Our Family, Traditions, and Recipes Living and working on our ranch in northern California, we think often about the family motto Brian coined: Be kind. Don’t whine. Be tough. Ranching takes a willing attitude toward early mornings, hours of chores, constant animal emergencies, and inclement weather. Throw in the everyday adventures of shipping our meats to customers’ doorsteps, managing a restaurant, operating a butchery, and living in a rural location, and you’ve got a recipe for busy, hardworking days spent as a family.
And that is what we signed up for. When we moved to the ranch in 2014, we made a decision to leave urban life behind and lean into the daily commitment and energy Five Marys Farms requires. In return, we’ve earned a family-focused life we love--one full of hard work, yes, but also confident, capable children and the kind of family bond that only comes from a setting where we face challenges as a team. In all seasons, when the work is done, we enjoy the food our land provides, mostly outside, always together. We’ve never looked back.
I always knew I wanted a big family. I grew up the oldest of four in Menlo Park, California, in a close family that has been in California for six generations, much of them in agriculture. The four of us understood from a young age that family comes first, and between holidays and reunions, we spent lots of time with aunts, uncles, and grandparents. My parents were each one of five, so that made for a lot of cousins, and growing up, I loved every part of it--the chaos, the huge gatherings, the constant celebration.
Food was always the centerpiece of our get-togethers. I used to help my dad shop for our family’s ravioli , and I remember going to get crab with him every year around Christmas. My favorite dinner of my mom’s was lamb chops with broccoli, and my dad made amazing tri-tip on the grill. As I got older, I knew that making and sharing meals with family would also be a cornerstone of my adult life. My husband, Brian, is a fifth-generation Californian who grew up on an almond farm. He had a combination of intelligence and down-to-earth brawn that drew me right in the moment we met. And he was raised in a big, devoted family that valued togetherness above all else too. Part of what made us a great match was that we held similar priorities for our own future family and wanted our children to grow up with the same reverence for food, and specifically for family meals.
Before long, we had established a settled (if busy) life together, with four girls ages five and under in our storybook Craftsman house in a suburban neighborhood close to where I grew up. Brian worked as a corporate lawyer, but he and I also owned a few farm-to-table restaurants in the Bay Area, and learned that we loved working side by side. But as entrepreneurs who owned restaurants, we felt constantly frustrated by our options for sourcing good meat; we wanted beef and pork from animals that were raised well on small-scale operations but also had really good genetics for great marbling and incredible flavor. We couldn’t find a small farm that could do this year-round for us, so we decided we wanted to find a way to do it ourselves.
Brian and I had always wanted to find property for family adventures and to escape from the busyness of the Bay Area, but the timing had never been right. In 2013, we started searching in earnest for land where we could raise livestock. The original plan was to hire ranch help and begin raising beef for our restaurants, traveling back and forth on weekends--another business, but not necessarily another life. We still laugh at ourselves for thinking we could fit ranch work into a weekend. When we found the historic Sharps Gulch Ranch in Fort Jones, California (population: 689), we saw so much potential: There were 1,800 acres of gorgeous land--a combination of pasture along a river valley and well-forested hills for grazing. The smaller of the two houses on the property was going to be easier to fix up quickly; it needed work but wouldn’t be as much of an undertaking as restoring the large old homestead. We relished the idea of living smaller and knew that the small house, which we began to call the Little House, would work for us with our girls. The community was kind and welcoming. We couldn’t wait to show our girls a different, more rural life. And believe it or not, driving six hours each way to and from the Bay Area with four kids seemed totally doable. We bought the ranch in December 2013 and became only its third owners in 160 years.
For the first two months, we went up every weekend and jumped into ranching without knowing much about what we were doing. Most people thought we were crazy, but the more time we spent at the ranch, the more it felt like our true home. Other ranchers we met were very generous with help and advice. The girls happily shared one double bed, just as I had done with my siblings for years while my parents renovated our childhood home. And returning to Menlo Park after spending the weekend in the Little House felt like leaving the place we loved the most. It didn’t take long before Brian and I looked at each other and made the huge decision to become full-time ranchers. After Francie finished kindergarten in June 2014, we moved north to the ranch for good and began a new life raising animals for meat. It was actually the easiest decision we’ve ever made. Stepping out of the truck that day, knowing we didn’t have to get back in, felt so right.
When we started ranching, we knew we wanted to raise cattle for beef; I had to talk Brian into adding pigs and sheep to our operation. We were lucky to have a mentor in Brian’s brother-in-law, a rancher from Eastern Oregon, who advised us as we were starting up (and still answers plenty of late-night calls). While Brian started refining our breeding and feeding programs, I focused on sales and marketing. We also made a few big decisions about how we wanted to care for our animals. We learned a lot about doctoring and decided we would not harvest animals for our meat program that had received antibiotics. (We also never, ever withhold medicine when an animal needs it.) We dedicated ourselves to bottle-feeding young calves or lambs that didn’t get enough milk from their mothers, to growing our herd with high-quality genetics in our breeding cattle and bulls, to calving each fall, and to shipping our meat directly to our customers. We don’t do anything unless we’re proud of it, and from a ranching perspective, that means giving our animals the very best care every single day, from birth to butchery.
