I had a really great week for a million reasons. A very, very busy week, but excellent nonetheless. One of the highlights was receiving an email from Gary Paul Nabhan. Nabhan wrote a book, Coming Home to Eat, which was the first book to really make me start to seriously consider an eat local diet. This week's email contained a post submission for the Eat Local Challenge blog which was posted on Thursday. In some ways, Dr. Nabhan's post complicates the issue of eating locally, as it asks us to consider not only distance, but inputs, ownership, and seed origin among other things. It's sure to begin an interesting conversation -- a conversation which I believe is coming at the right time.
I wrote about the new movie How to Cook Your Life this week on Bay Area Bites. There are a lot of people in my life who I want to take to see this movie. Seeing it validated how strongly I feel about food and how cooking is such an integral part of my life. Many of you, I'm sure, can relate to this. Being in the kitchen and chopping, and tearing, and tasting and listening is what grounds me. It can be better than a massage or a therapy session or a great phone call with a good friend. How To Cook Your Life put this concept in the context of Zen practice, and entertained me along the way.
It's starting this weekend in San Francisco and then will be in a few additional cities later this month -- check the site for more details.
My thoughts are with all the Southern California fire victims. I am intimately familiar with the Santa Ana winds and the damage that they can do. Talking to mom the other day, we talked about that specific smell that is the Southern California combination of Santa Ana winds and fire. Even if I never smell it again, it's something I will remember all my life.
When I was young, we lived in Lake Arrowhead during a large fire and waited at an evacuation center to find out the fate of our home (it was spared). I was at Pepperdine during the 1993 fire, and spent two days in the gym while everything around the campus burned.
When the winds pickup in Southern California, my thoughts always turn to fire, and I am sure that I'm not alone in that.
A few have asked about my family and friends. Everyone is safe, and no one is in the affected areas, thank God.
I will be interviewing someone from Hodo Soy Beanery at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market this Saturday, October 20, at 10.30 if you're interested in coming to watch and ask questions! I jumped at the chance to interview someone from this great company -- they have fantastic tofu products, and an interesting family history which I hope to hear more about. If you do come, please be sure to say hi to me.
Reason #19,739 that I love this series of tubes? I posted this photo on Flickr a few days ago and was really curious about what the right-hand side of the billboard said. A lot of signs in this style can be found around Vietnam, and they usually have words of encouragement on how to be a good citizen or something else encouraging and pro-Communist party.
So I knew that it was a Vietnamese government-related sign, but since it had to do with food I was very intrigued. I sent it to bad-ass blogger, Graham at Noodlepie, he asked his readers and I had my answer really quickly.
The letters VACR on the billboard refer to Vietnam's program to rebuild agriculture. The acronym stands for fruits and vegetables, aquaculture, livestock and rice.
If you enlarge the photo, you'll see that the section on the right shows durian, jackfruit, roosters, corn, fish and some other fruits. One commenter's translation of the sign is as follows:
phat trien = improve
giong lua = rice plant
can an trai = tree bearing fruit
va = and
vat nuoi = raised animal (?)
chat luong cao = good quality
Speaking of Flickr, I've been slowly going through the Vietnam trip photos and posting a couple a day. The photo above is one that I posted this week. Nine months after the trip, I am finally feeling like I can start to digest parts of it and talk about it. It took that long to not be completely overwhelmed by that amazing trip. So I've been writing a small amount about my impressions with the photos. You can see it all in the Vietnam Collection of my Flickr. You can subscribe to a feed of my Flickr photos using this link.
Also, if you read this site through an RSS reader, you may not notice the site's new look. I am happy to have new digs. Thanks for everyone who weighed in months ago about the new look. I chose a design that will allow me to swap photos in and out of the banner fairly easily.
(If you are reading this post on a RSS reader, you might want to click through to Life Begins @ 30 for the slideshow.
As we entered the Taco House last week, I steadied my grandfather on my arm. "The taco is $1.29," he said. "When I bought the Taco House, we sold it for 25 cents." Two women in front of the restaurant became really animated when they saw him. "You know who I just met," one exclaimed into her cell phone, "I met Bill. You know THE Bill."
My grandfather's name is Hank Silva, but in the Los Angeles community he is often known as "Bill". He bought Bill's Taco House in 1960 from the original Bill who had owned it for eleven years. Grandpa owned the restaurant for 25 years and many of his customers just assumed his name was Bill. He never corrected them.
