GIGA GRANADA HILLS

Granada Preschool occupies a lovely, green, pastoral setting on Haskell Avenue just south of Chatsworth Street. The spacious grounds offer plenty of room for children to romp in the grass, sandboxes, and play yards, and the school is also home to several animals. Inside one classroom is a tank holding a bearded dragon, who patiently waits on his hot rock for the next delivery of crickets. Just outside another classroom stroll two laying hens, whose eggs provide a monthly fresh omelet breakfast for the teachers and their young students. Plenty of wild squirrels also frequent the grounds; they recently dined on pumpkins left over from the school's Halloween celebration. A giant tortoise munches the green grass in the shady central courtyard, and near the drinking fountain are Snickers and Oreo, two soft, fluffy rabbits, and their next door neighbors, a pair of snow-white geese. And then there's Doc. Doc is a turkey. For those unaccustomed to encountering turkeys not yet in s...

How is it possible that I never before noticed the phenomenon of the Cream Puff Turkey? Looking something like a cream puff swan put through a mutagenic process of unchecked cell division, there's not one, but two shops in Granada Hills that are proudly displaying these creatures: Ara's Pastry in the Old Town section of Chatsworth Street, and Vrej Pastry in the Trader Joe's center. I learned from speaking to the lovely lady manning the counter at Vrej that in parts of town with large Armenian populations, like Burbank and Glendale, the Cream Puff Turkey is a standard offering at Armenian/European bakeries -- a time-honored Armenian-American tradition, it seems. The bakeries even compete with one another for supremacy in the field of Cream Puff Turkey artistry. It's something like a war over there -- and in a Cream Puff Turkey war, everybody wins. The competition is so stiff that at first, Vrej didn't want to let me photograph their turkey -- I think they may have...