My top 3 LA Food Trucks

It's taken months and months of grueling research, but it was worth it to find a few gems among the food trucks in LA. I still need to track down that shave ice truck and with new trucks starting up all the time this entry will be out of date as soon as I publish it. But here they are: my top three food truck orders as of July 27, 2010 9:50 am. These are the best of the best which means I stalk them on twitter and have to exhibit all sorts of will power not to eat them daily. Seriously. It's a good thing that Kogi line is so long or I might live off those tacos.

1 Kogi BBQ Truck
http://twitter.com/kogibbq
David always gets their Blackjack Quesadilla (that green sauce is so tasty) but I love the tacos. A trio of short rib, chicken and spicy pork por favor! Something about the kim chee, meat and sauce wrapped in a tidy tortilla makes my brain confused and happy at the same time. Oh and their tres leches is a chocolate gooey mess of yum.

2 Buttermilk Truck
http://twitter.com/ButtermilkTruck
Okay, the red velvet chocolate chip pancakes are so good that it's hard for me not to skip right to dessert every time. But the brick (chorizo gravy, cheese, fried egg, choice of bacon or sausage and hash browns) and the breakfast sandwiches (biscuits with an over easy egg, cheese, and bacon or sausage) are so good I haven't even had the chance to try to breakfast sliders yet. The Hawaiian bread french toast is another dessert option that is oh so tasty.

3 Coolhaus
http://twitter.com/COOLHAUS
I love ice cream. I love cookies. I love the Cool Haus's gourmet take on the ice cream sandwich. The only reason they didn't place higher is that I have such a hard time placing my order and I always have sandwich envy both before and after. David loves the snicker doodle with red velvet ice cream and I am a fan of the chocolate cookie with dirty mint ice cream, the chocolate chip cookie with mascarpone balsamic fig ice cream, or the oatmeal cookie with brown butter with candied bacon ice cream. I just saw some new flavors in their site though. Sea salt caramel and coffee toffee will be sandwiched in my mouth soon.

Honorable mention: delicious but easier to resist
http://twitter.com/dogtowndog
The Morning Commute and Fennel Dogs are super tasty.
http://twitter.com/BorderGrill
The carnitas tacos are quite delicious too.

Follow them on twitter or check out their websites for a tasting near you.

London, the Ghost Map and Cholera

My mom gifted me Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map for my birthday this year and I cracked it open while on a trans-Atlantic flight to London. Johnson's nauseating descriptions of city life in the mid 1800s, of cesspools and open graves, made me so grateful for our modern waste management systems. His careful unfolding of overlapping urban lives around London's Broad Street pump during the hot summer of 1854's deadly cholera outbreak illuminates how one devastated neighborhood helps unlock cholera's mystery and saves millions.

Although some parts dragged and others seemed redundant, The Ghost Map shows how early city planning and the sound scientific research of Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead made cities more livable and safe. It gave me a new appreciation for clean drinking water and how long it once took to understand the transmission and treatment of a deadly disease. The crowded sidewalks of those Soho Streets and the paved embankments along the Thames over 150 years later show The Ghost Map's lasting legacy and make me so very glad I am unlikely to suffer from death by cholera.Snow's map marks each cholera victim with a black bar. This geographic representation helped prove that contracting the disease was connected to the Broad Street water pump rather than the foul stench in the air.