Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
hopes you give his ponche recipe a try this holiday season.
Published December 19, 2025 5:00 AM
Ingredients for ponche, the Latin American holiday drink, include apples, tamarind, guava, prunes and cloves.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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LAist
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Topline:
Drinking ponche, a warm simmered fruit punch popular in Mexico reminds me of the old country. Making it in L.A. today, affirms where I am now. Keep reading, for a look back at holiday memories and stay for my ponche recipe.
Why it matters: Beloved across Mexico, Central America and in the U.S., holiday fruit drink has traveled through time and across the world, melding Europe, Middle East and Asian flavors.
Why now: The nine days before Christmas through January 6 are peak ponche-making days. Finding good quality ingredients in the U.S. can be a challenge.
The backstory: Ponche’s origins are embedded in the name, which is said to originate from the word in India for five. That’s the number of ingredients in a fruit and spice drink brought to Europe, then to what is now Mexico — alcohol, lemon, sugar, water and spices.
Last Sunday, I took out my big 16 quart-pot to make a batch of ponche for my family, friends, and a few LAist colleagues. It’s something I’ve made regularly over the years — a warm fruit punch simmered for five hours that’s popular from Central America to the U.S. The nine days before Christmas, through Jan. 6 are traditionally peak ponche-making days.
Fruit-filled ponche is simmered for about five hours.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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LAist
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My recipe, one of many variations, includes guayabas (guavas), apples, tamarind, cinnamon sticks, raw sugar cane, piloncillo (unrefined sugar), prunes, tejocotes (Hawthorn apples), raisins, and cloves.
Smelling the result of the long simmering of these ingredients makes me play a game: What fruit aromas do I recognize, and which ones are blends of multiple ingredients?
(You can find the full recipe at the end of the article. Feel free to modify as you please).
My strongest ponche memories are from my teens and 20s, going to my aunt’s house in Tijuana during the Christmas season and on trips to Mexico in December. Many of those relatives have since died or have moved far away.
LAist correspondent Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, as a young boy in Mexico during the holidays.
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Courtesy Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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When I moved to L.A. County, at 31, leaving behind my immediate family in San Diego, I reached out to my Mexican relatives to get their ponche recipes. I wanted to recover those supportive feelings of family conversations, relatives who'd known me since I was a kid, and talks with cousins about being Mexican away from Mexico.
What I found is that making ponche in my new home over the years did much more than that. It’s become a way to create new, good memories with my wife and children, friends and colleagues.
Ponche is a melding of traditions
By some accounts, ponche’s origins are embedded in the name, which is said to be rooted in the word in India for five, a reference to the five ingredients in a drink Europeans brought back to their countries hundreds of years ago — alcohol, lemon, sugar, water and spices.
That drink was brought to what is now Mexico and Central America, where people incorporated what was grown locally.
Whole cinnamon is an essential part of ponche, the simmered drink from Mexico and Central America.
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Adolfo Guzman-Lopez
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LAist
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Which may explain why the drink has such an eclectic set of ingredients today. Think about the trek those fruits and spices have made: prunes originally from Asia, raisins from the Middle East and guavas from Southern Mexico and Central America, to name a few.
The annual challenge
When I set out to make this year’s batch of ponche, I immediately encountered the usual challenge: finding ripe, fragrant guavas at the end of December. Supermarket guavas, more often than not, are sold green and don’t give my ponche the zing I look for.
The search for ripe guavas pushed me to foraging in recent years. There were guava trees in front yards in my neighborhood and I’d pick the fruit and freeze it about a month before making ponche.
But now one of those trees has been cut down and the other is barely a stump. So this year, I felt like I had no choice but to buy supermarket guavas.
I was on my way to Gonzalez supermarket in Long Beach, when, a block away, I spotted a different guava tree in someone’s front yard. I parked and talked to the man sitting on the porch. He told me he was originally from Mexico, is a landscaper and says he waters and gives the tree vitamins. He was gracious and picked a bagful for me to take. He said people come and take the fruit but he likes it when people ask.
