I’m afraid I have to report that we have played the part in the death of yet another rainbow-colored, paper-mâché burro, this one in honor of Katie’s coming birthday and a patio party with friends.

Also part of the party, handmade vegan tacos from our friend, Mick, at 100 Tacos, who we interviewed back in January. He debuted an exciting new addition to the menu this past weekend, the beer-battered seaweed-wrapped Baja tofu tacos (pictured below), and, I have to report, they were awesome.

Mick’s likely keeping this one a party-only offering (as opposed to the regular menu items he features when he’s at MooShoes and the area farmers’ markets), but he is available for private parties and we highly recommend booking him for your future shindigs. You can contact him via Instagram (email’s in his profile).

Rest in peace, you poor burro.

Below, a few shots of the tacos and party.

Following up on last week’s piece on recent newsletters + catalogs for Pittsburg’s Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, we’ve made an another long-overdue update to our project portfolio with the addition of two event invitations we created for the historic gardens last fall.

The first—a farm-to-table garden dinner party—involved establishing an airy, rustic visual theme for the event brand and invitation package, with custom sunflower, fork, and shovel illustrations driving the look.

The second—an Indian-themed masquerade party in the landmark glasshouse—centered around a peacock-inspired mask and feathers and a more traditional evening cocktail theme.

Read more and see additional images of the invitation packages in our work portfolio.

The fine people at CityLab yesterday announced built: LA, an interactive mapping project that plots the age of nearly every building in Los Angeles.

From CityLab:

“Using open data from local governments, built: LA visualizes the age of roughly 3 million buildings across L.A. County constructed between 1890 and 2008.”

The result is a zoomable map that displays the year of construction for all structures in the massive database as you roll over them in your browser. While fascinating in a functional, informative sense, it also strikes us as a beautiful marriage of data + design, reminiscent of the seen from overheard at night.

Our place, sadly, does not seem to be included in the data, but most of neighbors’ are. And we just love how Beachwood canyon is this glowing hand of development reaching up into the undeveloped wilds of Griffith Park.

Give it a go yourself. And be sure to click on the interactive timeline and stopwatch to see the development span through the years. Just make sure your browser’s up-to-date…or you likely won’t see anything at all.

built: LA was developed by Omar Ureta of the Urban Policy Collective at Roschen Van Cleve Architects and made with Mapbox Studio and Mapbox-GL, inspired by Portland, Oregon: The Age of a City; terrain + label data by Mapbox. OpenStreetMap, under ODbL.

Another gem from Mister Uncertain—the Los Angeles-based, vegan-hyping street artist we mentioned briefly in April—this one right in front of MooShoes in Silver Lake.

Pictured again here, Katie’s sandals from house brand, Novacas.

Last night, we attended Planned Parenthood Los Angeles‘ 12th Annual Bingo for Choice fundraiser, an event thrown by Planned Parenthood Young Professionals to raise funds for the good work of the local Planned Parenthood chapter.

PPYP asked our studio to design these invites and guide the event branding and, being longtime fans of the organization, we happily obliged, taking design cues from the venue, the Los Angeles Athletic Club’s Centennial Ballroom, in historic downtown Los Angeles.

You can read a little more about the design process and see a few more images of the piece in our portfolio.

The event itself—a night of drinks, snacks, prizes, and drag queen bingo—was a ton of fun. Run by LA’s longtime entertainer + event fundraiser Bingo Boy and emceed by the boisterously charismatic Roxy Wood, the event was full of bingo-infused sex jokes, chanting, and, yes, bingo. Bingo Boy + co. have been doing similar charity events since ’98 and similar, even more roof-raising events are held at West Hollywood’s Hamburger Mary’s Wednesdays + Saturdays (and yes, that site is awesome). We’d highly recommend attending any and all for an excellent night.

Below, our friend + PPYP volunteer, Ella, posing with Ms. Wood.

You can find out more about Planned Parenthood and how to get involved in your area via the organization’s Web site and join Planned Parenthood Los Angeles Young Professionals via their Web portal.

The sixth annual Vegan Beer Fest hit Los Angeles this past weekend and it did not disappoint.

Presented by Tony Yanow (Golden Road Brewing, Mohawk Bend, Tony’s Darts Away); vegan blogger, quarrygirl; and event-planning expert, Nic Adler (The Roxy, Goldenvoice), the festival made an ambitious move from a parking lot in West Hollywood—where it was held last year—to Pasadena’s famous Rose Bowl Stadium and it was a perfect fit for this celebration of all things vegan.

For anyone who does’t already know, most beer is vegan. Some, like Guiness + Red Stripe, use something in the filtering process called isinglass—a substance obtained from the dried swim bladders of fish—and others, like milk stouts or the like, include animal-derived ingredients, but most other beers are in the clear. Vegan Beer Fest brings many area and far-off, vegan-friednly craft beer producers together along with vegan and non-vegan restaurants and food vendors alike, encouraging them to show off specialty vegan menus for the day.

The result is a day full of beer samples and extravagant, increasingly impressively complex food offerings, from blowtorched vegan sushi to vegan fried chicken and bacon sandwiched between two donuts.

Really.

