Drink
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Drink Local Short – “Cultured Creations: Chef Lauren Kershner Takes on Kombucha”
“I bought my first kombucha at a gas station in Mendocino County when I was a teenager and thought it was awful,” Chef Lauren Kershner tells me. She’s preparing artful trays of vegetables and fruits for her catering business Goodness Gracious Catering in Glen Ellen. But luckily for her, and now for us, there are…
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Locavore: Eating Local, Cooking Local — “Jalapeños en Escabeche with Sheila Shupe”
Confessions of a Germophile I’ll tell you a secret. I’m a native Californian and I didn’t eat a fish taco until I was 28. When I first met my husband, born in Southern California and reared on Mexican food, who would gladly take beans intravenously if it were possible, he was devastated by this oversight…
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Eat Local – “Kneading a New Life”
Veronica Herico’s Journey from Corporate Go-Getting to Culinary Adventuring By the time she was 27, Veronica Herico had worked herself “to a puddy.” She’d been ambitious her whole life—a degree from U.C. Davis, a fluency in Mandarin that took her to Shanghai for a year, and then to a job in SF doing PR for…
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Locavore: Eating Local, Cooking Local — “Making Strawberry Vinegar with Sheila Shupe”
I’ll be honest. When I see a kid take one bite of a juicy red strawberry, then chuck the rest, I want to google their value in Bitcoin and sell to the highest bidder. I go mad thinking of all the hours the farmer had her hands in the dirt, all the water that nurtured…
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Drink Local – “Bottled Botanicals”
FloraLuna Apothecary & Trading Co. During the summer of 2015, Phaedra Achor was researching forgotten cocktails to serve at an outdoor party she was planning in a couple of months. Given that most of the recipes she settled on called for bitters, the flavor-loving former restaurateur decided to make her own. She already knew and…
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Drink Local Gift Guide
Hinterland Empire by Ursa Born Hinterland Empire and its sibling art gallery Neon Raspberry have long been a hub for their distinctively unapologetic progressive, feminist, queer-centric, radical economic and social justice-based ethos and aesthetic. The original shop, a local treasure in Occidental, is home to sassy custom designed screen-printed apparel and accessories, as well as…
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Adventures in Drinking: Wine Country Rambler
James Knight on the possibilities and pitfalls of vineyard-hopping. Back in 2019, I planned an ambitious hiking trip that I’ll call “The Great Wine Country Trek that Sort of Was, and Mostly Wasn’t.” Like many a fiasco, it began as a really great idea. I was approaching a major milestone (some call it “the new…
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Allée des Artistes
Café Frida Gallery Gathers the Town In the early 1930s, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera spent a night in a little house on Sebastopol Avenue in what is now the tiny but vibrant SOFA neighborhood near downtown Santa Rosa. The famous couple was hoping to meet botanist Luther Burbank, whom Kahlo later depicted as a half-tree…
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Taste of the Wild
Steve Doty’s Mobile Coolship Turns Rogue Yeast Into Sour Beer On a blue-skied and breezy afternoon in the Shady Oak beer garden, a comfortable outdoor patio alongside the Santa Rosa creek, brewer Steve Doty and I are here to talk about his journey into sour-beer brewing. But first we’re talking felines. “I’m sorry if I…
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Adventures in Drinking
Camp Rose Cellars Way too much wine talk is negative talk. Or haven’t you heard a wine praised for what it’s not? The phrase, “This isn’t one of those oaky, buttery Chardonnays” comes to mind. “This is no wimpy, white Zinfandel” is another, but the naysayers aren’t done with Zin, heaping praise by way of…