The other big part of our ranch life is our restaurant. In the 1850s, the old building we call Five Marys Burgerhouse, which is about five minutes from the ranch, was opened as the town bar. It has always been the local watering hole and a cornerstone of the Fort Jones community. When it went up for sale in 2017, we tried to talk ourselves out of buying it every way we could, but somehow we found out that the then-owners were distant relatives with a great-great-grandmother also named Mary Heffernan, from the same tiny Irish village Brian’s family came from seven generations back. We knew well how hard it is to run a restaurant, but it seemed too serendipitous to pass up! We wanted the Burgerhouse to be a gathering place where we could share our ranch-raised meats with our community. We like to say the Burgerhouse has good food, good drinks, and great people, because that’s what it’s really all about.
In 2021, we opened Five Marys Custom Meat Co., a craft butchery just down the road from the ranch. Building our own meat-cutting facility with state-of-the-art equipment and dry-aging rooms has given us total control over how we want each animal cut. We’ve honed the size of every steak we cut, the smokiness of our bacon, the spiciness of our sausage, and the aging process of our beef to our exact specifications. This latest evolution of our business lets us fully realize our mission of supplying customers with high-quality, flavorful, ethically raised meat.
Our life doesn’t really have quiet seasons. Even on the days when the restaurant is closed and we aren’t shipping meat, we all have chores to do, and both morning and evening, we don’t eat until all the animals have eaten. Brian gets up at 4:45 a.m. every day, often to get hit by whatever emergency has come up overnight, but he still says his worst days ranching are better than his best days lawyering. He coined a family motto that we all work to live by: Be kind. Don’t whine. Be tough. The girls have learned so much about grit and perseverance, and they’ve grown into strong, confident, competent contributors, helping out with almost every aspect of our operation. Living on a ranch might mean tromping off to the barn before dawn in a rainstorm to help a momma pig give birth, but having a common purpose--making the ranch run together, as a family--makes all the difficult and uncomfortable times worthwhile. The girls face challenges that bring them together to strategize, brainstorm, and cooperate, so that by dusk, when we sit down to eat together, they share a common sense of achievement.
Our evening meals as a family give us a chance to reflect on each day, talk about what went well or what we might do differently, and enjoy the meat we work so hard to raise. We plant a giant garden every spring, so in the summer and fall we always have plenty of delicious produce too. Except in winter, we often cook and eat outdoors, enjoying the ranch’s natural landscape together from Camp, our outdoor kitchen on a big hill, sometimes with friends and neighbors. And continuing our upbringings, Brian and I spend as much time as possible with our family--both with our immediate family and extended family from near and far. There are cousin campouts on our land and meetups at rodeos and of course the yearly holiday rituals, both at my parents’ house and with Brian’s family. No matter where we are, any gathering means an excuse to make good food.
In my first book,
Five Marys Ranch Raised Cookbook, I focused on individual recipes, including some of our family’s favorite ways to prepare our beef, pork, and lamb. In these pages, you’ll find some of our family’s longtime favorite meals and traditions, divided by season into entire menus you can recreate at home. There’s everything from the prime rib feast we make on Christmas Eve at my parents’ house in Menlo Park to my great-grandmother’s famous homemade ravioli . You’ll find my girls’ favorite birthday meal and the beef pasties we pack for rodeo competition lunches. While the recipes vary in seasonality and preparation time, they’re all great options for feeding a crowd. To me, the menus feel festive without being fussy, and because our celebrations often revolve around all-day projects like branding and sheep shearing, there are a few menus you can make almost entirely ahead of time. (You don’t have to be branding to enjoy our Branding-Day Dinner , but a Long-Day Manhattan really does taste best after a long day!)
Of course, from the menus, you can pick out recipes to come back to again and again, regardless of whether you’re entertaining friends or just getting everyone fed on a busy weeknight. At the top of my list: the Double-Beef Chili with Black Beans and Sweet Potatoes I make nonstop when the mercury drops; delicious Spicy Carnitas Tacos we rely on when we have a crowd to feed; and Grilled Steaks with Chermoula Butter that turn a simple backyard barbecue into a real party.
This is the food that Brian and I love, but it’s also food my kids love. In our family, the girls do some of the cooking, so I’ve included a few of their favorites as well as the stories and traditions that surround our meals. Wherever I can, I include instructions for making things in advance, because feeding a family doesn’t always coincide with free time just before the dinner bell. You’ll also find fun DIY (do-it-yourself) projects and crafts that can be done alone or as a group--things like hand-rolling beeswax candles or using real indigo dye to make
shibori-style hand towels . (If you need to know how to make a campfire or tie up a horse, I’ve got you covered there too.)
Much like ranching, creating a cookbook is a labor of love. I’ve so enjoyed compiling our family’s traditions and recipes in this book for you. I hope you find comforting, deeply flavorful food that’s nice enough to slow down for, but not so nice that you stop reaching across the table for more. I hope our ranch recipes and our long-standing traditions inspire you to make more recipes and traditions of your own. And I hope that as you go about your life and face challenges--or the “always somethings” come up no matter where you live--you remember our family motto: Be kind. Don’t whine. Be tough. And then kick your feet up and enjoy a hearty meal and a well-earned cocktail at the end of the day.
Mary Heffernan
Copyright © 2022 by Heffernan, Mary. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
