Latest recall
WARNING: CHECK YOUR TUNA! Tuna being sold under store brand names, or at Costco, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Walmart and other stores from Tri-Union Seafoods, has been recalled by the Food & Drug Administration due to possible deadly botulism from the can’s lid. Although some media said Tri-Union Seafoods is located in San Francisco, it is actually in El Segundo, according to their own press release.
15th Annual Chili Bowl (Express)
We used to call this fun fundraiser for the Sonoma Community Center the Chili Bowl Express, so I continue to do so. It’s on Saturday, Feb. 22, with seatings of your choice at 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., and 5 p.m., the last of which includes a cocktail hour and first “crack” at the beautiful bowls. You get the bowl, plus the chili and a lot more. And the 700 or so bowls are all made by Community Center ceramists.
Guests line up, and when someone says “go” you peruse all of the bowls, select your favorite, and hang onto it until you are told it’s your turn to decide which chili you would like to fill it.
This year the chefs or restaurants contributing chili include Cogir, Spread Kitchen, Aunt Momo’s Wine Country Cooking, Delicious Dish, the girl & the fig, HopMonk Tavern, Murphy’s Irish Pub, MacArthur Place, Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn, Homeless Action Sonoma, Sunflower Caffé, and Gerardo Diaz, who is SCC’s Bilingual Engagement Coordinator and programmer for the Culinary Department.
Little teasers: Mara Roche (Aunt Momo) will make a beef mole chili with smoked brisket and beans, using Guittard dark chocolate in the mole, and Aaron Brumley, of FSMI, will make his Hillbilly Chili with skirt steak, chorizo and beans. There will also be plenty of vegetarian chilies to choose from.
As well, the girl & the fig will make 200 buttermilk biscuits, FSMI will make cookies, SCC board president Jan Erickson will provide more cookies, and Gordon Lindberg will bring a pineapple upside down cake. $35 for 11:30 and 1:30 seatings, and $75 for 5 p.m. cocktail hour and chili. 276 E. Napa St., Sonoma. (707) 938-4626.
Hot nibs and sips (hot at least when I wrote them last week)
Great dessert news: Marcia McDonald, whom many of us followed from Bob Rice’s Breakaway Café to El Molino for her fabulous desserts, is now making them and serving at Jacob’s restaurant next to Train Town on Broadway. And sometimes those desserts also show up at Verano Café.
The former Country Motors corner of Broadway and East MacArthur is for sale again. Apparently Bill Foley, current owner of MacArthur Place, does not see it as an expansion or development asset. But, also apparently, Foley does see his quasi-rural Sebastiani Winery vineyards appropriate for housing and commercial development and increased traffic congestion downtown.
Straw Man?
President Donald Trump has proclaimed “back to plastic” straws, declaring President Joe Biden’s goal of converting to paper straws dead. Not sure how much micro plastics one might find in Trump’s McDonald’s diet.
Meanwhile, regular gas prices have jumped well above $5 in most Sonoma gas stations in the weeks since President Trump’s inauguration and tariff threats. What happened to “bringing down costs on Day One?”
President Trump named himself the new chair of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., kicked out the current chair and board appointed by President Joe Biden (which is customary), and then had his new board name him Chairman of the Board (which is not customary) to rid the Center of “woke” entertainment. What does that mean? Will he get his board to rename it the Trump Center as well?
Carolyn Mulas Du Bose joins La Prenda and Water to Wine, Inc.
Part of the highly respected Mulas farming family, Carolyn Mulas DuBose has joined Water to Wine, Inc., the umbrella of La Prenda Vineyards, Fifth Hill Wines, and Sonoma Collection. DuBose started her wine career working for great guy Harry Parducci at Valley of the Moon Winery in Glen Ellen, where many of us used to go for jugs of his red wine, which he also sold to most of the multi-course little Italian restaurants in San Francisco’s North Beach.
As she learned and learned from each job of selling or marketing wine, she was hired by Joe Martin at St. Francis Winery in Kenwood, then moved onward and upward to Classic Wines of California, and then to Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, the largest distributor in the country.
Eventually it was time to come home to Sonoma, which many of us understand.
In a way, DuBose joining Erika and Ned Hill-La Prenda, basically to market all of their brands, is bringing together two long-respected farming families of Mulas and Hill – people who have gotten not only their fingernails dirty, but their old boots soaking wet and muddy as well.
Ned Hill grew up following his dad, Steve Hill, who worked with and then managed the famous Durell Vineyard and their own family’s Parmelee-Hill Vineyard, and earned a degree in Fruit Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Ned also currently serves as president of Sonoma Valley Vintners & Growers Alliance for the second time.
La Prenda Vineyards Management Inc. is based in Sonoma and farms nearly 900 acres on almost 30 properties within the area. They farm for many independent growers, selling their fruit to nearly 60 different wineries and labels, from as far North as Lake County and South to Lompoc and even San Diego, and they “export” grapes to east coast wineries.
You can try their wines as the La Prenda tasting room across the breezeway from The Red Grape on First Street West, Sonoma.
