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.

That ocean breeze is just not cutting it in schools in Torrance and Long Beach as Southern California reels from a heat wave.

Parents have taken to social media, created petitions and are proposing a bond measure in order to address the sweltering classrooms as temperatures hit triple digits in some areas.

Only 25% of Torrance Unified classrooms have air conditioning, according to a district spokesperson. And while 90% of Long Beach Unified schools have air conditioning, the schools without air conditioning have to bear this heat spell until the end of 2027 when new air conditioning will be in all classrooms.

What are schools doing to beat the heat?

In Long Beach, the district says there are portable fans in classrooms without AC and the district has installed heat-blocking window covers.

"The things that we do immediately and have been doing for several years, hydration stations,” Keith Butler, the deputy superintendent at TUSD, told the school board early this week. “So our nutrition services freezes blocks of ice, puts them into containers with water, and students are — and staff are able to rotate through and at least get ice water.”

There is also a classroom rotation system so everyone gets a turn in cooling zones, he said.

Can schools close on extreme heat days?

Eric Mitchell, a spokesperson for LBUSD, told LAist, “The District will not close schools because of extreme weather unless the City of Long Beach Public Health Department or a state-authorized emergency response agency directs it.”

Baillie echoed his words adding that a state-declared emergency allows schools to close temporarily without needing to make up teaching time. School funding is dependent on attendance and instructional time.

If a local emergency is declared, school districts, she said, must consult with labor unions to adjust the school schedule to either extend the school year or move to a student-free professional development day.

“Our district is actively discussing creating union-approved ‘weather days’ that would provide a mechanism to adjust the schedule,” Baillie said. “Thresholds would be part of that discussion and might focus on when national weather alerts elevate a heat advisory to an extreme heat event, as they did this week.”

So how can Torrance get ACs in the classroom?

School districts like Torrance pay for facility upgrades like new ACs through district issued bond measures. A school district takes a loan and the people in that city pay back that loan through an increase in their property taxes. That is because there is no specific state allocation of funding for major upgrades or construction. Most of the money schools get from the state is spent on instruction and other student services. There have been some occasional grant programs, like CalShape, but no ongoing source of funding.

This week, a petition to get TUSD to place a bond measure on the ballot to fund ACs has already garnered over 1500 signatures.

But, Baillie said, “Third-party polling completed earlier this year showed a willingness to vote for additional future bonds; however, when specifically asked about the costs of specific bonds to fund the $520 million needed to upgrade the electrical systems and install AC at all 34 campuses, polling showed there would not be enough support (bonds require 55% +1 of voters in an election) to pass a bond for AC.”

And so the bond measure was not placed on the upcoming ballot.

Butler, the deputy superintendent, explained during this week’s school board meeting that parents cannot simply donate an AC unit.

“ One [reason] is it's not super effective to have a typical window unit from a home that would be trying to cool a 960 sq. ft. classroom with 27 students and a teacher, maybe an instructional aide,” he said. “But the bigger issue is the ones that are large enough to really do that, the room has to have a large electrical load, and our electrical system within our buildings where most of them were built in the 1960s, it's just not meant to handle what it does.”

LAist reporter Mariana Dale contributed to this article. 

The Orange County District Attorney’s Office is hosting a buyback event Sunday where people can exchange their e-bikes and e-motorcycles for up to $1,000 in gift cards. The goal is to reduce the number of illegal bikes on the road, and give parents an incentive to get dangerous vehicles out of kids’ hands.

“These vehicles are not child’s play, and the consequences are incredibly dangerous and increasingly deadly,” DA Todd Spitzer said in a news release announcing the event.

Communities in Orange County have been grappling with a surge in e-bikes and e-motos on the road, including among young kids, and an accompanying increase in serious crashes.

“Our area has pretty much the highest concentration of e-bike injuries and e-bike accidents in the country,” said Dr. Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.

Takeuchi said  just over 70% of the children treated at the hospital for e-bike injuries had some level of head injury, “from a simple concussion to devastating brain damage, brain bleed and skull fracture."

A lot of those injuries are among teenagers not wearing helmets, he said. Plus, many e-bikes on the market are too heavy and fast for children to control, Takeuchi said.

Besides safety concerns, tensions have flared with other drivers, pedestrians, and neighbors in areas with heavy concentrations of e-bikes.

Newport-Mesa Unified School District became one of the first districts in the country this year to restrict e-bikes to high school campuses only. District leaders say the policy is working to disincentivize young students from riding e-bikes to school. But at one middle school, students with e-bikes have opted to ride them anyway, parking in the surrounding neighborhood and raising the ire of homeowners.

The DA’s approach

The DA’s office has started to target parents who allow their children to ride e-bikes and e-motorcycles that have been illegally modified for high speeds, sometimes with deadly consequences. In April, the district attorney filed child endangerment charges against a mother from Aliso Viejo after her 14-year-old son struck and killed an 81-year-old man while doing wheelies in the street in Lake Forest. The boy was riding an e-motorcycle souped up to reach 60 mph.