The story that led my grandfather to own the Taco House is a real up-by-your-bootstraps, American-way story. He grew up very poor -- moving around, but mainly in the Central Valley -- and went to school very sporadically only through elementary school. During some of his youth, he picked fruit and cotton up and down the Central Valley -- figs, prunes, rhubarb, and strawberries. When the workers would break for lunch, grandpa and his best friend Tony would pretend that they were going to lunch as well. But they didn't have any money and didn't eat. When lunch was over, they would come back to the field, chewing on a toothpick and pretending that their bellies were full from the feast that they'd just eaten.
In 1939, grandpa had a small amount of money saved and felt that he was destined for something greater than ranch work. He wanted to leave the valley, but didn't know where to go. "San Francisco or Los Angeles," he told his friend Tony at the bus station. Grandpa had been waffling about which direction to go. "Just go buy me a ticket to either place." Tony chose Los Angeles. "You're going to Hollywood," Tony told grandpa, in a decision that was pivotal for grandpa's life and the future of our family.
Grandpa met my grandmother in 1945 (a great story for another day), served in the Navy in World War II, and then returned home to support his family. He held many jobs including working at a bra factory (where grandma worked as well), selling Baby Butler children's furniture, and selling tract homes in Riverside County. In the late fifties he was working at a trucking company and had an accident -- he fell from the dock and injured his elbow. The insurance company compensated him for his injury by giving him $10,000 (the equivalent of $69,000 today).
That $10,000 insurance check is the money that grandpa used to buy the Taco House. The restaurant is on Martin Luther King Blvd. in Los Angeles, about a mile east of USC. "We were open until four a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays," mom recently told me, "and there would be a line down the block after the clubs in the area let out." The taco that they were all lining up for is, what I could imagine, the perfect drunk food. It's greasy and full of spices and a fully craveable meal.
Every once in a while, someone who had just been released from jail would come into the Taco House because they'd been craving Taco House food in the slammer. Celebrities also came into the Taco House -- sometimes limos would pull up and people like Barry White and the singers of the Fifth Dimension would come in to get their taco fix. Many people who grew up in the neighborhood and became successful -- singers, boxers, politicians -- would continue to return to Bill's Taco House. "I remember when Barry White was coming in and no one knew who he was," grandpa told me recently, "and then he kept coming back when he was famous."
Recently on a trip to the Taco House alone, I tried to assess the taco. It's a seasoned hamburger patty, grilled and cut into three pieces, with a slice of cheese ("What kind of cheese, Grandpa?" "Yellow cheese."), diced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and a spicy chili gravy all wrapped with a fried taco shell that is more soft than crunchy but with a fried flavor. Today's taco is pretty true to the original recipe, and the one that grandpa used. I laughed the other day at a user review on the Internet recently that called it "good Mexican food." I agree more with a different user who called it "good junk food."
"We would get a delivery of fresh ground beef every day," grandpa said on the drive home last week, "and on Saturdays, we would order 500 pounds of beef." Each taco uses less than a quarter of a pound of beef, so that's a heck of a lot of tacos.
Grandpa was really well known in the community. It's still a treat to run into people who went to Bill's as kids in the sixties and seventies and talk to them about what they remember. Aside from selling popular food, he provided the land for a Head Start school next door to the Taco House that is there to this day, and gave back to the community in many other ways. When the Watts riots occurred in 1965, neighbors urged grandpa to leave as the riots were breaking out, and spray painted "brother" on the wall of the Taco House. The Taco House was saved from being burned or looted while businesses all around were destroyed.
Grandpa sold the Taco House in 1985. It's still in existence, and in fact there are now one or two other "Bill's Taco Houses" around town, though I have never been to them.
It's hard to know where our family would be had grandpa not come to Los Angeles, or had he not owned the Taco House. Much of the family -- my mom, my uncle, my godmother, my grandmother and even my dad -- worked at the Taco House at one point or another and it's a major part of our family history. My grandparents have taught me so many life lessons, but grandpa's ownership of the Taco House taught me some big ones:
Make people happy by giving them good, honest food.
Treat them with respect, no matter what their background or social status.
Intuition and real world experience trump formal education.
Once you have a dream, work and work and work until you see it to fruition.
The original Bill's Taco House is located at 219 E Martin Luther King Jr Blvd., Los Angeles, 323-233-1587.
Recent Comments