Who needs dinner and a movie when you can have dinner and a butchering class? Now that’s some serious romance.
Beginning Feb. 13, 2012, Meat Revolution’s Berry Salinas and Fork Catering’s Sarah Piccolo are teaming up for a three-class series focused on teaching home cooks how to make the most of their meat — with the benefit of dinner and wine as part of the learning process.
Session 1: Chicken (Wednesday, Feb. 13, 5-8PM)
Learn how to break down a whole chicken from wings to thighs, how to use the whole carcass, how to brine and marinade and finally, prepare coq au vin. Afterward, sit down for a communal dinner featuring coq au vin, creamy farro, braised fennel and leeks and salad. Go home with recipes and a chicken to prepare at home.
Session 2: Rabbit (Wednesday, Feb. 20 5-8PM)
Learn how to break down this versatile animal for a tasty rabbit ragout. A family-style meal will include homemade mal tagliati pasta and polenta with rabbit ragout, local mushrooms, and a salad.
Session 3: Sausage and Curing Pork Belly (Wednesday, Feb. 27, 5-8PM) Learn how to cure your own pork belly for some tasty pancetta as well as learning how to stuff sausage (not as easy as it looks!). Dinner is carbonara with tagliatelli, grilled sausages and salad. Students take home a chunk of pancetta for later.
Classes are $75 each, or $60 if you purchase the series. Limited to 10 students, 330 Main St., Sebastopol. Email info@forkcatering.com for reservations or call 707-494-0960.
Campo Fina’s co-executive chef Jamil Peden has departed from the Healdsburg restaurant. Owner and co-exec chef Ari Rosen will step into Peden’s place. Meanwhile, in Sebastopol, Chef Martin Maigaard has taken over the kitchen of the Gypsy Cafe, introducing a deep fried portobello mushroom po boy, rock cod fish cakes, hush puppies with honey butter and butternut squash lasagna with Bechamel sauce.
Get your sweetie in the mood for amore, or at least a little snuggling, at the 24th annual Wine and Chocolate Fantasy at Rodney Strong Vineyards Saturday Feb. 9, 2013 from 1-4p.m.
Wander through the mood-lit barrel cellar nibbling dark chocolate truffles, cupcakes, small-bites from local chefs and sipping some of the Healdsburg winemaker’s best pours. $65 per person, tickets and info at rodneystrong.com or 431-1533.
Rosso’s John Franchetti, Three Squares’ Josh Silvers, Kendall Jackson’s Justin Wangler along with Press Democrat columnist Michele Anna Jordan and several other prominent local chefs will participate in Third Thursday, a seres of dinners in conjunction with Worth Our Weight. The program puts chefs in the kitchen with at-risk youth apprentice cooks to serve up a multi-course prix-fixe dinner. The first dinner, February 21, features Liza Hinman of Spinster Sisters and Franco Dunn of Franco’s One World Sausage. $55 per person, with proceeds going to help the WOW program. Reservations 544-1200.
The time has come for Fresh to move from the Skyhawk Village Marketplace.
Thank you to everyone who has supported the business relentlessly without ever doubting. You all have stuck in there and I appreciate the good memories I will take with me.
We are negotiating a new location and will close our doors for business tonight. The new facility has all the equipment and accoutrements we need so we will be able to sell most of the equipment that we brought here. Tomorrow Tuesday Feb 5th we will be Closed all day to prepare for the moving sale. There will be no Tuesday night take out specials.
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Feb. 6-8th from noon to six o’clock, all items will be for sale and marked down 25 – 50%. We are planning to sell everything from food to equipment and décor.
We hope that you can come by to take advantage of this sale.
Thank you sincerely,
Lisa Hemenway
PS We will continue to do catering out of the Skyhawk Village Marketplace until the move is final.
Art Ibleto will open Art’s Place in Rohnert Park (courtesy of Art’s Place)
Pasta King Art Ibletohas taken over the former Seasons Sports Bar in Rohnert Park with plans to open a family-style trattoria in late February.
