In many ways, 2025 already feels like a dumpster fire. Not like the first few sparks of a blaze that’s about to ignite, but a raging fire fast engulfing anything and everything in its path. Maybe a few well-intentioned resolutions will help?
According to a Pew Research Center survey, three in 10 Americans attempted at least one new year‘s resolution last year. I wasn’t one of them.
Resolutions make me sad. Less calories. Less pounds. More gym memberships. Do all resolutions have to make me feel like I should just crawl back into bed?
With better resolutions in mind, I found a blurry glimmer of hope in — of all things — actress Valerie Bertinelli and her Sunday apple fritters.
I’m not kidding. Last fall, Bertinelli made the decision to eat more apple fritters. The Daytime Emmy- and Golden Globe award-winning actress and author wasn’t researching a new role or a recipe for a cookbook. She was on a mission to bring more joy to her Sunday mornings.
“I wrote my whole last cookbook [Indulge: Delicious and Decadent Dishes to Enjoy and Share] about changing my mind about food and food not being the enemy,” she says. “I’ve always loved apple fritters. One day, I got curious to see if the local doughnut shop I usually drive by has them. And it was the apple fritter from my childhood.”
Every Sunday she visits her favorite doughnut shop to buy an apple fritter. She brings the doughnut home and eats it while she works on this paper’s Sunday crossword puzzle.
“My whole life in the business made food the enemy and not until I started turning that around and dealing with the emotions that made me want to use food to numb my feelings did I start to think of it as nourishing my body and my soul,” says Bertinelli, who joined “The Drew Barrymore Show” as a lifestyle expert last fall. “A special doughnut once a week included in the perfect ritual of the L.A. Times Sunday crossword and a relaxing day with your animals is a good way to nourish your soul.”
Thanks to Bertinelli, January 2025 will be my first attempt at an actual resolution. Inspired by her commitment to nourishing her soul, I’m committing to treating myself once a week. It could be going out for a movie, a hike or a run for Rite Aid ice cream. It needs to be something that’s just for me. And why not start with my favorite doughnuts?
Monarch Donuts in Arcadia has been my go-to apple fritter spot for nearly a decade. Run by Jonathan Ung, it’s more of a walk-up window than an actual shop. And Ung is just as adept at offering life advice as he is at frying doughnuts. On my last visit, he gave an example: Behind his shop, he allows space for multiple unhoused people to gather, for a relatively safer haven than the tougher streets, where he encourages them to seek out opportunities. One of them now has a career at a car shop down the street, he says proudly.
“Don’t get too caught up in everything,” he says as he hands me my fritters. “We are so blessed.”
Monarch Donuts is a one-man operation, open daily only from 5 to 9 a.m. but runs out of doughnuts long before it closes.
The fritter is pale in color, with big hills of dough clumped together like monkey bread or funnel cake you might find at a state fair. The sugar glaze isn’t hard and all encompassing, with pockets of bare doughnut spread out over the surface.
It’s a delicate fritter, not overly sweet and with a light pastry generously flecked with cinnamon. The bites without apple almost feel like a cinnamon roll, with a fluffy, baked texture even softer than a yeasted doughnut.
Instead of small pieces of apple, there are big, tender chunks strewn throughout, peeking up through the icing and enclosed in a secret cache in the middle. It is a destination apple fritter unlike any other.
For something sweeter and a little more substantial (and for those times when you wake up too late to make it to Monarch), there’s Mr. Goods Donuts Shop on the corner of East Colorado Boulevard and Allen Avenue in Pasadena.
The fritter at Mr. Goods looks similar to the fritters at most doughnut shops, the icing a thick sheet becalmed over a hilly landscape of deep fried dough. Never a perfect circle, but dependably rotund, the doughnuts are large enough to tear at greedily and still last the entire drive home.
The dough tastes deep fried, the icing and crisp shell yield with a slight squish under your teeth. The baker is modest with the cinnamon and generous with the apples. The small squares of fruit are soft and sweet, trapped between the lumps of dough like hidden treasure.
It’s lighter than some of the clumpy book ends that pass for fritters in many of the other shops, but still recognizably a hulking apple fritter. Like Ung’s doughnuts at Monarch, it’s singular in its ability to satisfy and deliver unabashed pleasure.
I hope that this year, we all find our version of Bertinelli’s Sunday fritters. Do what works best for you. No judgment. And may there be many apple fritters, or whatever else brings you joy, in your future.
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