The Brief

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article originally appeared in September, but we figured you may be searching for leftover recipes this time of year, so we're republishing it. Enjoy!

Tiffani Thiessen is no stranger to nostalgia. To many, like myself, who grew up watching her as Kelly Kapowski on Saved By The Bell and as Valerie Malone in Beverly Hills 90210 — two shows that dominated the teen television scene during the late '80s and early '90s — she was a symbol of the time's youth culture. But these days, Thiessen can be found making waves in the kitchen instead of scripted television.

For her second cookbook, Here We Go Again, Thiessen conjures up recipes made from what many of us already have in our refrigerators — leftovers, with a retro vibe to jog our collective memories of a simpler time.

Her recipes include a "Pizza For Breakfast Sandwich" made with leftover pizza, a fried egg, and prosciutto, and "Cornbread Skillet Sloppy Joes" which uses leftover tomato paste and shredded cheese — two things that I always seem to have in my fridge.

One specific recipe, her retro ambrosia salad made up of chunks of pineapple, cherries, clementine oranges, multicolored marshmallows, and whipped cream, is the updated version of what my aunt made for birthdays and potlucks growing up. Thiessen’s 2023 version (which currently has 74K likes on TikTok) uses fresh fruit and Greek yogurt instead of the marshmallow cream and canned fruit cocktail I ate as a child (and sometimes still crave.)

Growing up in Long Beach, her love of cooking took shape from watching the women in her family preparing meals.

“I would always watch my mother and grandmother and aunt, all the women in my family, cooking in the kitchen together,” she reminisces. “And I just wanted to be with them.”

“It was me as a little girl, wanting to hang out with the cool women in my family and doing what they were doing.”

Tiffani Thiessen from her cookbook "Here We Go Again."

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Rebecca Sanabria

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Her interest in food grew while traveling to promote her acting work, and she was regularly exposed to different cooking styles and cultures. Meanwhile, the Food Network and Cooking Channel constantly played in the background at home.

On a trip with her family one day to the Chelsea Market in New York, she noticed the Food Network offices were housed in the same building. She requested a meeting, which resulted in Dinner at Tiffani’s, which ran for three seasons on the Cooking Channel from 2015-2017, followed by her first cookbook, Pull Up a Chair: Recipes from My Family to Yours (2018).

For the love of leftovers

When she began thinking about her next book, the concept of leftovers was appealing due to how she was raised. It also presented a personal challenge because her husband, actor and artist Brady Smith, wasn't a big fan of next-day dishes.

“It was a funny book to do, to prove to him that leftovers can be cool and awesome,” Thiessen says.

As she explains, leftovers took center stage for her at the beginning of the pandemic, when a routine grocery store trip meant a potentially hazardous exposure to the COVID virus. As a result. she was forced to use what she already had in her home, trying to find ways to cook with those ingredients for as long as possible.

It was then a core memory unlocked for Thiessen. She recalled growing up with her family on a tight budget, her father working two jobs to support her and her two brothers. Her stay-at-home mom would get creative in the kitchen with whatever was on hand, looking for ways to reinvent food to save money.

The Pizza for Breakfast Sandwich.

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Rebecca Sanabria

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“Any sort of protein was usually made into some sort of awesome tacos or enchiladas, or even in [went into] our omelets the next day,” she says. Rice was another ingredient that would never go to waste, she says, her mother often using it to make rice pudding.

Another motivating factor was food waste. According to Feeding America, 119 billion pounds of food in the United States annually is wasted, translating to nearly 40% of America’s food supply.

It's also a significant contributing factor to climate change. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from food waste in the U.S. each year equals the annual emissions of 42 coal-fired power plants. For Thiessen, using leftovers was not only a personal cause but an existential one.

So, her idea was to write a cookbook of recipes to help home cooks use what they already have rather than throwing food in the trash.

Childhood memories

Upon hearing the subject matter of Thiessen’s book, I was immediately intrigued. As an avid home cook, I attempt at least three to four dinners weekly for myself and my family. It also brought back some memories from my childhood as well.