Art’s Place will be a joint venture with his wife, Victoria, and daughter, Annette, and family friends Greg and Wendy Kalemba. The menu will be a mix of traditional Ibleto-favorites like polenta, minestrone, pesto and marinara along with wood-fired pizzas, sandwiches, burgers and specialty entrees.
“We’re featuring Art’s food,” said Wendy Kalemba, adding that the family-operation will also include brother Angelo Ibleto’s focaccia.The vibe will be family-friendly with lunch and dinner served seven days a week. The restaurant will serve beer and wine.
Ibleto, 86, continues to run his Pasta King catering business and sauce empire and will being “making regular appearances” at the restaurant, said Kalemba.
“He just puts us all to shame with how hard he still works,” she added.
Art’s Place, opening soon at 563 Rohnert Park Expressway, Rohnert Park.
The multi-course dinner is slated to include Hedgehog mushroom and caramelized onion tart, “Poor Man’s” truffle risotto, juniper and maple glazed Sonoma County duck breast and butternut squash and candy cap mushroom creme brulee along with wine pairings from master sommelier Geoff Kruth.
If there’s a crystal ball for the year’s upcoming food trends its the annual winter Fancy Food Show held in San Francisco in mid-January. Eager start-ups go shoulder to shoulder with international conglomerates to get the attention of food buyers who will stock their products in the coming year.
Some of my favorites of 2013 and trends we’ll be seeing on store shelves in the coming months (if not already):
Smoked Chocolate Chips at the Fancy Food Show 2013
– Smoke is the new bacon: The woody, campfire flavor is making a huge inroad into non-tradition foods like olive oil and chocolate. Hot Cakes alderwood smoked chocolate chips ($15) have a ton of potential for cooking.
– Foraged Food: Wild mushrooms and greens are all the rage, and Napa Forager Connie Green’s Wine Forest Foods includes packaged mushroom risottos, candy cap mushroom sugar and mushroom alchemy powder at thewildtable.net.
– Prepared sauces and relishes: Opening a jar of homemade-tasting goodness and calling it your own beats hours over the stove. Artisan sauces (curries, tomato sauces, skillet sauces and other ethnic sauces) are hot. Sonoma’s Tomato Smash features a chunky new-school tomato relish that beats the pants off ketchup. I also loved Dave’s Gourmet masala marinara.
– Microgreens and shoots: Move over sprouts. Shoots, or very young plants, come in every flavor under the rainbow — think sweet corn, radish, wasabi or cucumber — to add big taste to everyday foods. Microgreens, or baby lettuces and leaves, are also popular with the gourmet-set. Fresh Origins has some of the wildest selections of microgreens and edible flowers we’ve ever seen.
– Prunes: I’m predicting prunes to be the next cranberry. High in fiber and other health benefits, we’re seeing them pickled, pureed and mixed in as a sweetner. No longer are these sweet treats just for granny. Boat Street’s pickled French plums were insanely good.
– Wacky Ice Cream: The ice cream stampeded continues with sweet and savory flavors, mix-ins and surprises around every corner. Three Twins’ out of Petaluma makes a spicy cardamom and Jeni’s Ice Cream has come out with “influenza sorbet” with Cayenne pepper, ginger, bourbon, honey, lemon and orange to help ward off whatever bug is going around the office this week.
– Oil and Vinegar 2.0: Move over plain jane acids and oils. Vinegar is getting infused with everything from lemongrass to pear to kick up salads and add zip to pan sauces. Meanwhile, verjus has become our go-to instead of wine for adding a tart nip to recipes as well as drinking straight from the bottle. We love Terra Sonoma’s new 3L box (mostly made for restaurants, but great for sipping as well).
Of course, there were a million other ideas, trends and takes on the show…which you should check out as well.
