Today, despite the “cold” temperatures (eek highs in the 40’s!) and a small amount of sleet, Danielle and I took a mini road trip up to Santa Clarita for the Santa Clarita food truck fest.

True Life: I am older than the city of Santa Clarita

Santa Clarita is about 45 mins north of Los Angeles. It was a pretty easy drive north and it was totally worth the trek. For $5 we got access to around 40 different trucks serving everything from sushi to cupcakes to fried chicken and salad.

Danielle is a good foodie and we easily agreed on a basic strategy: no unnecessary beer, bread, or calories that will take up space in our stomachs. For example, we avoided the fry smith truck because its fries and will take up room. If there is a long line, one person will wait in line while the other goes to another truck with a short line. And we split everything. This way we can try more different things before we get full.

Trust us, we're pros

The first place we wanted to go was LudoTruck. For those that don’t know, Ludo Truck is by the same chef as the Ludo Bites restaurant, a pop up restaurant in LA that is super tasty and also super hard to get a reservation to. There truck serves only fried chicken and sides. I’ve been dying to try this truck for months and It was finally in my sights.

Here is the back story on Ludo Truck:

The line was super long so while I held our space Danielle ran to the Clean Street Food truck.

You might have read about that truck on Kaitlin’s blog. Danielle enjoyed some samples and called me asking about what I wanted. I left the decision to her discretion and she choose a winner:

Marinated Steak, sliced Parmesan with Caesar salad and Chopped Tomato. We ordered it “naked” so as to not waste precious stomach space on bread. This was one of my favorite eats of the day. The parmesan was so tasty on the steak and the salad was light and clean. The garbanzo salad was also very fresh and cilantro-ey. I really want to eat from this truck again it was so good! We finished this off quickly which was good because it was fried chicken time!

We ordered chicken strips. They had all white meat and we didn’t order any sides with it (it came with the slaw). Photo fun ensued:

Best. Fried. Chicken. Ever! The skin was very crispy and the chicken was clearly very high quality. The skin was salty and peppery which was perfect. We opted to dip it in grain honey mustard sauce which was a good compliment. We also tried the slaw. It was different than your typical slaw and had savvoy cabbage, celery, red onion, chives, and Italian parsley leaves. Maybe not my everyday slaw but nice and upscale. This was my favorite thing I ate today.

After we got the two most important trucks out of the way we wandered around the festival a little bit and got our barrings. Our next stop was dessert. For dessert round 1 we tried Ahn Joo.

This is another one I want to go back to eventually. Their entrees sound so good!

Bacon wrapped rice? Um, yes! We wanted the apple egg roll but they were out so we “settled” on the Nutella Sammie.

The sammie was grilled with butter and in the middle there was nutella and blueberries. It was dusted with cinnamon sugar and as you can probably imagine, it was fantastic!

To off set the sweet we decided to try some Hawaiian BBQ sliders from Uncle Lau’s.

This was the point where it started sleeting, in SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA! Danielle is a fellow defected Midwesterner and we were not amused that there was “snow like substances” following us to So Cal. Luckily we got our food and had something else to focus on.

BBQ brisket and pulled pork with slaw. The pulled brisket mostly tasted like bbq sauce and the pork was light and maybe a little citrus-ey and was light but still flavorful. Overall, very good sliders.

Then it was time for more dessert! This dessert was so good that we took a bite, made an audible sound (lets call it a foodgasm) and a photographer came over and asked what we were eating and snapped our picture. What brought all this excitement on? Loukes Greek to go!

Loukoumades, mini greek donut balls, were the dessert of choice. I tried nutella and peanut butter and Danielle had strawberry. We got way more than we bargained for and I have leftovers!

Mine

Hers

Like fried dough heaven with nutella smeared on top. Love love love! Can’t wait to break into my left overs.

The second to last stop on the food truck express was the India Jones truck. I’ve eaten there before and I wanted to have a samosa.

Just like I remembered!

And on the way out I got a small treat to go: Honeydew boba tea.

I haven’t had boba in a long time and it hit the spot for the ride home. I love the chewy boba balls in the bottom!

Overall, the food truck was a major success! The only long line we waited in was for Ludo Truck and it was totally worth it. The eats were all tasty and even though we got sleeted on it could have been way worse (the weather last night was hurricane like). I came home, took care of some essential tasks (like filing my last ever FAFSA!), took a bath and now all my food baby wants to do is lounge and perhaps read some interesting academic articles on high school reform.

What is your favorite food truck?