I remember being constantly amazed by my father, who cooked a lot of our meals, being able to whip up whatever we had on hand, giving it a cute name such as “tofu magnifico,” a stir-fry dish that he’d throw together using leftovers from the previous night’s Chinese take out and whatever produce was on hand. In many ways, even today, I still strive to knock out a dish, short-order-cook status, on the fly.

Thiessen’s recipes in Here We Go Again have clearly been created to appeal to elder millennials and Gen-Xers like myself. The pages take on a retro-thrift store chic in their look and feel, with heavily color-saturated pictures resembling Kodachrome film with images of the prepared dishes against vintage wallpaper.

Those retro vibes led Thiessen to reach out to bookseller Matt Miller. Miller owns Kitchen Lingo in Long Beach, near Thiessen’s childhood home. Miller specializes in vintage and antiquarian cookbooks and food writing.

“I think every book, especially a cookbook, has a story to tell. When you have a cookbook and cook from it, you rarely do it for yourself. Most people cook for other people. So you have this real connection to people cooking for families. Cooking for friends, cooking for parties.” says Miller.

Retro Ambrosia Salad.

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Rebecca Sanabria

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Thiessen contacted Miller after sliding into his DMs. When he saw he had Thiessen as a new follower, he automatically thought it was a fake account. But he sent her a message when he realized it was her, not a bot. Thiessen responded, and the two quickly bonded over cooking and cookbooks.

To Miller, the concept of leftovers is a highly accessible one. “I think it makes it easier for most people to approach. Everyone has a leftover pizza slice in their fridge at some time. Everybody's got something left over that needs to be reinvented,” Miller explains.

Leftovers’ legacy

Leftover cookbooks aren’t exactly something new. Miller has a book for sale in his shop published in the 1940s titled 500 Delicious Dishes From Leftovers, compiled by the Culinary Arts Institute. For context, the difference between leftovers from the 1940s and today has much to do with the size of your refrigerator.

“If you were fortunate enough to have a lot of food left over, refrigerators weren't as big. So you had to find something to do with it. Otherwise, your food was going to go bad. People didn’t waste as much then,” says Miller.

When asked what Thiessen hopes people will take away from her cookbook, she compares it to when her husband begins one of his murals. “I try to relate to when he looks at an empty canvas with a ton of color on the floor. And I was like, where do you start? This book helps you start with what you already have in your fridge in your pantry,” she says.

LACMA’s first Van Gogh isn’t a painting of blue flowers, golden wheat fields or aged faces. It’s of a parked stagecoach, and it’s considered a good example of what made the Dutch painter, and the Impressionist movement he was a part of, so revolutionary.

The painting is called “Tarascon Stagecoach.” It was painted in 1888 and was donated to LACMA earlier this year by the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation.

It’s LACMA’s first Van Gogh painting, and the encyclopedic museum will be showing it off starting Sunday in a show called “Collecting Impressionism at LACMA” that focuses on 100 works from LACMA’s collection. The works are arranged chronologically to show the evolving tastes that have shaped the museum's collection of Impressionist art.

The museum’s acquisition isn’t just a win for the museum. The museum-going public and the region’s teenage and college-age students also will benefit.

“I very much remember seeing Van Gogh in a rotunda space in the [Philadelphia Museum of Art] and finding it to be just so striking because of these luscious, bright colors,” said Summer Sloane-Britt, who saw her first Van Goh during a middle school visit to the museum.

Sloane-Britt now is a professor of art and art history at Occidental College.

“Visual analysis and seeing objects in person is always so core to historical learning and for studio artists as well,” Sloane-Britt said.

And seeing a Van Gogh in person, Sloane-Britt said, and saying you don’t like it is also OK because that signals the work has led you to identify and assert your own aesthetic tastes in art.

Van Gogh road trip in LA. Shotgun!

The LACMA exhibit presents a good opportunity to get on the road for a four-stop Van Gogh road trip without leaving L.A. County.

Van Gogh's "Irises"

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Courtesy Getty Museum

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You can start at LACMA and see “Tarascon Stagecoach,” benefiting from the context of seeing other impressionist works by Van Gogh’s contemporaries.

