Santa Rosa’s Secret Breakfast Spot

Written by Heather Irwin for BiteClubEats. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone, but we’ve found a secret Santa Rosa breakfast spot. Local cook Damon Gault slings hash from around 8 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. Sunday mornings at Sprenger’s Tap Room (446 B St., Santa Rosa). And by “around” we mean as long as people are eating and his food doesn’t […]

Eggs On the Menu

Scrambled, fried, poached or sauced, where to find great egg dishes

New Year’s Eve: Serve This, Get Lucky

If you've already got Champagne and caviar lying about, then by all means, use it, and with neither apology nor reservation. But here is my contribution: Whatever you do, make sure you serve something that will get you lucky. As it happens - to nobody's surprise, at least if they're regular readers - we in the Proximal Kitchen are nothing if not opinionated, and we love most of all to pontificate about which foods and wines are most likely to earn you flirty looks and even messier sheets, and we've got just the ticket:

A Nicoise Salad in Winter, and The Rules

Perhaps Will Shakespeare lived in Northern California and craved a salad in winter when he spoke of those days, green in judgment and cold in blood; or maybe I'm just projecting because, as recently as yesterday, I was talking about this salad I had made, borne of winter crops, which still I took to be a very-nearly-classic Salade Nicoise, but for the outrage of tomatoes in absentia, and it got me thinking: What, really, constitutes the One, True Thing, the Nicoise that casts its shadow on the wall?

A Salade Nicoise in Winter

The degree to which this - a Salade Nicoise, sans tomates - is, in fact, a Nicoise salad remains debatable. What is incontrovertible is that, while I won't eat out-of-season tomatoes, I'm not waiting around until next summer for the league leader in salads-as-meals, and this, my Jack Frost version extant, still tastes damn good.

What Obama and Bush both know about wine

Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine; which came first, the food or the wine? In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, the ordinal structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll neither be fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. To wit, a wine that my wife adores and that Presidents Obama and Bush Jr uniquely agree upon, because it's been spilled on the official tablecloths of Republican and Democratic White Houses alike...

Cooking for Date Night, Naughty ‘n Nice

Whipped cream for dinner, because Saturday night, with any luck at all, means date night. Date night - at least around our house - is at least as likely to mean a raid on the wine cellar and a bag of tricks from the farmer's market as a babysitter and a night out on the town, because we live in a sleepy wine country town where most of the bars shutter their doors around the same time my kids shut their eyes...