Hello 2014

We are all caps now baby. Our food truck rolls out from holiday hiatus with our new branding at Silverlake Wine Mondays from 5-9 and Tuesdays at Everson Royce from 5-8.

Our website and new blog (!) are up next, my fingers and head are buzzing to upload it all. Oh I can not even wait to show you!

Until then, let's eat! And don't forget both Silverlake Wine and Everson Royce conduct $12 tastings for three flights of wine each of the days our truck is parked out front, and you can bring your plates inside… or take them to go!

But there are plenty of other things to order, the menu changes each week.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling

See you for dinner!

Rolling Out Our Re-Brand

Photo: Glen Nakasako

Oh, the time has come. We are stepping it up! A massive re-branding has been in the works and we are going to start rolling it out at Monday's Silverlake Wine Food Truck Stop. And Eat Street will be there to film it!

Hey, but you gotta get to Silverlake Wine from 5-5:30 so you can order any one item for $1! Then from 5:30-7:30 please enjoy any one item for $5. And it's fresh pasta night! Cavatelli, Agnolottis, Lasagna Cupcakes, whoa! 

So see you Monday October 28 from 5-5:30 for a $1 piping hot Lasagna Cupcake!!! 

As featured here

A Special Night at Yamashiro Farmer's Market

For the last 3 years, our food truck has been parked at the stunning Yamashiro Farmer's Market every Thursday night in the spring and summer. Stationed in the Hollywood Hills, you can watch the sunset over the city (on a clear night you can see Catalina)and listen to music (there's always a live band) as you drink wine and purchase produce and eat off of a few different food trucks.

As with all of our food truck stops (Monday at Silverlake Wine, Tuesdays at Everson Royce and, in the summer, every other Friday at Barnsdall), our truck always changes. YOu get count on lasagna cupcakes, but the flavors vary. 

That's our friend Bonnie Tsang there with some Turkey Mole Nachos. It was Mexican Night on the truck and our Ceviche and Wet Burritos always are the first entrees to sell out.

If you're not familiar with Bonnie, she's an expert I Phone photographer (among other things), and she is teaching a class at Poketo coming up, check it out here.

Last Thursday was a special evening because Matt did a cooking demo with Phil Mc Grath's produce. Remember when we hosted a dinner off his farm here? His heirloom tomatoes are unsurpassed so Matt talked about how you don't need to do too much to make them into an impressive Panzanella Salad. Phil had brought some organic (his enitre farm is organic) micro corn that Matt couldn't resist adding to the salad as well. Why follow rules when so many treasures are in front of you?

You may ask why Matt is not wearing one of his many Hedley and Bennett aprons. He gave his to Phil there who couldn't believe an apron could look so good and be so functional. You can get one for yourself at Poketo.

Photos: Tara Maxey

This recipe is so easy that you can have your kids do the heavy work! 


PANZANELLA SALAD


1 lb assorted varieties of heirloom tomatoes 

1/4 medium red onion, shaved thin (on mandolin or sliced)

1/2 cucumber, sliced

5 leaves basil, torn into small pieces

2-3 slices thick crusty bread drizzles with salt, pepper, and olive oil

1 clove garlic

2 oz balsamic vinegar

2 oz extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste


• combine tomatoes, onion, cucumber and basil in a bowl and season with salt and pepper, set aside to marinate

• in a hot pan or grill, char the bread so that each side is toasted (a little char is okay), then rub the raw garlic clove on the bread vigorously

• dice the bread into one inch squares

• now add balsamic vinegar to the tomatoes and toss, then add the olive oil and mix again.

• just before serving, gently toss in the bread croutons 

• top with buratta or fresh mozzarella or shaved parmesean cheese

and feel free to add Mc Grath Farm's micro corn or diced avocado or crispy bacon or prosciutto even!

Pizza Off Our Food Truck

Who doesn't love pizza? Crazy people, that's who! Here at Heirloom, we all have different preferences. Thick crust, thin crust. Lots of cheese, hardly any and mostly sauce. Traditional, or wacky filled crusts. We're all over the map in who likes what.

One thing is for sure: making your own crust (which method elicits debates in and of itself) is an effort that sends the flavor of the 'za to a different stratosphere. There's talk about how the water in Naples and in the Big Apple makes pizza made in those regions superior to anything served up in Los Angeles or San Francisco even. I've devoured pizza in each of these cities, I love 'em all. Pizza fan I am.