Hop over to the Hammer Museum in Westwood, where you’ll see “Hospital at Saint-Rémy,” one of three paintings by Van Gogh in the collection.

Then head west on Wilshire Boulevard to the Getty to see “Irises,” one of the paintings that’s made Van Gogh an art star.

"The Mulberry Tree," a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, on display at the Norton Simon Museum

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Courtesy Norton Simon Museum

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End your Van Gogh road trip by heading east to Pasadena to the Norton Simon Museum. The museum’s smaller, more intimate setting is a good place to see the museum’s six, yes six, Van Gogh paintings.

The exhibit also will feature the newly acquired work "The Artist’s Garden, Vétheuil" by Claude Monet.

The new year doesn’t just bring new gifts and new resolutions. It also brings new laws.

State and local lawmakers have a lot on tap for 2026 when it comes to housing laws that will affect Southern California renters and landlords.

From refrigerators to fire damage, from development streamlining to rent control caps, LAist has rounded up the legal changes coming next year that you need to know.

AB 628: No more ‘no fridge’ apartment listings

Starting Jan. 1, landlords must provide tenants with a working refrigerator and stove. Many landlords already offer these appliances, but the L.A. area stands out nationwide for having an unusually high proportion of fridge-less apartments.

Next year, L.A. newcomers will no longer be taking to social media to express incredulity at all the city’s bring-your-own-fridge apartments. If landlords fail to provide refrigerators or stoves in good working condition, apartments will be considered uninhabitable under the new law.

SB 610: Landlords must clean smoke damage

In the weeks and months after the January fires, many renters struggled to get their landlords to address toxic ash that blew into apartments and rental homes that remained standing. Some landlords said cleaning up the smoke damage was not their responsibility. Initial communication from local public officials was confusing on what tenants were supposed to do.

This new law, which partially was driven by LAist’s reporting, clarifies that in the wake of a natural disaster, “it shall be the duty of a landlord” to remove “hazards arising from the disaster, including, but not limited to, the presence of mold, smoke, smoke residue, smoke odor, ash, asbestos or water damage.”

SB 79: Upzoning LA neighborhoods near transit

L.A.’s City Council voted to oppose it. Mayor Karen Bass asked the governor to veto it. But California’s big new upzoning law passed anyway. Its changes are set to take effect July 1, 2026.

Under the law, new apartment buildings up to nine stories tall will be allowed next to rail stations, and buildings up to five stories tall will be allowed within a half-mile of rapid bus stops. This upzoning applies to neighborhoods within those transit zones, even if they’re currently zoned only for single-family homes.

Next comes the implementation. The law could give renters more options once new housing is constructed. But L.A. could choose to delay the law’s effects in some areas for years. Ahead of the law’s passage, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto sent legislators a letter opposing the bill, signaling what could turn into a legal showdown over the bill.

AB 246: Protecting Social Security recipients during government shutdowns

Tenants can face eviction three days after missing their rent. During this year’s federal government shutdown — the longest on record — that swift timeline was a cause for anxiety among tenants who count on federal benefits to cover their rent.

Though this year’s shutdown did not affect regular Social Security payments, this law will give Social Security recipients a defense in eviction court if they ever stop receiving benefits because of any future shutdowns. Under the law, renters will be required to repay their missed rent, or enter a repayment plan, within two weeks of their Social Security payments being restored.

Lower rent control caps in the city of LA

After years of debate, the L.A. City Council passed a new cap on annual rent hikes in the roughly three-quarters of city apartments covered by local rent control rules.

The City Council enacted a new 4% limit, replacing a 40-year-old formula that allowed increases as high as 10% in some units during periods of high inflation. Councilmembers also ended a 2% additional increase for landlords who cover tenants’ gas and electricity costs.

The city had a nearly four-year rent freeze in place during the COVID-19 pandemic that ended in February 2024. That means many L.A. tenants are scheduled to receive their next rent hike Feb. 1, 2026. They should be getting a 30-day notice soon. Each year’s limit is determined by recent inflation data. The current cap of 3% is set to last until June 30.