Category: BiteClub

It’s Happy Hour Somewhere

It's Friday afternoon, the sun has won its daily battle with the fog, and I'm making cocktails. Never let it be said that the Proximal Kitchen does not count booze as a food group.

Should I buy local wines at Costco?

We've talked about Costco before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let's be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying locally produced goods at the Big C?

Why I’m Trying To Make a Perfect Mac-n-Cheese

An old friend of mine and nascent PK supporter, a certain Ms T (you know who you are), recently put in a request in for my best take on mac-n-cheese. Not just any mac-n-cheese, mind you, but a "rich, rich, rich, very adult mac-n-cheese". This, T must have intuited, sits squarely in our wheelhouse because, here at the Proximal Kitchen, we love cheese, we love pasta, and we're not scared of butter. But for me, and I suspect for T and probably most of you, it's also about much more than that:

Brasserie | Santa Rosa

Eclectic Railroad Square restaurant eatery gets an updated menu

QOW: Best Desserts

Favorite Sonoma County treats for your sweet tooth

Just Three: Tomatoes, Chilis, and Parsley

As I've already confessed elsewhere and at length, I'm a pretty lousy gardener, but - as with most things in life - luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have slipped them some tongue.

AV Chardonnay Calls BS on ABC (Part 2 of 3)

I may live in the Russian River Valley – indisputably, home court to any number of world-class Chardonnay winemakers – but I’m here to tell you that, if well-made, sexpot Chards are your thing, then you need to get your Chard-guzzling booty over to the Alexander Valley, and stat. You won’t find nearly the selection […]

AV Chardonnay Calls BS on ABC (Part 1 of 3)

Google "ABC Anything But Chardonnay" and you'll get something on the order of 19,000 hits in the first few tenths of a second. The oldest reference I could be bothered to find dates to 1995 in a column by Frank Prial for the NY Times, but as recently as 2008, someone actually took the time to write a book with the same dated and misguided tag line, so