partying, described by Hasley as, “The most radical trip ever made with the most radical surfers ever born.” They won in Malibu, and for the next five years, Windansea dominated competition on the West Coast.
    One of the earliest members of the club, long before it was organized, was legendary wave-rider Hobie Alter. Of surf life in the early 1950s, Alter recalled, “The first thing you heard was Windansea in La Jolla.” He described it as “a hard break .