Posting just a couple photos of last week’s retreat up to Big Sur + Carmel up the California coast.

You can see a ton more via our Instagram feeds—ravenandcrow + katiefrichtel. Also, expect a lot of photos of our cat + dog—Allister + Owen, respectively—and food we’re about to eat.

Click the panorama below of the view from the precipice on Ewoldsen Trail at Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park to see a larger version. Note the single bird trailing multiple times across the same shot.

We completed these projects a while back but are just now making time to share them.

As we’ve mentioned on these pages in the past, we’ve worked with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for a while now—since 2007, actually—helping them brand their office’s publications, Web products, and overall public impression as they work to organize communication between the many on-the-ground actions of various UN offices and outside aid organizations.

A longtime project—the office’s print annual report—collects data + information on the office’s many coordinated support efforts to address chronic issues around the world as well all too common national + regional emergencies. These reports are then shared with OCHA’s public audience as well as their worldwide supporters, reporting exactly how their financial aid is being put to use each year.

In recent years, we planned and designed a template to create Web-based annual reports to compliment the print versions, providing both duplicative information for audiences able to more easily digest it online and provide added content that can sometimes be difficult to effectively capture in print (most often, exhaustive financial data and data on regional + country office staffing).

This most recent print publication was large enough to require perfect binding (as opposed to saddle-stitch/staple binding) and brought in a whole new design template we developed hand-in-hand with OCHA. The cover features a full bleed photo that wraps around publication back + front. The Web version continues to employ the template we developed in 2011 for the office, evolving to incorporate both new formats of content and changing aesthetics in Web design.

You can see a few more images of the annual reports below, but take a look in our portfolio to see more about the Web + print publications.

When we picked up roots and moved our studio from its home in Brooklyn, New York to the relative wilds of Beachwood Canyon in Los Angeles, California, we had a pretty high bar set in terms of expectations. Our studio space in Brooklyn was great—a third floor walkup in a historic, former pre-prohibition brewery with tall ceilings, gigantic northeastern-facing windows, and excellent light for photo shoots and general good moods (you can see pictures of the space throughout  older posts in this journal, like this one on the desks we made with Katie’s dad back in 2010).

But, even if we hadn’t moved to the west coast, that area—Boerum Hill—was rapidly changing and rents were starting to skyrocket, so we likely would have moved even if we had remained a Brooklyn-based company.

So when we finally made the decision to head westward, we sought out a different work atmosphere that reflected our desired change in lifestyle, but still met certain requirements, awesome light included.

Making the choice to combine home + office (at least initially), we situated ourselves in Beachwood Canyon, just up the street from where we originally staged our four month trial period last fall. For anyone not already familiar with the area, Beachwood’s the canyon directly below the Hollywood sign where the original Hollywoodland development was built (read more about this history of the area at beachwoodcanyon.org). Though it’s technically part of Hollywood, the neighborhood feels a million miles aways from the Times-Square-esque tourist hub down the hill and abuts Griffith Park, the nation’s largest urban park and a big draw for us. Our home + office is nestled at the foot of a woodsy hill with (no joke) a pack of coyotes living at its peak and the whole neighborhood gives off a surprisingly small town feel, with a small strip of businesses just up the street from us.

Every morning except for those two or three it rains (I wish that were less of a hyperbole), we set up our design studio on our the patio right next to our house. There are a few negatives to doing this—on some days, our wi-fi signal can get a little weak and, yes, we are sometimes startled by falling tree debris—but, most days, it’s akin to working in the midst of a tranquil little forest.

We ordered one of the few solid wood outdoor tables we can find to serve as our daytime work table/nighttime dining and hang-out area. The table’s topped slotted pieces of wood that make it easy to run our power adaptor and a FireWire cable to connect our two computers for a faster tie-in than wi-fi would provide. We moved from two large desktop screens to two 15″ MacBook Pros, which took a little adjusting and can be somewhat limiting with large publication work, but we have a backup gigantic iMac in our indoor office + guest room to use as needed.

In Brooklyn, we employed a realtively large, 1 terabyte (one trillion bytes) G-Drive to house all of our design projects externally, but, when we moved to the more mobile, outdoor office, we purchased a much smaller G-Drive Mobile with a dual USB data + power connector so we could both transport the drive more easily and wouldn’t require a totally separate power source, as with the previous drive.

