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Cheap Tickets on Virgin + the Good Food Awards = Be in SF in January
Whether you’re in the Bay Area or So Cal, if you’re into food, plan a trip to the Good Food Awards Reception (January 13) and Marketplace (January 14) at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Virgin has some great airfares right now, and the Epicuring team would love to meet you. You can meet the winners and taste the food and drink crafted by the people redefining ‘good food’ all around the country. New to the Good Food Awards Marketplace this year is a dedicated Beer & Spirits Garden with small pours of winning brews and spirits (straight and mixed). Also new for 2012, there are a few tickets on…
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Learning Wild Fermentation at an Oakland Market
It was cool enough that the Phat Beets farmers market in North Oakland had a free Fermented Ginger Beer making class, using Sandor Katz’s Wild Fermentation book. But this weekend they’re at it again with a Pickled Root Vegetables class, free! The market is tucked in a parking lot, easy to get to if you’re coming off highway 24 or off of Stanford (the Powell Street exist on 80). The interactive ginger beer teacher invited us to take part in the making. She gave us bottles and my beer is sitting in the fridge after two weeks fermenting. (We had to swear that we’d store the bottle in a sock…
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Epicuring’s Holiday Food Gift Picks
Creative gift giving is fun & easy with Epicuring’s Picks & Markets Love Apple Farm has 25% off gift certificates for their classes which include cider making, gardening, bee-keeping, and an array of classes with Chez Pim from jam making to macarons and Thai food. Your chocophile friends will love Tante Marie’s “Professional Chocolate Techniques,” taught by the legendary Alice Medrich. She has written many books on working with chocolate and is the former owner of Cocolat. Starting in January, 18 Reasons will host a six-month Urban Gardening School, guaranteed to teach participants everything they need to know about growing their own fresh vegetables in small city spaces. A perfect gift…
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Thanksgiving Food Volunteering…and Thanks !
This Thanksgiving, the Epicuring team is thankful to see so many great small food businesses and farms creatively engaging and teaching people about good food! If you are able to donate time or food this year, here are some resources: Thanksgiving Day Volunteer Match lists opportunities to serve food on Thanksgiving Day across California. Feeding America lists statewide food banks. Yelp members share their suggestions. Please add more to our Facebook page! Check for needs at local churches too, before and after Thanksgiving. Spotted on Craigslist: Philanthropic Gingerbread Cookie Making Like to make cookies? The Gingerbread Project Needs You! (dublin / pleasanton / livermore) Tri-Valley Haven is looking for volunteers…
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Convivial Cocktails at CUESA Recap
Laiko and I were delighted to meet a bevy of cocktail loving, food event craving CUESA supporters who trudged through the raging snow storm to brave…oh wait no it was a beautiful warm fall night. So anyway, they braved getting to the Ferry Building and were not disappointed. Two long rows of interesting craft cocktails and appetizers delighted a couple hundred people. At only $35, be sure to come to the next one! Here’s who was there. It was fun to learn the Hotsy Totsy–which was a long-time fave dive bar–is now serving up craft cocktails. At this event they made a ginger apple concoction topped with a candied California-grown…
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A Taste of Vermont in California
By Emily Shartin, Epicuring As a recent transplant to California and a lover of both cheese and beer, I’ve been excited to start learning about all of the great things this state has to offer with regard to two of my favorite fermented foods. However, I was also admittedly happy to discover recently that the Cheese School of San Francisco was welcoming two of Vermont’s finest artisan producers (ones whose products you can’t always find on the west coast): the Cellars at Jasper Hill and Hill Farmstead Brewery. Zoe from Jasper Hill and Shaun from Hill Farmstead create cheese and beer pairings that are an authentic representation of place: the…
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Californians Supporting Bristol Bay
By Celeste Noche, Epicuring Alaska’s Bristol Bay is renown among fisheries because of the amount of sockeye salmon that return each year is currently unprecedented in the world: up to 40 million salmon, migrating within the world’s only fully functional ecosystem. Native Alaskans have relied on Bristol Bay salmon for thousands of years– not only as a food source but also as a way of life. Now the livelihood of this ecosystem and lifestyle are at risk as large gold and copper deposits have been found at the headwaters of the rivers that feed into the Bay. The proposed Pebble Mine would create a hole 20 miles wide and deep…
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The Other Wine Country Harvest
By Emily Shartin, Epicuring In California wine country, “harvest,” for the most part, refers to grapes. But in just over a month, after all the Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys has been picked, another important crop will be harvested in wine country: olives. If you’ve spent any time around wineries, you may have noticed that olive trees often grow alongside grapevines. This is because the two plants share similar growing conditions, and olive trees are often seen as a way to add some biodiversity to the vineyards. The trees may also be planted around the perimeters of vineyards to help protect vines against wind.…
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SF Cocktails Transcending the 21st Floor
Tony Abou-Ganim, Joel Teitelbaum, and Marco Dionysos prepare their signature cocktails. By Celeste Noche, Epicuring Through an act of serendipity, Harry Denton’s Starlight Room reopened just as San Francisco Cocktail Week ended. Although the two events were planned separately, both seemed to commemorate a milestone in San Francisco’s bartending culture. In its fifth year running, the city’s annual festival paid homage to its thriving cocktail scene while the Starlight Room’s reopening brought together the best of the old and the new. This week the iconic lounge welcomed a new era while commemorating its past 15 years on the 21st floor of Kimpton’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel on Powell Street…
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Boy Did We DIY at Eat Real Festival
A Perspective on Three Fun-Filled Days by Susie Wyshak On Epicuring we post lots of DIY food crafting classes and festivals, not to mention street food events and tastings. For the third year, the Eat Real Festival in Oakland’s Jack London Square brought it all together. From the time the event kicked off Friday night with a Jam Bar (cocktails made with jam), the crowd reveled in local beers, great dance music, and things to learn and taste in every nook and cranny. Photo and video booths captured people’s stories and moods for fun and posterity. We made bagels, shaped pretzels, and learned various bacon-making techniques (which you too can…