A warm hug
Armed with peak guava, I began my prep on Sunday morning, washing and chopping the apples and guavas and painstakingly peeling the tamarind. By the afternoon I was ready to welcome guests, like my colleague Yusra Farzan, who covers Orange County.
Ponche drinkers, (L) Yusra Farzan, Adolfo Guzman-Lopez and Marcos Weinstein
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Gab Chabrán
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LAist
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“This ponche is like a warm hug. I'm feeling it in my fingers, in my toes,” she said, adding that she liked chewing on the sugar cane slivers in the drink.
Gab Chabran, LAist's food and culture writer, grew up in a Latino household but didn’t try ponche until he was an adult, because his parents aren’t big fans of warm drinks. Still, he said there was something distinctively familiar about it.
It was the flavors of cinnamon and apple, which reminded me of the holidays, mixed with the tropical nature of the guavas, the tejocotes and the tamarind.
— Gab Chabrán, LAist food and culture writer
“It was the flavors of cinnamon and apple, which reminded me of the holidays, mixed with the tropical nature of the guavas and the tejocotes along with the tamarind,” he said. “Something about them mixed together, it's just so comforting and warm. I feel like I could drink it all year long.”
For others it was a new spin on an old tradition. “It's different from what I make,” said Erwin Cox, who grew up in Guatemala. The ponche he drank as a kid had a pineapple base, instead of guavas. He liked mine — I want to try making his.
As for the food that went with it — for many years when I was growing up, ponche went along with tamales. But now some of my traditions have changed. On Sunday I made latkes to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, part of the Jewish traditions I’ve adopted from my wife and her mother and father’s families.
And there was ponche, accompanying me along the way, seeing time pass and changing along with me.
ADOLFO'S PONCHE RECIPE
For 8 quarts
10 ripe medium or small guayabas, washed, cut into fourths (optional: scoop out seeds without taking too much of the fruit), cut dry navel
5 medium sized apples (sweet, not sour) washed, cored, cut into eighths
2 piloncillo cones (add a third if you want it sweeter)
8-10 medium length tamarind pods, shelled, deveined
12-15 tejocotes (hawthorne apple), washed
10 prunes
Half a cup of raisins
One heaped tablespoon of cloves
4 medium thickness cinnamon sticks, about 6 inches long each, fewer if thicker
Raw sugar cane stalk: use four of the segments, slice off outer husk thinly, cut each sliced segment into fourths. If you can only find the pre-cut sealed sugar cane, use one package.
Put all ingredients in an 8 quarts or larger pot that has a lid. Fill with 8 - 10 quarts of water. The ingredients take up a lot of space and you’ll lose about a quart of water in the simmering. Bring to a boil on medium-high heat, then lower to a simmer and cover. It needs to simmer for at least four hours, ideally five - plus.
Serve in a mug with a sugar cane sliver or other fruit from the pot. You can add rum, brandy, or other distilled spirit to your liking after serving.
I always buy one or two more of the ingredients to put raw/whole in a bowl to show people what they're drinking.
O.C. Japan Fest, corgi beach day, the grunions are back, a new play festival, a talk with Sen. Cory Booker and more of the best things to do this weekend.
Highlights:
Experience sakura season without leaving the area at the O.C. Japan Fair, featuring 250 vendors, craftspeople, food booths, art activities and more, all celebrating Japanese culture.
Check out readings of five new plays – all for free! – at the Play L.A. New Works Festival, put on by Stage Raw and the Greenway Arts Alliance along with a number of L.A. indie theater powerhouses.
Spend Friday night with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, whose new book, Stand, tells stories from his political life that aim to share “actionable insights” to help preserve democracy in these challenging times.
I hope you had luck in securing the first round of LA28 Olympics tickets — and that you’re not still waiting for page refreshes this morning! We’ve got all the info on how to get your tickets and why you shouldn’t fret if it doesn’t work out on this first try.
