Molly Baz ended up in Los Angeles by chance. In March 2020, she was vacationing in L.A. with her family when government officials issued a stay-at-home order due to COVID. She didn’t feel comfortable going back to her crowded apartment building in New York.
“So I just ended up extending my stay out here and then we just never went home,” says Baz, a recipe developer, food personality and author of the cookbooks “Cook This Book” and most recently, “More Is More.”
Baz and her husband, Ben Willett, a creative director and spatial designer, along with their 6-month-old son Gio and wiener dog Tuna, have been living in their Altadena home ever since. Their property is adorned with nearly 40 palm trees — an important selling point for Baz. When asked what she loves most about living in L.A., she says: “This is so f—ing cliche, but I love palm trees so much. Palm trees have been symbolic of vacation to me forever, so now I’m like, I get to live in a place that feels like vacation. Even though I’m in a city, every time I see a palm tree, I’m like ‘We’re chillin.’ ”
Her latest project, a mayonnaise brand called Ayoh (pronounced “A-yo”), is partially inspired by her move to L.A. During the pandemic, she hosted a podcast called “The Sandwich Universe” and made tons of sandwiches. She’d often mix her mayo with Marconi hot giardiniera relish to make her own sauce, which sparked the light bulb moment.
“I was like, this is exactly what sandwiches need, and then that kind of opened my mind up to all the other flavor profiles that I could introduce to mayo in order to make multi-textural, really interesting, delicious sando sauces as we’re calling them,” Baz says.
Just days before the launch of Ayoh, we caught up with Baz to learn about how she’d spend her ideal Sunday in L.A. On the menu is hiking in Altadena, eating a sandwich at Bub and Grandma’s and buying fresh fish from a Japanese marketplace in San Gabriel for homemade sushi.
8:30 a.m.: Snuggles in bed
In my ideal world, my baby and I are sleeping until like 8:30 a.m., which is sleeping in for us. The baby and I will do snuggles and I’ll nurse him in bed. Then I’d have my husband go to the kitchen and make me my first coffee — a pistachio milk cappuccino — which he’d bring to me in bed. We’d hang out in bed with the baby and the wiener dog, Tuna, for like 45 minutes to an hour before we walk out and face the rest of the world.
9:30 a.m.: Neighborhood walk or hike
I don’t really eat breakfast, so the next thing we’d do is go for a walk in the neighborhood. There’s lots of hikes around that we sometimes do, but we always try to do morning walks on the weekends and sometimes during the weekdays as well just to get sunshine in our eyes. I go to Eaton Canyon a lot. Cobb Estate is a really nice one as well. We’ll do one of those hikes if we’re feeling really ambitious.
10:45 a.m.: Breakfast time
I would probably be hungry by now, so we’d go to Bub and Grandma’s, which is where I had my launch party a couple of weeks ago. I’m a freak for sandwiches and they pretty much only sell sandwiches. Also, I just love big, cozy booth vibes. I love hanging out in a booth and sitting in a restaurant for a long period of time. You typically find booths at nighttime restaurants like Houston’s, which is another place that I spend a lot of my life, but Bub’s presents a morning booth option so I really like that.
We’d order breakfast sandwiches. They have a really delicious scrambled eggs, onions and cheese on a house-made brioche bun called the Onion Breakfast. It’s like a really overly simple breakfast sandwich, but it’s so good. The bread is so soft and the eggs are so supple.
1 p.m.: Caffeine pick-me-up
After our long, linger-y Bub moment, we would drive over to Kumquat, which is my favorite coffee shop and it’s near Bub. I would get 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 it’s a beverage that’s both hot and cold. It’s like a cold milk with a hot shot of espresso dropped into it, so as you’re drinking it you’re meant to experience hot and cold at the same time. It’s very crazy and delicious.
2 p.m.: Play cribbage at the park or go to Huntington gardens
The next thing I would do is either go to Lacy Park to play cribbage, which is a card game with a peg board that my husband and some of my friends play. We’d sit in the park and play cribbage for a couple of hours or do crossword puzzles. That’s another pastime that I love. Or we’d go to Huntington gardens. I went there the day after the election when I was feeling suffocated by politics, the news, doom scrolling, social media and everything. I left my phone in the car and I felt like I was breathing different air there than I did at home or anywhere else. There are so many plants at Huntington Gardens that the air feels and smells different. It feels fresh and alive. It’s a really amazing place to just reset your equilibrium.
4 p.m.: Pick up fresh fish for sushi
Typically we try not to go out to dinner on Sundays, so what I’d do from there is drive to a place called Yama Sushi in San Gabriel. It’s a tiny, Japanese fish market and they have Japanese groceries and a fish counter with really, really high-quality sushi flown in from Tokyo. They will prepare the fish any way you want, then you can take it home to make sushi. So my absolute ideal Sunday night dinner would be sushi night at home with homemade sushi. We normally get their salmon and we keep the salmon skin so I can crisp it up for salmon skin hand rolls, which are so good.
4:45 p.m.: Take a nap before dinner
We would come home with our sushi then take a nap for about an hour. Naps are a huge part of Sundays. We’re big nappers. Then we’d start making sushi and we’d sit in the living room on the floor. We eat most of our meals on the floor. I just like to be low to the ground and cozy at our coffee table. We like to play music and light candles while we’re eating. We might have a glass of wine. Just very cozy and mellow with us just chatting. I feel like dinner times are really important moments for connectivity with me and my husband because we just crank on work all day long during the week, so dinner time is kind of sacred.
7 p.m.: Unwind with an ice cream sandwich and TV
Next, we would give the baby a bath and put him to bed about 7:30 p.m. Then my husband and I would eat an Oreo ice cream sandwich and watch something on TV before bed. At the moment we’re watching “Bad Sisters.” And then lights out, for me, at 9:15 p.m. would be ideal so I can get like 10 hours before the next day.