In terms of overall power source for the laptops, we ran a series of lines of outdoor lights from the utility outlet, through the tree in our yard, across the dividing fence and under the table.

At the end of the day, we pack up shop and return the patio to recreational mode.

Who knows if we’ll keep this setup in the longterm or move to separate home + office again down the road, but, for the time being, we’re enjoying designing in the wilds of Hollywood.

Below, power + data connections to our computers and G-Drive; our decorative-meets-utilitarian power source; straight-up decorative semaphore flag (F for Farmer AND Frichtel, bike-planter, and HAPPY pennants to remind us why we do all this (partial hold-over from Katie’s birthday); nothing says ‘happy’ like fresh flowers from the farmers market!; ditto that for homemade cold brew coffee most days; Allister + Owen posing regally; and Katie, looking cutely studious, along with Owen, in his usual stop directly below my chair.

One last reminder that Katie + I will be repping MooShoes LA tomorrow for what’ll be the store’s first public event at PETA’s Vegan Fashion Pop-Up. We’ll have new products on hand and available for sale, including these awesome new kicks from Le Bunny Bleu. Stop by and see us.

The event takes place on the rooftop deck at PETA’s Bob Barker Building—2154 Sunset, just across from Mohawk Bend. Get a full, up-to-date listing of the vendors + RSVP on the event’s Facebook page. And hope to see you there!

NYC public space grassroots non-profit 596 Acres just announced their fall fundraising gala, Mapping Matters. The name of the event reflects the organizations unique approach to mapping out unused public space in New York City. 596 Acres takes data on vacant publicly owned land from various sources, sifts through it all, and then uses that data to create interactive mapping that allows the community to mobilize around a shared space to turn it over into a community garden, urban farm, local meeting space, or anything else they deem beneficial to their community.

You can see a screenshot of the organization’s mapping below, but we recommend checking it out on their site—it really is quite impressive.

We created the branding for the group’s very first fundraising event back in 2012 and, recently, 596 Acres approached us about doing so again this year. The result marries the on-the-ground imagery of fenced in vacant lots with a map of New York City, using bent fencing to form the geographic boundaries and vines to subtly denote the major thoroughfares of NYC.

You can find out more about the fall fundraiser—taking place October 2 at Galapagos in DUMBO—on the groups Web site. You can see the branding we did for the 2012 event in our studio portfolio.

Katie made the Getty Iris, the online magazine for the Getty!

The Getty’s one of our favorite places in LA. With it’s unbelievably tranquil, beautiful grounds, most visits, we have to force ourselves inside to view the exhibits. Our last visit was for the museum’s Friday Flights series, which “brings together a network of Los Angeles-based musicians, visual artists, and creative thinkers for a vibrant evening of sounds and sights.” That evening was curated by LA vegan band, No Age, and, in addition to all the art + music, included a special vegan menu on the patio.

Staff caught up with Katie on one of their scenic stairwells and snapped this awesome shot of her with the Pacific in the background. It was so clear that day, you could even see Catalina Island from the museum. The photos part of their Fashion Off the 405 series, which “documents the many different visitor styles of the Getty—from the trendy to the casual to some wild street style.”

You can see the rest of the shots over at the Iris. Katie’s clearly wins though.

Photo by Isoke-Nilaja Cullins.

We’ve all been there, ammiright? Your friend suggests a book club and everyone gets all excited and then, a month later, at best, half of you have read the book and the club gradually, if not rapidly, degenerates into either monthly drinking parties or total nonexistence.

Don’t get me wrong: I love the idea of monthly drinking parties, but, at a certain point, the only honest thing you can do is stop calling it a book club. And ‘Drinking Club’ just doesn’t have that impressive, ‘I totally read New Yorker articles all the way through’ feel, does it?

But what can you do? These days, it’s so tough for most of us to be able to say with any certainty a month in advance that we’ll be able to prioritize reading the hot new summer novel over, say, running your business or feeding your kids or catching up on Game of Thrones?

Enter the Cookbook Club—a book club of a different color, where participants are merely required to pick out a single recipe from a cookbook, make it, meet up in a months time for a kind of curated pot luck, complete with merriment and social camaraderie. It’s like a book club where you don’t have to read as much but you still get to hang out and drink. Add a wide variety of awesome food you and your friends made and you’ve got a cookbook club.

