Urban Homestead on Private Chefs of Beverly Hills Friday

Check out the reality soap opera "Private Chefs of Beverly Hills" Friday night at 10 pm on the Food Network. It was shot at the Path to Freedom Urban Homestead, and among the diners trying out a vegetarian meal from the garden are Good Food's Evan Kleiman, author Amelia Saltsman, the L.A. Times' Jessica Gelt and me.

When we taped the show in January, it was a freezing cold, drizzly afternoon, but we enjoyed our lunch cooked by chefs Brian Hill and Manouschka Guerrier, which included fresh duck eggs, preserves from the Dervaes family pantry (below) and lasagna from the clay oven (above). The Dervaes family grows 6,000 lbs. of produce a year on their small urban lot near downtown Pasadena, and raises bees, chickens, ducks, rabbits and goats. It's an inspiring place even for air conditioning-using meat-eaters like me, and we learned a lot from chatting with the Dervaes family about why their vegetables have such intense flavors (it's the soil, of course) and lots more. If you want to know more about the homestead, check their blog and Facebook page. (For a family that uses olive oil to light their house, they're pretty plugged in.) 
(photos by Anais Dervaes)