LAist’s Mariana Dale went to Hollywood High School this week to see how students and teachers felt about Mitski bringing a concert to the historic space. Seems like no one was missing class since perfect attendance meant a shot at tickets.
No matter your music taste, there’s a show for you this weekend. It may not be the height of summer yet, but things will be heating up at the Hollywood Bowl as Ben Platt and Rachel Zegler reunite for their concert performance of Broadway hit The Last Five Years. Plus, Licorice Pizza recommends Mercury Prize-winning London rapper Dave at the Palladium, St. Paul & the Broken Bones are at the Belasco, Calum Scott plays the Wiltern, and there’s a really cool First Fridays night at the Natural History Museum with dub legend Adrian Sherwood. Saturday has pop trio LANY at the Intuit Dome, Lamb of God slaughtering the YouTube Theater, SoundCloud rapper Rich Amiri at the Fonda, post-hardcore band Hail the Sun at the Wiltern, pop sensation Nessa Barrett at the Masonic Lodge, and another rising pop star, Alexander Stewart, at Chinatown’s cool new venue, Pacific Electric.
Experience sakura season without leaving the area at the O.C. Japan Fair, featuring 250 vendors, craftspeople, food booths, art activities and more, all celebrating Japanese culture. From sake tastings to sushi-making workshops to musical performances and kimono try-ons, the annual event is one of the largest Japanese cultural fairs in California.
Play L.A. New Works Festival
April 3-4 Greenway Court Theatre 544 North Fairfax Ave., Mid-City COST: FREE, MORE INFO
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PLAY LA Festival
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Check out readings of five new plays — all for free! — at the Play L.A. New Works Festival, put on by Stage Raw and the Greenway Arts Alliance, along with a number of L.A. indie theater powerhouses. This year’s plays are Stonewall’s Bouncer by Louisa Hill, produced by The Victory Theatre; At Olduvai Gorge by India Kotis, produced by The Odyssey Theatre Company; Ghost Play by Mathew Scott Montgomery, produced by InHouse Theatre; The Incident by Rachel Borders, produced by The Road Theatre Ensemble; and Three Dates by Erica Wachs, produced by IAMA Theatre Company. Go see one, or go see them all!
SoCal Corgi Beach Day
Saturday, April 4, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. 21351 California 1, Huntington Beach COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Vlad D
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Unsplash
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Head to Huntington Beach for the cutest event of the year, the annual SoCal Corgi Beach Day. This year’s theme is "Tiki Beach Pawty," because of course it is. Honor Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite pets and spend the day at the beach with these short, stout, snuggly friends while they frolic and compete in events like — I am not making this up – Corgi Limbo.
Plaza Mexico Celebrates Easter
Sunday, April 5, 12:00 p.m. to 4 p.m. 3100 E. Imperial Highway, Lynwood COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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Plaza México
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You have your pick of Easter Bunny photo ops and egg hunts around town, and Plaza Mexico would be a great one with the family. Meet and take a picture with the Easter bunny, enjoy kids' arts & crafts, family activities, vendors and sweet treats.
Writers Bloc: Cory Booker
Friday, April 3, 7:30 p.m. John Adams Middle School (JAMS) Performing Arts Center 2425 16th St., Santa Monica COST: $33; MORE INFO
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - FEBRUARY 05: Senator Cory Booker attends PBS' "Black & Jewish America: An Interwoven History" Screening With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And Conversation With Sen. Cory Booker at 92NY on February 05, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
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Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
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Getty Images North America
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Spend Friday night with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, whose new book, Stand, tells stories from his political life that aim to share "actionable insights" to help preserve democracy in these challenging times. The conversation with Writers Bloc will be hosted by Sean Bailey, the former head of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production for 14 years and the current CEO of the new multi-platform production company B5 Studios. The event is sold out, but there is a waitlist available.
