NEWS: MUNCH LA Food Truck Extravaganza, Sept. 18 at Fairfax High

Ooh breaking news ... on Saturday, September 18, MUNCH LA will hold its first event - a food and fashion extravaganza featuring over 30 of L.A.'s famous food trucks as well as indie fashion vendors. The event will be from 11am - 5pm at Fairfax High.

Sought after food trucks such as LudoTruck (Ludo Lefevbre's fried chicken), Let's Be Frank (gourmet hot dogs), the Dim Sum Truck and Tropical Shaved Ice will be there. The full list of trucks follows:

Ahn Joo, Baby Bad Ass Burgers, Big Swirl, Calbi BBQ, Crepe n Around, Del’s Lemonade, Dim Sum Truck, Don Chow Tacos, Dosa Truck, Dumpling Station, Eat Phamish, Fish Lips, Flying Pig, Frysmith, Greenz on Wheelz, Greasy Weiner, India Jones, Kabob N Roll, Komodo, Lake Street Creamery, Let’s Be Frank, LudoTruck, Nana Queens, Slice, South Philly, Sweet Truck, Tropical Shave Ice, Vizzi and more.

In addition, attendees can do some designer shopping, as Young Fabulous & Broke, Hudson Jeans, Wendy Glez Lingerie, T Bags, Dylan George, Paige Denim, Boheme Jewelry and others will be on hand to offer their wares.

Tickets are available in advance at munchla.com ($7) or at the door on the day of ($10)

WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 18th, 11am – 5pm
WHERE: Fairfax High School; 7850 Melrose Ave, LA 90046

THING 80: Harry's Seascape Strawberries

Strawberry farmers are always on a quest to build a bigger and better strawberry. In strawberry terms, what that means is they want the perfect everbearing strawberry - one that produces a large amount of fruit for a long amount of time.

Seascape berries were birthed at the University of Davis and they are an extremely productive variety of strawberry, and even better than that, have a very good flavor. Seascape berries are particularly suited to California, but will grow especially well in any cool region with a warm micro-climate.

Not only is the berry one of the better berries for commercial growing and selling, but this year, researchers at Purdue have discovered that it may be able to go into space with astronauts. In attempting to discover which produce might be cultivated on a space shuttle, it was determined that Seascape berries require little maintenance or energy, are not sensitive to the amount of daylight available. In fact, what they found with the Seascape was that with half the light, the plant yielded lesser amounts of berries, but each berry was bigger, such that no volume was lost overall. The plants are small, and the berries are easy to grow and consume with little waste. Total space berries.

At the Farmer's Market in Los Angeles, the place to get these berries (and others) is Harry's Berries. Harry's Berries is a family farm in Oxnard that has been growing strawberries since 1967. Harry Iwamoto was from a farming family that went back generations in Japan. He moved to the U.S. in the late 1950s and worked as a gardener until he was able to move to Oxnard and begin the farm, which grew strawberries from the start. They started with a roadside stand and a wholesale business, but various circumstances caused them to scale down their operation and now they focus on specialty varieties of both strawberries and other fruits and vegetables, which they sell at farmer's markets. Harry unfortunately passed away while they were moving to the smaller field, but his daughter and her husband still run the farm today.

Harry's sells berries at Farmer's Markets from Montecito to Torrance, and they are in at least one market and usually more every day of the week.

They sell two varieties of strawberry: Gaviotas and Seascapes from February through August, with maybe a small amount other times of the year, with spring being the peak. Gaviotas are sweeter strawberries, perfect for buying and eating straight away. Seascapes are more acidic but sturdier and are perfect for baking as well as eating.

Harry's also sells beans and tomatoes when they have them and processed foods made with their products: preserves, juice, and salsa.

Be warned that at peak season these specialty berries are much more expensive than what you would find in the store. But for a special treat they are worth it. Juicy and delicious, but not too sweet they are great for eating alone and even better for baking in a tart.

To find out when Harry's Berries will be at a market near you, visit their website at: http://www.harrysberries.com.

THING 44: Strawberry Donut from Donut Man

Without a doubt, Jonathan Gold's description of these donuts is a prime example of why he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer, so it's impossible to write anything about them without providing an excerpt that shows how incredibly persuasive this man can be when enticing you to be enthusiastic about a food you might otherwise never bother to try:

It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates cushion, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness, oozing from the sides, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home.

This ... this is why he wins. Anyone who can use the word "miasma" in a description of food where the end result is that you desperately want to eat the food is a master.

The Donut Man is something that I may never have tried, but for Mr. Gold. I love donuts a lot, but the Donut Man is located in Glendora, way out in the San Gabriel valley, and although I do sometimes have occasion to go there, I usually go straight to my destination and then home, without the desire to stop at random donut shops along the way.

But it's true that the Donut Man has something no other donut shop around here has, and that is donuts that feature fresh fruit - strawberry in spring, peach in summer. A strawberry donut from Donut Man is not a withered, overfried slab of cake with pink icing strewn over the top. It is instead a fluffy, airy glazed donut-bun surrounding a mound of fresh strawberries drowned in their own sugary glaze.

How accurate is Mr. Gold's description? Entirely accurate. By the time you get the donut home, the bottom has turned into a sticky sweet mass of goo, but the top remains light and fluffy and the strawberries fresh and glowingly red. You can even save it for the next morning, but I recommend to eat it as fresh as possible so that it doesn't lose a bit of softness or warmth and the ooze:solid ratio remains in a manageable balance. The miasma can only encroach so far before the quality starts to suffer.

As Gold himself admits - Glendora is going to be at least 45 minutes away from you, and there's nothing there unless you're lucky enough to have relatives that give you an excuse to head out there every so often. But it's close enough to all of that legendary Chinese food of the San Gabriel Valley, so you could do worse than to make a day of it, abandoning whatever diet you are on and heading east for a day of gluttony.

Donut Man, 915 E. Route 66, Glendora, (626) 335-9111.