Below, some of what we captured/ate/drank, starting with a Neapolitan-style Lasagna Pizza from 800º Pizza + Crossroads Kitchen/Kite Hill; the Chicken + Waffle Melt from The Grilled Cheese Truck; their vegan menu for the day; our favorite food of the day, the Walnut Chorizo Tostada from Mud Hen Tavern; cuties, Chef Kajsa + Stacy Michelson from Mud Hen; the Mac + Cheese Waffle (featuring Follow Your Heart cheese) from Clara’s Cakes; Katie with said waffle; Clara + her mom showing off their MooShoes; the Ghostface Killah, an amazing ghost pepper-infused IPA from Boulder’s Twisted Pine Brewery; a Wolf Among Weeds IPA-infused cashew cheese from LA’s Nary Dairy; our friend Nic’s final slider from Native Foods; our very cute pals from Kombucha Dog; Brian L Patton, vegan chef and author of The Sexy Vegan Cookbook, showing off his bizarrely awesome shirt from Puppies Make Me Happy; the S’morrissey + Strawberry Lab donuts from Donut Friend; and musical headliners, Jamestown Revival.

You can see a ton more shots from the day of festivities via Vegan Beer Fest’s Instagram account—a great appetite stimulant and proof positive that you should mark your calendars for next year’s fest now.

A mural we pass relatively constantly on Fountain by Panhandle Slim.

As Wikipedia puts it, on their entry for the 2005 album by UK band, The Wedding Present, named Take Fountain:

“In Los Angeles, Fountain Avenue is a minor east-west street, between and parallel to Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, two very congested arteries. Therefore, when Johnny Carson asked Bette Davis for advice on ‘the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood,’ Ms. Davis replied without hesitation, ‘Take Fountain!'”

This ain’t that clip—it’s one from 1988, the year before Ms. Davis died—but it’s a classic nonetheless, especially all the shade-throwing at Faye Dunaway.

Yesterday was our annual field trip with the sixth grade class from the school at the bottom of our canyon, Cheremoya Avenue Elementary School.

The organization we’re part of (and on which Katie’s now a board member), the Hollywood Orchard, has hosted the soon-to-graduate classes for a fruit- and nature-centric tour up Beachwood Avenue—their backyard—for the past four years now.

We wrote a bit about it last year when we participated for the first time, but, in short, it’s a wonderful, exhausting experience entertaining and interacting with these kids for an entire day. We love it and, with any luck, they did too.

You can learn more about the Hollywood Orchard on the Orchard Web site and see a ton of photos from the trip on the Facebook page we have for the group.

Above, the craziness that is a passion fruit flower, just up from Franklin on Beachwood growing on an unassuming fence in front of someone’s house; below, a shot of Katie + me by Bridie Macdonald.

We came across this on our trip to Ojai last week at the excellent mostly outdoor bookstore Bart’s Books—Drawings by Sylvia Plath, a collection of pen-and-ink illustrations created during her transformative Cambridge University period, when Plath met and secretly married poet Ted Hughes.

The book jacket alone is inspiring.

In it’s most ideal form, Cinco de Mayo is less a specific celebration of the Mexican army’s 1862 underdog victory over the much more massive and heavily equipped French army and more a general, symbolic point of pride for Mexicans and Mexican Americans.

But, in fact, most of just use it as an excuse to eat Mexican food, hang out with friends, and drink Margaritas.

Which, honestly, I’m pretty okay with. As long as we know it’s origins, I’m generally of the mind that life’s short, so why not take any excuse to celebrate a thing?

And Margaritas are great and everything, but, every since living in Brooklyn and frequenting a relatively new Gowanus establishment called Lavender Lake, we’ve been in love with one of their mainstay cocktails, the Night Heat.

The bar’s in a beautiful space right on the Gowanus Canal and they offer some of the best house made pickled vegetables, bar snacks, and original drinks around.

We’ve never acquired the exact recipe for the Night Heat, but we know it’s primary ingredient is Pechuga organic mescal from celebrated handcrafted mezcal producer, Del Maguey. Pechuga has a smokey, almost scotch-like taste that, honestly, reminds you a little of old bandages…in the best of ways, if that’s possible. It’s difficult to describe, but we love it.

For the rest of the simple recipe, we essentially followed the blueprint of a Margarita recipe, substituting fresh lemon juice for lime and a homemade rosemary syrup instead of Cointreau or Triple Sec, both of which have lost favor in our home in the past few years anyway in favor of simple syrups.

Those seem to be the only ingredients of the original Night Heat and, from our home experimentation, this recipe seems to really nail it on the head.

How do you make simple syrups?

We wrote up homemade syrups in detail way back in 2010, but, basically, you take two or so cups of purified water, bring to boil, add a cup or so of granulated raw sugar, lower to a simmer, and allow to reduce until the sugar’s dissolved, stirring occasionally.

In the case of rosemary syrup,  just add five or so sprigs of rosemary as you’re simmering and then store with a fresh on when transferred to your storage container and chilled. Just be sure you don’t reduce the syrup too much so that you keep it relatively watery and mixes will with you lemon + mezcal.

Click on the recipe to the right or right-click to download the PDF, and enjoy.