These intense debates feel real similar to those over pie doughs, but the big deal to me at least is not so much the liquid used but the oven. Oh gosh! People will be so mad about me saying that, yikes!! Here's the deal though, a typical pizza oven burns at 1000F and conventional ovens heat to half that. Some pizza ovens are wood burning, some wood burns hotter than others which yields a lighter, less bready dough with a crisp crust because it heats up so fast, there are just so many factors and opinions. You sort of need to develop the dough for each oven you use to figure out the best process.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling

On our truck tonight at Silverlake Wine, we do not have a wood burning pizza oven, but we're trying to figure out a way to re-invent delectable pizza without one. Matt's using a dark ale in the batter rather than water and he's playing around with the fresh yeast he's using. It's so hot in the kitchen right now, everything is variable in how the dough rises so you have to temper by moving it in and out of refrigeration. Then instead of the oven, he threw a slab of granite on a piping hot char grill. There are some respectable bubbles coming up. Does it sound like a lot of work to get it right under less than ideal circumstances? It is!

Up for trying what we came up with on this warm summer night? Tonight we will be serving pizza off our truck at Silverlake Wine. We've got two types:

McGrath Farms baby Carrots, Fresh Mozzarella, Ricotta Cheese, Roasted Fennel and Pistachio Gremolata 

Shaved Prosciutto, Oven Roasted Zebra Tomatoes, Garden Basil, Parmesean Cheese, topped with Fresh Buratta, Balsamic Reduction + Sea Salt

Come let us know what you think, and as one of our event managers here, Nicolette, says in all of her outgoing emails: Peace, Love, and Pizza!!

Our Day Starts Like This

Sometimes our kitchen is quiet. Sometimes it is very loud. At the beginning of the day, often before the sun has risen, it smells faintly of bleach and feels like a secret womb of safety where creative experiments can be spun out unencumbered by questions, by the prep list, by obstacles of your fellow cooks' bodies who will always politely move out of the way-- we have a polite kitchen-- but it is just so nice when the floor is all your own. It's the magic time of the day when you feel ahead of everyone else, like a superhero saving planet Heirloom, giving a kick start to get things going: the ovens heated, the new inventory signed off, your own tasks underway with whatever morning playlist that inspires you, we all have different tastes in music here. It's a very powerful feeling to be the first in the kitchen.

Cooks trickle in at 6 a.m. or 7, some at 8. They strap on crisp white aprons greeting good morning in Spanish or in English as they peer into the boxes of vibrant produce being delivered before they prep it out which is what most of our cooks spend most of their day doing. It's easy to forget what an important aspect this is to restaurants and catering companies who don't open cans, this critical behind the scenes groundwork of prepping that is never featured on the olympic cooking showdowns of network television. 

We get most of our produce not from a middleman but from the farmers themselves so there is much dirt and trimming to contend with. Our kitchen meets the challenge everyday, and if you should pass through in the midst of it, you will be struck by the color and uniqueness of it all. It never gets old.

In the middle of the morning we host a congested thoroughfare. The office is in by 9 and they enter the kitchen just long enough to pour themselves a cup of hot coffee. Breakfast orders have been fired and sent, and now the same is being done for lunch menus as well as any dinners we are serving. Everyone is buzzing because there is much work to be done and we all want to get it right. This is when things get loud and the kitchen is transformed into a cacophony of carts rolling, doors opening, doors closing, knives chopping fast, fast, fast. Outsiders visiting, as so very many do, are completely intimidated. It's Grand Central Station during rush hour and you just better know what your destination is.

This is the day to day of our kitchen. It rarely lets up and we are all grateful for that. Those who are afraid of the electricity of it all don't last that long here, neither do those who feel they are better than scrubbing the floors because we've all done that, scrubbed the floors. We all help each other out. We've seen each other through personal battles and public ones too. Our kitchen is four years strong and our office is just over a year. Everyone here has a fire in their eye and a commitment to what they do, making and selling really good food. We all approach it differently, but it's there. You can feel it when you walk through the doors.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling

People ask us all the time, "How do you work these crazy hours?" 

I don't know. We just do. It's exciting to be a part of something that is contributing to the greater good in this era where, to quote Michael Pollan, our eating is being outsourced to corporations. People who hire us for full service catering events, who eat off our truck, who order our drop-offs, are people who want real food that is carefully sourced and handled and exquisitely prepared. We are here to do all of the above and to change back the environment of how we eat. Slow food. Quiet meals meant for you to linger over and share and remember. 

We're just working to keep food simple.

