The first thing Lee Ann does when she wakes up at 8 a.m. is eat a half a leftover sushi roll that’s been left in the fridge. Nothing fancy, just a California roll with imitation crab meat from Trader Joes. Then it’s a few handfuls of nuts.

 “I’m like a frickin’ squirrel,” she says unscrewing one of the industrial size mixed nut plastic jars from Costco.

 It’s not exactly what you might call the breakfast of champions, but with a long day of “prep” ahead of her, including a trip to the Farmer’s Market, Restaurant Depot and Trader Joe’s, she’ll take whatever she can get.

 Prep is probably too tame a word for the extensive preparation that has been going on, from building an industrial kitchen from scratch to gathering everything we need for the mighty feast.

 Stop one on prep day was the Mar Vista Farmer’s market, which, oddly enough, was started by our good friend Ian Voterri formerly of X Games PR fame. We’ve known Ian for 15 years, since the very first X Games he worked on and we worked on, but that was another life and this is another story. Today the story is about food.

 The Mar Vista’s Farmer’s market is a small-scale neighborhood market with mostly local produce vendors and a wide variety of food prep, from raw Oaxacan food and specialty to dim sum Chinese. There was even a DJ spinning retro tunes from Frank Sinatra and other 50s labels my mom might recognize.

 Lee Anne found lots of beautiful food to work with: flowering zucchinis, farm-fresh tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs and so much more.

 For more information on the Mar Vista Farmer’s Market, go to http://marvistafarmersmarket.org