I certainly can’t claim to have originated this wonderful idea, though we did hit upon it before the ever-in-the-know Gweneth Paltrow, it’d seem. Our cookbook club actually owes its existence to another, much more intense and strictly run predecessor that our friend, Ali, is a part of still. That cookbook club, started a while back some LA foodies unknown to us, involves rigorous membership rules—no couples, balanced genders among the group, one-time guests allowed as invited by the hosts. That last rule lent directly to our club’s creation. Our other friends, Maureen + Ilene, were guests of Alie’s when she hosted and immediately fell in love with the idea of a cookbook club. But when the time came around to plan the next cookbook and hosting date, Maureen + Ilene had a kind of ‘No Homers Allowed’ moment when they realized, as they checked their date books, that they weren’t invited. Guests are only allowed to attend when invited by hosts in order to control the size of the club and monthly get-togethers. And with that realization, poor Maureen + Ilene saw their cornucopic dreams of cookbook clubs to come dissolve before their very eyes.

So they did what any enterprising young Americans would do—they started their own damn cookbook club, one with much looser attendance policies and a more casual atmosphere overall. As we’ve been told, that original cookbook club trended towards the extremely culinarily ambitious, choosing cookbooks that had participants doing things like fermenting cheeses, using only implements that were available to pre-settlement Native Americans, and roasted animals whole. Our cookbook club is nigh so aspiring (or gross—whole animals‽). Don’t get me wrong—we go all out, but we’re also dealing with a humorously era-appropriate range of dietary restrictions, from vegan (woo!), to vegetarian, to paleo, to gluten-free.

But the results are great—we highly recommend starting a cookbook club to any and all. And it seems to be sweeping the nation…or LA, at least. Just the other day, we were touring the studios of local, beloved public radio station, KCRW and the producer of their Good Food segment told me they had their own cookbook club at the station.

All you need to do is find a willing group of participants—our group’s pretty small right now, around 10 people at its base—pick out a cookbook to cook from, and set a date + host. It’s on the host of the coming cookbook club to pick out a range of recipes, but it’s a good idea to pick more than you need, so everyone’s got plenty to choose from, and then do your best to think out the end menu, making sure there’s a good variety of appetizers + entrées and balancing the savory + sweet, greens/starch/protein/grain, et cetera. It’s also nice, as host, to hold off on choosing until most everyone has. That way, you give your guests first dibs and it opens you up to be able to chose something to balance out the menu, whether you initially shared the recipe or not.

Then the hosts just need to scan or copy the recipes and upload them to a common space. We use Google’s Drive to create + share spreadsheets that lists the chosen recipes so that members can then claim a dish (so you’re not doubling up on anything). Then you can link next to the recipe a scan and/or write-up of the recipe. We use the app TinyScan—which creates Zerox-esque scans with your phone’s camera, adjusting for page curve—and then photograph any enticing photographs of the dish that the recipes might be paired with in the cookbook (thanks for the recommendation, Ilene). Just be sure to take a quick look at the recipe to make sure there aren’t any ‘See page so-and-so’ recipes within recipes before sharing.

Then eat, drink, and be merry! We like to go through at the beginning to explain exactly what can be eaten by whom and most of tend to try to make dishes as vegan-/paleo-/GF-friendly as possible, putting cheese topping on the side, for instance. Then we go around the table and talk about making each dish—the perils of the recipe; how it could have been better, maybe; what we’d do next go ’round; what we think of the cookbook in general; how we felt when we were making the food…. But, if that’s not your bag, you can just dig in and high-five in silence.

Katie + I hosted the most recent cookbook club, choosing to cook from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s most recent book, Isa Does It, which went over great. Isa graciously gave me permission to reprint the recipe I chose. Well, I mean, kind of graciously. She sent the text + picture to the right. To be fair, that’s pretty gracious for her.

Korean BBQ Portobello Burgers
(pictured above)

For the marinade:
1 cup water
1/4 cup light molasses (not blackstrap)
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons liquid smoke
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
2 teaspoons sriracha
1 teaspoon onion powder
2 cloves garlic, smashed
4 average-size portobello mushroom caps, stems removed
Olive oil, for spraying or brushing the grill

For serving:
4 large white hamburger buns
Vegan mayo
1 cup kimchi

Prepare the Marinade:
Combine all of the marinade ingredients in a large shallow bowl or pan with enough room to hold the mushroom caps in a single layer. Mix well.