Choose 100% Grass-Fed Beef

As I have stressed before here, cattle fed an all grass and foraged diet for their entire life yields beef that has substantial health benefits. Even Dr Martha Grogen M.D. of the Mayo Clinic attests that grass fed beef, like the 100% Grass Fed Skirt Steak with Sunchokes and Green Garbanzos above, offers increased health benefits like:

• Less total fat
• More heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids 
• More conjugated linoleic acid, a type of fat that's thought to reduce heart disease and cancer risks
• More antioxidant vitamins, such as vitamin E 

In fact, the fat of grass fed beef is where the high levels of omega-3s are and that is why leading nutritionists recommend making it a regular part of your diet.

So why isn't everyone eating 100% grass-fed beef? Well, it's much more expensive, about 2-4 times the price of corn and grain fed beef. It's so much faster to plump up a cow with hormones and feed that has high sugar levels. A very disturbing fact is that the cheapest feed has fillers in it like bone meal, gross, rendering it very susceptible to disease which is combatted with lots of antibiotics that is ultimately transferred to the final product on your plate. 

The bottom line: you get what you pay for.

Cows foraging for their own food on pasture are much more lean so their beef lacks the marbling that characterizes cows raised on high sugar diets. It also lacks the cholesterol.

As a result of being more lean, cooking times for searing grass-fed beef must be shorter to avoid toughness so it is most delicious to serve rare as with this cap steak above that was simply coated in olive oil, salt and pepper and placed in a very hot, dry pan to give a beautiful crust on all sides. Due to cooking it so fast, it's tenderness remained intact.

Photos: Tara Maxey

We used a different method for this grass-fed rump roast. We kept all the healthy trimmings from the cow we got from 5 Bar Beef and sous vide it, low and slow, for 36 hours with the roast, then it was flash cooked in the oven at 500 F to get that utterly divine caramelization on the outside. 

Grass-fed beef gets a bad rap because it doesn't have the same flavor and richness as beef raised on a high sugar diet, but that's just because it's being cooked without taking into account how lean it is. The beef our kitchen prepared above tasted like butter, all of it. I'm not alone in loving it because it's been selling out on our Food Truck. 

Stop listening to me and come by Everson Royce tonight (and every Tuesday from 5-8) where we will be serving Beef Brisket so you can taste for yourself 100% grass-fed beef and nourish your body with omega-3s! I think you are going to be converted.

Support School Gardens

A couple of months ago we were approached to team up on a fundraiser for a high school garden. A high school what? Oh, I needed to hear more, so much more. It turns out that this school in Pasadena, John Muir High, not only educated David Lee Roth (class of '72) and Rodney King (Class of '87) but it currently has an operating edible garden that supports it's lunch program and a CSA. Get this, kids work the land here, creating a local food system and receive credit for PE. What?! I LOVE it, all of it! We scheduled a site visit and were blown away by how expansive the garden was so we knew we needed to go big and bring our Food Truck and invite as many people as possible to help raise money for this important program.

We brought in our most esteemed captain, Duane, to direct students who were assigned the task of serving guests during dinner service. They were all so excited and took a lot of pride in what they were doing. 

One of the kids, Malik, had a lot of fun helping Matt and Migs cook the dinner's 5 courses off our truck. All these students loved vegetables, a testament of what the experience of working in an urban garden has given them.

Photos: Tara Maxey

Wouldn't it be wonderful if more schools adopted a program like this? I think so too, but with fundamental aspects of our public school system being aggressively slashed, money for an urban garden is not going to emerge from our government. Programs like this depend on volunteers and the charitable donations of the community. The future of our food system relies on our youth valuing where it inherently comes from and understanding why organic farming is so critical to the health of our land. When you are asked to support a program like this, please do, not just for the kid who is asking but for our entire society as a whole.

School Garden Dinner

Calling out to all my fellow peeps who were humiliated and tortured by PE in high school! John Muir HS in Pasadena has built a school garden off their football field (where the bleachers used to be) that supports their school lunch program. Not only are students getting Physical Ed credit in exchange for tilling the soil and learning about organic farming for an hour every day, but they are also eating healthy doses of organic produce instead of typical cafeteria sludge. This arrangement makes such good sense I can not even stand it!! 

But they need some help to fund the program. Dirt ain't cheap and neither is irrigation and supplies. We decided to bring our Food Truck on out to the campus and cook dinner from the goods the kids harvest so we can raise some dollars for them. Come join us! Information is below. If you can't make it, donate anyway! And spread the word in your own community for more programs like this that promote sustainability and nutrition. Direct link and menu here.

Our Food Truck in C Magazine

You may have already seen this wedding in C Magazine. It took place at the Ace Hotel which has their own catering but we were allowed to bring in our Food Truck for this extravaganza along with our friends from Let's Be Frank and Handsome Coffee. The next morning we cooked a brunch off site which helped with everyone's hangovers!