Behind the Canvas — An Exclusive Art Talk with the Jurors of A Woman's Place: Framing the Future
Saturday, April 4, 11 a.m. Ebell of Los Angeles 741 S. Lucerne Blvd., Mid-Wilshire COST: FREE; MORE INFO
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The Ebell
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Have coffee and doughnuts with the curators of the Ebell’s Women’s History Month exhibit, "A Woman’s Place: Framing the Future." You can catch the show before it closes and see work from women artists exploring new interpretations of womanhood, feminism and art.
Grunion Run
Saturday, April 4, starting at 10:30 p.m. Venice Breakwater Ocean Front Walk, Venice COST: FREE; MORE INFO
Thousands of grunions on the shore.
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Courtesy of the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium
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I have lived in Venice for more than 20 years and never actually seen a grunion, despite efforts, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to see all your neighbors scouring the beach by moonlight on a Saturday night. The Venice Oceanarium folks always organize an educational tent with lessons on how these unique fish show up on our shores to reproduce, and maybe you’ll luck out and time it right this year.
She’s Auspicious
Saturday, April 4, 7 p.m. Broad Stage 1310 11th St., Santa Monica COST: FROM $40; MORE INFO
L.A. native Mythili Prakash takes the Tamil dance form Bharatanatyam to new heights as a choreographer and performer. Her short dance film Mollika, commissioned by Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage in London, was nominated for a 2025 National Dance Award for Best Short Dance Film. She’s Auspicious, her latest production, "blurs the line between goddess and woman, exploring the dichotomy between celebration of the goddess versus the treatment of women in society." It was nominated for an Olivier Award in the category Best New Dance Performance in the U.K., and lucky for us, is on for one performance only at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica.
Julia Barajas
explores how college students achieve their goals, whether they’re fresh out of high school, pursuing graduate work or looking to join the labor force through alternative pathways.
Published April 2, 2026 5:00 AM
Cal State Long Beach is one of the 23 CSU campuses where Teamsters-represented workers held a strike last month.
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Brian Feinzimer
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LAist
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Topline:
The California Public Employment Relations Board (has issued a formal complaint against California State University trustees over the system’s alleged refusal to give raises to trades workers. The complaint follows a statewide strike earlier this year, in which workers at every campus walked off the job.
Why it matters: Teamsters Local 2010 represents 1,100 plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, locksmiths and other building maintenance staff who work across the CSU system. A formal complaint from the Public Employment Relations Board means the two parties must resolve the dispute in a formal hearing process.
The backstory: According to Teamsters Local 2010, union members won wage increases in 2024 “after nearly three decades of stagnation.” That year, the union was on the verge of striking alongside the system's faculty, but it reached a last-minute deal with the CSU. The union has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the system, arguing that the CSU refused to honor contractually obligated raises and step increases for its members.
What the CSU says: The CSU maintains that conditions described in its collective bargaining agreement with the union — which “tied certain salary increases to the receipt of new, unallocated, ongoing state budget funding” — were not met.
What’s next: In an emailed statement, spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said the CSU welcomes “the opportunity to present the facts of this case before an administrative law judge.” After the formal hearing, the state board will propose a resolution to the dispute.
If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
Wind moves palm trees on Monday, Dec. 29, 2025, in Stanton.
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Mel Melcon
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Los Angeles Times
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QUICK FACTS
Today’s weather: Mostly cloudy then sunny
Beaches: mid to upper 60s
Mountains: mid 60s to around 70 degrees
Inland: 64 to 71 degrees
Warnings and advisories: Wind advisory
What to expect: A mostly sunny afternoon with temperatures sticking to the low to mid 70s for most of Southern California. Breezy conditions will pick up in the afternoon for some valleys and mountain communities.
Read on ... for more details.