Restaurant Week: February 24-March 2, 2025
Here is what I could find. The Sonoma County Restaurant week website, socorestaurantweek.org, sometimes takes us to Forestville when you click on Sonoma, or puts Glen Ellen restaurants in Kenwood, possibly by their design. Some local restaurants sent me their menus – a great help. Restaurant Week participants hope to entice new customers to visit in the winter with lower prices, or to bring less frequent diners back to try something new.
These are listed more or less by ascending price.
Palooza Brewery & Gastropub
Palooza’s $15 lunch: fried pickles, mozzarella balls, or soup of the day; entrée choices of BBQ chicken pizza, smash burger, French dip sandwich, carnitas fries, or a BBQ smashed potato. Deals on brews and Deerfield Ranch Sauvignon Blanc. 8910 Hwy. 12, Kenwood. (707) 833-4000.
Sonoma Grille
$25 lunch, $40 dinner. Lunch: soup of the day; chicken picatta; gelato and sorbet. Dinner: soup or green salad; duck breast; gelato or sorbet. 165 W. Napa St., Sonoma. (707) 938-7542.
HopMonk Tavern
$40 dinner: fried artichoke heart with lemon aioli; Jambalaya of Spanish rice, prawns, chicken, Andouille sausage, celery, onion, bell pepper, Cajun spaces; chocolate mousse with whipped cream and shaved chocolate. 691 Broadway, Sonoma. (707) 935-9100.
OSO
$40 dinner of green goddess salad or deviled eggs; seared King salmon or seared pork tenderloin; warm triple chocolate brownie. 9 East Napa St., Sonoma. (707) 931-6926.
Bloom Carneros
$25 lunch or $50 family style lunch. Lunch: shrimp ceviche or Brussels sprouts; sweet potato tacos or roast pork sandwich. Family style: chicken bites or Brussels sprouts; roasted pork with chimichurri served with fries and a seasonal salad; seasonal panna cotta. $6 extra for ginger cake. 22910 Broadway, Sonoma. (707) 412-0438.
Wit & Wisdom
$55 dinner: butter lettuce salad, Kabocha squash soup, or wood grilled octopus; pan seared seabass, Margherita pizza, or braised short rib with duck fat potatoes; rice pudding dessert. 1325 Broadway, Sonoma. (707) 931-3405.
Songbird Parlour
$60 dinner includes smoked and pickled beet, gorgonzola, crispy onion; choice of ricotta and arugula gnudi with roasted winter squash cream, salmon with celeriac and fresh celery, or duck confit with Beluga lentil cassoulet; Sweet Scoops vanilla ice cream with olive oil, honey and fennel pollen. 14301 Arnold Dr., Suite 3, Glen Ellen. (707) 343-1308.
The girl & the fig
$60 dinner: duck liver terrine with cornichons, chicories, toasted baguette; steak au poivre with hanger steak, potato purée, wilted greens; riz au lait with whipped cream and nuts. 110 W. Spain St., Sonoma. info@thegirlandthefig.com.
Salt & Stone
$35 lunch or $60 dinner: Lunch: soup or mixed greens salad; Shanghai chicken salad or pasta Bolognese with housemade rigatoni or ground beef or half Dungeness crab and Bay shrimp melt with sourdough bread, and pommes frites, or a grilled Australian lamb burger with fries. Dinner: French onion soup or roasted Delicata Squash with honey, baby heirloom potatoes, dried cranberries or butter lettuce salad with pickled onions and Shaft’s blue cheese, or a Little Gem Caesar salad with grana padano, boquerones and crostini; Gulf prawn and scallop tagliatelle or braised beef short ribs with soft polenta and sautéed spinach; butterscotch bread pudding and vanilla ice cream or flourless chocolate torte. 9900 Hwy. 12, Kenwood. (707) 833-6326.
Glen Ellen Star
$60 dinner: wood roasted cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, or cream of wild mushroom soup; red wine braised short rib with horseradish, sweet potatoes and endive, or tomato cream pie, or spinach radiatori pasta with basil pistou butter, pistachio and garlic; vanilla maple bourbon, chocolate fudge, or oatmeal raisin cookie ice cream, or pear ginger sorbet. 13648 Arnold Dr., Glen Ellen. (707) 343-1384.
A Kennedy pleas for her country’s health
Caroline Kennedy, the last living child of the late President John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, and a former U. S. Ambassador to Japan and Australia, wrote a long letter to all members of congress cautioning them against and pleading with them not to confirm her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., for the position of secretary of Health and Human Services.
The U.S. Senate confirmed anti-vaccination advocate R.F.K., Jr. last Thursday on a party line vote, except for polio survivor Sen. Mitch McConnell voting “No” saying, “In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles,” McConnell said in a statement according to The Hill.
Caroline Kennedy wrote in part of R.F.K., Jr.: “His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
Claiming he has had a worm eating his brain, Wi-Fi makes your brain leak, and heroin helped him study, R.F.K., Jr. has also admitted to dumping a dead bear into New York’s Central Park. As Secretary of Health and Human Services, this Kennedy is now overseeing the U.S. health programs.
What will he do as Secretary of HHS? Let’s hope he does look into the effects of chemicals in agricultural fertilizers, and our processed and manufactured foods.
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