Details of the buyback program

The e-bike and e-motorcycle buyback program is part of the DA’s plan to address safety concerns with e-bikes. Local police departments, hospitals and the California Office of Traffic Safety will also be onsite with information booths.

People can bring in functioning or non-functioning e-bikes, e-motorcycles, e-scooters and pocket bikes and exchange them for gift cards worth up to $1,000 — while supplies last.

The event takes place from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, Sept. 13, at Angel Stadium in Anaheim.

An appeals court issued a ruling Friday that strikes down a federal government effort to block a lower court’s order requiring the construction of 2,550 new housing units on the Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.

The long-running case, brought forward by disabled veterans struggling with homelessness in the L.A. area, has centered on the use of the sprawling 400-acre VA campus.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter had previously scrutinized leases for the private Brentwood School’s athletic facilities, a parking lot company, an oil drilling enterprise and UCLA’s baseball stadium.

Ruling that the campus was meant to aid veterans, Carter ordered the VA to not renew the leases and quickly build 750 units of temporary housing and 1,800 units of permanent housing.

But Carter’s September 2024 order has been on hold ever since the defendants asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to review his decision.

Case returns to lower court

On Friday, more than two-thirds of the court’s 29 judges ruled against the VA’s petition for a rehearing.

“It's a historic day for veterans,” said Mark Rosenbaum, an attorney with Public Counsel representing the plaintiffs.

“The government has been fighting their veterans, who went to fight on behalf of the nation,” he added. “They've been fighting them like they are the enemy. They went to the district court to fight. They lost.”

Rosenbaum said he’s pleased to see the case return to Carter’s courtroom after a long appeals process. Carter, himself a Marine Corps veteran who served in the Vietnam War, took an active role in pushing the VA to address a homelessness crisis that has thousands of former service members experiencing homelessness on any given night in L.A. County.

Could the VA pursue further appeals? 

Carter has also ordered the VA to stop using veterans' disability payment benefits as a reason to make them ineligible for supportive housing programs due to income restrictions.

But Rob Reynolds, an Iraq War veteran who advocates for L.A.’s veteran community, said the federal government’s attempts to win an appeal could continue.

“The government can still appeal this to the U.S. Supreme Court,” Reynolds said.

When veterans involved in the case first heard today’s news on the 9th Circuit ruling, he said they immediately asked about the potential for further appeals.

“All of us are really hoping that the government stops this fight, and that we can get housing built for our veterans and end this madness once and for all,” Reynolds said.

A spokesperson for the VA declined to comment on the ruling, saying the department does not discuss pending litigation.

Jenny Yang, a comedian from L.A., has been traveling across the country turning immigrant grocery stores into comedy hubs. Now she’s back in L.A. getting ready to start a mini-residency in Highland Park, tape her first one-hour special and share moments from the tour.

Yang kicked off her Good Egg Immigrant Grocery Store Standup Comedy Tour in June in L.A., then took it to 15 cities across the country. She told LAist the decision came as a way to cope with the grief from her dad’s death, 10 failed in vitro fertilization treatments between 2020 and 2025 and seeing the news of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids spread across the country.

She said the idea to tour grocery stores was a way to reclaim those spaces, after immigration enforcement left many afraid to go out and do simple tasks like buying groceries.

“If we cannot laugh in front of a wall of instant ramen around our bok choy," Yang said, "then what is the American dream for?"

Her routine wove in stories about her fertility struggles and the challenges of having to be a “good egg” growing up as the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan. Her hope for the tour was to connect with people, to make jokes and help people feel lighter after.

The tour proceeds went to local nonprofits serving immigrant communities, and Yang said those organizations helped recruit the grocery stores. She said some stores said no at first — they felt overwhelmed by ICE activity in their city, had lost staff or worried about drawing attention.

“That's part of the story of the tour is it's one thing to want to imagine this beautiful world where you can tell jokes inside of immigrant grocery stores," Yang said. "It's another thing to know what those obstacles are, and I think that's still very telling for where we are as a country.”

One moment stood out to Yang: performing at Shuang Hur Supermarket in Minneapolis. It’s near the memorial for Alex Pretti, the nurse that a U.S. Border Patrol agent shot and killed in January as federal agents carried out immigration enforcement in the city.

“I was able to talk to Henry, the owner who’s a Chinese American uncle. [He] was so proud of being able to help his regular patrons, who for the most part even though it was an Asian centered grocery store, were majority Latino,” Yang said. “I was able to bear witness to their resilience as a community, what they did to take care of each other.”

Now she’s back in L.A. and is doing a mini-residency at the Outside In Theater at 5317 York Blvd. in Highland Park. Her first show is 6 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 12, followed by shows on Sept. 19 and 26 at the same time. Tickets are pay-what-you-can, and you can find them at Outside In's website.

In February 2027, Yang will be taping her first one-hour special at Rancho Meat Market #1 in Lincoln Heights. She describes it as a love letter to Los Angeles that’s endured so much, from the ICE raids to the January fires.

You can follow Jenny Yang’s work here.