QUICK FACTS
Today’s weather: Mostly cloudy then sunny
Beaches: mid to upper 60s
Mountains: mid 60s to around 70 degrees
Inland: 64 to 71 degrees
Warnings and advisories: Wind advisory
The cool weather continues for one more day in Southern California. Later this evening, strong winds will kick in for some mountains and highway corridors ahead of a Santa Ana wind event slated for Friday.
Temperatures at the beaches are going to stick around the mid to upper 60s, and around 70 degrees more inland.
Coachella Valley, San Bernardino and Riverside County mountains will continue to see gusty winds until tonight.
At noon, the Antelope Valley will be under a wind advisory, with winds expected to reach 20 to 30 mph, and some gusts up to 50 mph. Wind advisories will also kick in for the 5 Freeway corridor, Ventura County mountains and the Santa Susana mountains, where gusts could reach 45 mph.
Libby Rainey
has been tracking how L.A. is prepping for the 2028 Olympic Games.
Published April 2, 2026 5:00 AM
The official Olympic flag returns to Los Angeles for the first time in 40 years.
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Dania Maxwell
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Getty Images
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Topline:
One or two line overview of the story, should be sharp and to the point. If it's the only thing they read it should still give them good info.
{ERASE ME — some possible lead ins, please change/add/delete what makes sense for story}
Why it matters:
Why now:
The backstory:
What's next:
Go deeper: {if you have stories you want to link add them here}
A key agreement outlining what city services Los Angeles will provide for the 2028 Olympic Games and how the cash-strapped city will be reimbursed for its extra work is now six months late.
High-stakes talks over that agreement between the city and the private Olympics organizing committee LA28 have dragged far past an Oct. 1 deadline, sparking concern from city officials and observers that taxpayer dollars could be on the line.
City Controller Kenneth Mejia, who audits and scrutinizes city finances, called the delay "deeply troubling."
"The City needs a guarantee from LA28 that they will not go over budget and will pay for all of the additional security, sanitation, transportation, administrative, and any other costs associated with the Games," Mejia said in a statement to LAist. "The preparation and execution of these events should not come at any cost to Los Angeles taxpayers."
The 2028 Olympics are intended to be privately financed, and an existing city agreement with LA28 states that the Olympics organizers, not L.A., will pay for extra costs for public services in support of the Games – like policing and traffic control.
But the nuts and bolts of that arrangement have not been finalized, and if the agreement leaves L.A. exposed to unexpected or additional expenses, taxpayers could end up paying many millions.
Hosting the Games is already an enormous financial risk for Los Angeles. The city is the financial backstop for the Olympic Games, meaning if the organizing committee runs into the red, L.A. will pick up the bill, along with the state of California.
The extra staff and resources the city will dedicate to the Games represents another area where L.A. may end up with surprise costs.
Why is the agreement delayed?
Neither the city nor LA28 have shared publicly what's holding up the deal.
Past public meetings and comments indicate that the two sides may disagree over the scope of LA28's obligation to cover city expenses.
At a December city council meeting, the city administrative officer and council members discussed the boundaries of where LA28's responsibility for a service like traffic control ends and the city's responsibility begins.
The city's Chief Legislative Analyst Sharon Tso, who is leading negotiations with LA28 along with the City Administrative Officer, told LAist in an email Wednesday that the city is still discussing the terms for things like cost estimates, service levels, and timelines for repayment.
"We continue to work diligently with LA28 to finalize the agreement," Tso wrote. "I do not have an anticipated completion date at this time."
Jacie Prieto Lopez, Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs for LA28, said in a statement provided to LAist that the organizing committee was working with city leadership to finalize the agreement.
"We remain engaged in good faith negotiations and look forward to our continued partnership with the City of Los Angeles," she said.
Once the agreement is completed, it will be submitted to the city council and mayor.
LA is counting on federal funding
LA28 isn't the only entity expected to pay L.A. for Olympics-related costs. The city also is banking on money from the federal government, which has allocated $1 billion for security costs.
The city administrative officer told the council last year that city spending on security at the Olympic venues, like for local police, should be covered by those funds.