Among the big winners in the 2013 Good Food Awards were a handful of North Bay food and beverage producers making noteworthy beer, cheese, coffee and spirits. Tapped for their commitments to flavor as well as a respect for their environment and connections to communities and cultural traditions, a panel of noteworthy judges tapped the following 114 winners from among 1,366 entries from 49 states.
Congrats to all of this year’s winners. I’ve included two quotes from our Healdsburg winners, who were pleased as punch about their selection.
BEER
Ballast Point Brewing Company, Winter San Salvador Black Lager, California
Bear Republic Brewing Company, Tartare, California (Healdsburg) “Tartare was awarded a medal in the Adventurous, Barreled, Big, Bawdy, & Belgian beer category. Tartare, a dry and tart Berliner-style wheat beer spontaneously fermented in a 2500 gallon oak vessel, is Bear Republic’s interpretation of the classic sour beer style dubbed as “The Champagne of the North.”
1000 Faces Coffee, Ethiopia – Shakiso Mora Mora, Georgia Case Coffee Roasters, Kenya – Nyeri Gaturiri Co-Op-Peaberry, Oregon Cuvee Coffee, El Salvador – El Molino Witness Project, Texas Evans Brothers Coffee, Ethiopia – Yirgacheffe Birhanu, Idaho
Flying Goat Coffee, Ethiopia – Wottuna Boltuma, California Healdsburg)
“Our aim, from the first day we started roasting coffee in Healdsburg, has been to find the best coffees in the world, grown by people who care not only for the crop they grow, but also for the people, animals and land around them. This commitment needs to be more than just a certification on paper; it needs to be a way of life. That’s why we spend so much time meeting with coffee farmers, walking with them on their farms, and exploring new and better ways to improve coffee quality and environmental health on and around their farms. To us, coffee quality and sustainability are mutually reinforcing. The Good Food Award, along with the special Golden Seal designation, is proof positive that this is a winning approach to creating the world’s best coffee. We owe a big thank you to the farmers and managers at the Wottuna Boltuma cooperative in Ethiopia. This winning coffee was the result of a special member-organized project that dedicated extra time to sorting ripe cherries and staffing the drying beds in exchange for a healthy per-pound premium if the targeted quality was achieved (Boy was it!). FGC green buyer, Phil Anacker, just returned from a 3 week trip to Southern and Western Ethiopia and visited with all the farms we work with, including the Wottuna Boltuma co-op. He came away quietly confident that the upcoming 2013 crop may be even better than last year’s.” -Phil Anacker of Flying Goat
Bill Foley will open Chalkboard at the Les Mars Hotel. Photo: Kent Porter, PD
Bill Foley will open Chalk Board at the Les Mars Hotel. Photo: Kent Porter, PD
Investor Bill Foley plans to open Chalkboard Bistro & Wine Bar this spring in the former Cyrus space at the Les Mars Hotel in Healdsburg.
He’s hired Shane McAnelly, the former executive chef of Va de Vi, a critically-acclaimed tapas-style bistro and wine bar in Walnut Creek. McAnelly left Va de Vi in December, according to Inside Scoop.
The concept will be an “upscale casual” fun atmosphere where visitors can share small plates and wine tasting flights, Foley said. “It should be a lot of fun,” he said, adding that restaurant will take full advantage of his kitchen gardens at Chalk Hill Winery.
Sources in the restaurant biz close to Foley said he was looking for a more “approachable” restaurant to replace the Michelin-starred Cyrus.
Cyrus closed in Oct. 2012 after years of disputes and lawsuits between Foley and Chef Douglas Keane, who leased the space. Foley is the owner of Chalk Hill Winery, Sebastiani Vineyard and Winery in Sonoma; Merus, Altvus, Kuleto Estate in Napa as well as numerous wineries throughout California and Washington and New Zealand.
Who needs dinner and a movie when you can have dinner and a butchering class? Now that’s some serious romance.