Photos: Max Wanger

Heirloom Garden Fiesta

It's a big turning point, 30, so we decided to throw a grand fiesta in our back parking lot garden to celebrate. Over 200 people joined us and lots of friends contributed to pulling it off into a festive extravaganza, including the custom font (!) made by Smog Design for all our menus and invitations. Could our invitations be any cuter? I will answer that question, no, no they could not. Thank you Glen and Bijan at Smog for yet another slam dunk in design for us.

You may remember another party in our parking lot garden here. That was for Glen's 40th birthday. Many of a milestone celebrations going on behind our building, that's for sure.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling of YEAH Rentals

Speaking of parking lots, can you believe this is our parking lot? I sure can't. That's how transformative the cool, modern collection of YEAH Rentals can be. They unload their wares and Presto! You now have the set-up of a cozy party that you wish was a permanent fixture, so stylish it is.

Photo: Jennifer Emerling of YEAH Rentals

We wanted to have lots of things to do rather than just eat (duh! everyone knows they'll be eating mightily at any of our parties), so one of the Cabanas we built had a Tarot Card Reader (she said the answer to my question was "ten months" but I forgot to ask a question, dang-it!), our friend Whitney set up a Smilebooth, and Handsome Coffee was there with one of their fancy machines making beautiful cups of Joe that took the chill away. Those who had never ventured downtown to their storefront marveled over how dreamy coffee can be when it's roasted and prepared to such perfection. 

Also my talented friend Heather (who just had a baby but you'd never know because she looks so smokin' hot), she played an eclectic mix of vinyl that was ambient and cheerful, and we screened The Three Amigos which was very popular among the little kids who attended.

Photos: Ellen November

Although everyone on our Heirloom Team contributed to make this party happen, it was one of our catering managers, Nicolette, who took the piñata by it's snout and led the way for our party committee. She had the idea to blow up a picture of Matt and instead of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, she set up a Stick the Stash on Matt! By the end of the night, everyone was mostly wearing these stashes themselves. 

Photos: Jennifer Emerling of YEAH Rentals

After a couple of trips downtown (in Piñata Town, yes there is a Pinata Town here!) to pick up $4 sombreros, multiple piñatas (and we had several custom pinatas you can get made here, one an exact replica of our Food Truck!), balloons, and tissue in the color family of our invitations, Nicolette grabbed a pair of scissors and went to work shaping colorful garlands and pom poms to pair with cacti whose vessels were aluminum cans from the makings of enchiladas that she cooked up for she and her husband and their freezer. Way to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, sister! She also collected Mexican Coke and cerveza bottles for flowers that we scattered everywhere. These ideas were not only vibrant and affordable decor, they also worked as party favors to send guests home with. 

Loop and his wife, Kara, run a company called Tact Events which manages several venues here in Los Angeles and now in San Francisco as well. Under Tact Events, there are two valet companies (Jeffrey and Dovetail) that both have impeccable reputations for quality and trust. Loop has endorsed us from our humble beginnings and it is such a pleasure to see his company grow because he is such good people. For our fiesta, Loop provided Jeffrey Valet (the good looking hipster dudes who drive your car responsibly) so that guests just waltzed right on into The Salon and out to the back for a taco.

Photos: Jennifer Emerling of YEAH Rentals

Photo: Ellen November

You must be noticing those beautiful goblets. You must! They are from our friends expansive collection over at Casa de Perrin. What do you do with these most colorful and delightful glasses that you never want to put down you ask? You put a rockin' cocktail in it that's what. 

Okay so I drank every one of the above cocktails and they all were uniquely complex and fresh, but the one I enjoyed two of was that Blue Cello. Whoaaa! Yum city. For those who keep it simple, our dear friends at Silverlake Wine provided us with plenty of Mexican beer and wine. 

Photos: Ellen November

Whatsa Birthday Party without a cake? Or two?! Our friends at Charm City Cakes surprised us with this brilliant confection designed after the invitation. It was a Dulce de Leches Cake that was as delicious as it was merry and thoughtful. And I made a Strawberry Tres Leches Cake layered with Caramel Rice Krispies and Meringue because inside out cake is the new trifle.

Photo: Elizabeth Daniels

It's a new decade for you, my life partner, my love. I know I speak for everyone when I say that it is with great anticipation that I look at these upcoming years to see what you will build and become and innovate and nurture (and cook!) as your generous spirit continues to embrace us. I'm so grateful and excited to be on this crazy, sleepless ride with you.

Here now are some favorites that friends took on Instagram from this happy night: