Molly Baz ended up in Los Angeles by chance. In March 2020, he was on vacation in Los Angeles with his family when government officials issued a stay-at-home order due to COVID. She didn't feel comfortable returning to her crowded New York apartment building.
In Sunday Funday, the people of Los Angeles tell us step by step their ideal Sunday in the city. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.
“So I ended up extending my stay here and we never came home,” says Baz, recipe developer, food personality and author of the cookbooks “Cook This Book” and, most recently, “More Is More.”
Baz and her husband, Ben Willett, creative director and spatial designer, along with their 6-month-old son Gio and dachshund Tuna, have been living in their Altadena home ever since. His property is adorned with nearly 40 palm trees, a major selling point for Baz. When asked what he likes most about living in Los Angeles, he says, “This is a fucking cliché, but I love palm trees so much. Palm trees have been a symbol of vacations for me forever, so now I think I can live in a place that feels like a vacation. Even though I'm in a city, every time I see a palm tree, I think, 'We're relaxing.' ”
Her latest project, a mayonnaise brand called Ayoh (pronounced “A-yo”), was partially inspired by her move to Los Angeles. During the pandemic, he hosted a podcast called “The Sandwich Universe” and made tons of sandwiches. He often mixed his mayonnaise with Marconi giardiniera hot sauce to make his own sauce, which sparked the lightbulb moment.
“I thought, this is exactly what sandwiches need, and then that opened my mind to all the other flavor profiles I could introduce into mayonnaise to make delicious, multi-textured, really interesting sando sauces as I'm calling them. ” says Baz.
Just days before Ayoh's release, we caught up with Baz to find out how he'd spend his ideal Sunday in Los Angeles. The menu includes hiking in Altadena, eating a sandwich at Bub and Grandma's, and buying fresh fish at a Japanese market in San Gabriel for homemade sushi.
8:30 am: Snuggle in bed
In my ideal world, my baby and I sleep until 8:30 am, which is sleeping in for us. The baby and I will hold him and I will nurse him in bed. Then I would ask my husband to go to the kitchen and make me my first coffee, a cappuccino with pistachio milk, which I would take to bed. We were in bed with the baby and the dachshund, Tuna, for 45 minutes to an hour before we had to go out and face the rest of the world.
9:30 am: Walk or walk around the neighborhood
I don't really eat breakfast, so the next thing we would do is go for a walk around the neighborhood. There are a lot of walks that we do sometimes, but we always try to do morning walks on the weekends and sometimes during weekdays too, just to get the sun in our eyes. I'm going to Eaton Canyon a lot. Cobb Estate It's very pretty too. We'll do one of those hikes if we're feeling really ambitious.
10:45 am: Breakfast time
He would probably be hungry by now, so we would go to Bub and grandmawhich is where I had my launch party a couple of weeks ago. I'm a sandwich fanatic and they pretty much only sell sandwiches. Plus, I love the vibes of big, cozy booths. I love being in a booth and sitting in a restaurant for a long period of time. You will usually find stalls in late night restaurants like houstonwhich is another place I spend a lot of my life, but Bub's features a morning stand option, so I really like that.
We would order sandwiches for breakfast. They have really delicious scrambled eggs, onions and cheese on a homemade brioche bun called Onion Breakfast. It's like an overly simple breakfast sandwich, but it's so good. The bread is so soft and the eggs are so smooth.
1:00 p.m.: caffeine stimulant
After our long, drawn out Bub moment, we drove to kumquat orangewhich is my favorite coffee shop and is close to Bub. I would have my second coffee of the day, which would be their Cloudy with a Chance of Peanuts drink. It has this delicious salty peanut milk and is both a hot and cold drink. It's like cold milk with a hot shot of espresso, so when you drink it you should experience hot and cold at the same time. It's very crazy and delicious.
2 p.m.: Play cribbage in the park or go to Huntington Gardens
The next thing I would do is go to lace park play cribbage, which is a pegboard card game that my husband and some of my friends play. We would sit in the park and play cribbage for a couple of hours or do crossword puzzles. That's another hobby that I love. Or we would go to Huntington Gardens. I went there the day after the election when I was feeling suffocated by politics, news, Doom Scrolling, social media and everything. I left my phone in the car and felt like I was breathing different air than I did at home or anywhere else. There are so many plants in Huntington Gardens that the air feels and smells different. It feels fresh and alive. It's a truly amazing place to restore balance.
4pm: Collect fresh fish for sushi.
We usually try not to go out to dinner on Sundays, so what I would do from there is drive to a place called Yama Sushi in San Gabriel. It's a small Japanese fish market and they have Japanese groceries and a fish counter with very, very high quality sushi, brought in from Tokyo. They will prepare the fish however you want and then you can take it home to make sushi. So my ideal Sunday night dinner would be a sushi night at home with homemade sushi. We usually buy their salmon and save the salmon skin so we can crisp it up and make salmon skin rolls, which are very good.
4:45 pm: Take a nap before dinner.
We would return home with our sushi and then take a nap for about an hour. Naps are a big part of Sundays. We are big sleepers. Then we would start making sushi and sit on the floor of the living room. We eat most of our meals on the floor. I just like to be low to the ground and comfortable on our coffee table. We like to play music and light candles while we eat. We could have a glass of wine. Just very welcoming and calm with us just chatting. I feel like dinner time is a really important time for connectivity with me and my husband because we work all day during the week, so dinner time is kind of sacred.
7 pm: Relax with an ice cream sandwich and TV.
Then, we would bathe the baby and put him to bed around 7:30 pm. Then my husband and I would eat an Oreo ice cream sandwich and watch something on TV before going to bed. Right now we are watching “Bad Sisters.” And then turning off the lights, for me, at 9:15 pm would be ideal to be able to arrive about 10 hours before the next day.