Marinate the mushrooms gill side up for at least 15 minutes and up to 1 hour. Make sure that each mushroom is slathered in marinade.

Stovetop Grilling Instriations:
Preheat a grill pan over high heat. Spray or brush with oil. Place each mushroom gill side up in the pan and partially cover with a large lid. Cook for about 5 minutes; spoon a little more marinade  on about halfway through. Flip each mushroom and cook for another 5 minutes, or until the center where the center was seems tender and juicy and the mushroom is nicely charred. 

Broiling Instructions:
Preheat the broiler to high. Spray a rimmed baking sheet with oil and arrange on the oven rack about 6 inches from the heat. Place each mushroom gill side up on the baking sheet and broil for about 5 minutes per side. Spoon some marinade over the mushrooms while they are cooking. 

To Assemble:
Spread each bun with a little mayo. Place burger on bun and top with kimchi. I like to cut my burger with a steak knife and dig in!

Notes:
Don’t remove the gills from the portobellos, even if you’ve seen them do that on cooking shows. They are loaded with flavor and texture, not to mention that the gills soak up marinade beautifully. Gently wash your caps before marinating them and you are A-OK.

Portobellos vary in size pretty drastically. They can be anywhere from the size of a hockey puck to the size of a small Frisbee. For burgers, I like mushrooms that are somewhere in between about 5 inches in circumference. Try to grab nice firm ones that are uniform in size and not limp or wrinkled. If you’re going to keep them stored in the fridge for a few days, wrap them in a clean kitchen towel instead of plastic. They need a little air to stay fresh.

Since I was making these for a larger crowd, I subbed in a cut up loaf of farmers market bread for the burger buns, multiplied the size of the recipe by 1.5, and cut the sandwiches into smaller sizes.

Pictured below, friends enjoying food + company at our last cookbook club; the excellent and highly recommended Isa Does It; vegan Chai Spice Snickerdoodles from Isa Does It, made by Martha; and the spread from the previous cookbook club, when we all cooked from Hugh Acheson‘s A New Turn in the South: Southern Flavors Reinvented for Your Kitchen. If you’re interested, you can read our write-up on the bread + butter pickles we made from that cookbook too. They’re awesome.

We’d like to announce and invite everyone to PETA‘s first ever Vegan Fashion Pop-Up this summer. The event will be held Saturday, August 23 from 11AM to 6PM on the spacious rooftop deck of PETA’s west coast headquarters, the Bob Barker Building at 2154 Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake. They’ll be touting wares by NYC’s Vaute Couture, LA-based Nicora Johns, Sydney Brown, Cri de Coeur, and many more. Plus, tacos by Plant Food for People + sweets from Courtesan Cupcakes. So, that. From PETA: “This fancy group includes our headliners, PETA’s 2014 Most Influential Designer, Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart—the first all-vegan designer to show at New York Fashion Week—and Stephanie Nicora, PETA’s 2014 Most Talented Designer, among other favorites who are steadfastly changing the course of fashion as we know it. Don’t miss your chance to rub elbows with these visionaries! Add raffle giveaways, vegan cupcakes, and jackfruit tacos to this mix, and you have yourself a magical afternoon.” I don’t know if I’d call us visionaries per se (pause for obligatory compliment), but we’ll be there too repping MooShoes LA, which is coming along very well, thanks for asking, and scheduled to open this fall just down the street from PETA. Check the Pop-Up’s Facebook page for updates on participants and to RSVP. And hope to see you there!

Our friend Eliza wrote this bit with Kristen Bell where she plays a Mary Poppins who’s newly awakened to the realities of her workplace. It’s that perfect pairing of funny and brutally truthful; the next best thing to funny/terribly sad, like that scene at the end of Steel Magnolias where Sally Field’s all yelling and crying and laughing in the graveyard and you lose your shit every time you watch it.

What? Just me?

Anyway, watch this. It’s awesome.

Heads up that MooShoes is in the midst of an Instagram contest to promote the coming western outpost, MooShoes LA. Win it and you could win a $100 gift card.

All you have to do is re-post this image on Instagram, and then tag + follow MooShoes NYC + MooShoes LA.

If you have no idea what any of that means…you probably aren’t Instagram. Which is totally fine, man. Totally fine. I mean, if you like missing a ton of cute photos of our dog + cat and the non-stop stream of vegan food with which we engorge ourselves. It’s fine.

The winner will be chosen this Friday, July 25.