Southern Sonoma Country Life

A Night In Old Havana — Petaluma Educational Foundation's Cubano BASH — Sept 10th, 2016

This year’s 2016 Petaluma Educational Foundation fundraising gala BASH, supporting the mission of PEF guarantees another legendary night of dancing, dining and auctions benefiting all 38 K-12 public, not-for-profit and charter schools in the Petaluma area.

On September 10th, guests will be transported back in time to a “Night in Old Havana” as they come together to raise funds to benefit the mission of the local non-profit working to enrich and enhance the academic experience of each and every one of our 13,000 students. 

PEF’s Cubano BASH is sure to be memorable. Kicking off with signature cocktails during the reception hour and super-silent auction, the night continues with a nostalgic vibe of vintage Cuban nightlife.  The live auction, offering an opportunity to bid on the most sought after packages featuring once-in-a-lifetime experiences, to all-time favorite culinary and excursion auction lots, takes place during the elegant sit-down dinner portion of the evening. 

The gala’s highlight comes when the over 500 guests are collectively invited to raise their paddles pledging support to all Petaluma students, who benefit from PEF’s Impact Grant program.  One hundred percent of the pledges during the Fund the Future paddle raise support the foundation’s annual grant program which this year is expected to exceed the milestone mark of $3 million in support since the program started in 1982!

 Live music by the Bay Area’s Beat Street Band will add to the night’s festive flavor.  From Sinatra to The Stones and Elvis to Usher, Beat Street has all the hits covered!  All-inclusive tickets ($150.00 pp until August 10, $175.00 pp starting August 11) are available by contacting the PEF Office at (707) 778-5063 or visiting the event website at https://petaluma.ejoinme.org/bash16.  PEF’s Online BASH Auction kicks off August 17 – August 31 at https://biddingforgood.com/pefinfo/bash2016 providing everyone the opportunity, near and far, to bid in support of local education.

Annual PEF Partners for Education – Clover Stornetta Farms, Petaluma Market, and Petaluma Health Care District join presenting event partners Exchange Bank and Dairy Delivery, as top-tier sponsors.  Several other businesses who have committed to keep education as a priority in our community will underwrite the festivities as corporate partners: Law Offices of Bridget Mackay, Lace House Linen, PG&E, Bank of Marin, Encore Events Rentals/Cal West Rentals, Camelbak, First Community Bank, Guido Enterprises, Hansel Auto Group, Hennessy Funds, Mike Hudson Distributing, Petaluma Argus Courier, Petaluma Minuteman Press, Pisenti & Brinker LLP, Rabobank, Sonoma Clean Power, W.K. McLellan Co., Cinema West, Comcast, Don Ramatici Insurance, Inc., Friedman’s Home Improvement, Kaiser Permanente, Morris Distributing and Top Speed Data Communications.

Funding the Future of education has never been more important.  PEF, which does not receive any government funding, is committed to ensuring that vital resources are available to all charter, public and private campuses in our community.   The annual PEF BASH event provides the public an opportunity to hear first-hand how they may partner with others to continue the mission of the foundation as it starts its 35^th year as a local nonprofit with a legacy of positively impacting our community’s schools and students.

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The mission of the PEF since its inception in 1982 is:  Every child has a dream and by matching the passion of our supporters to the proven needs in the academic community, together, we fund the future of our local students.  Petaluma Educational Foundation (PEF) is a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.  Since 1982, PEF has been reaching Petaluma’s K-12 students through PEF Grants to local schools and PEF Scholarships to graduating seniors. 

A Tasty Tumble Down the Rabbit Hole — Mad Hatter's Tea Party at Swanky Sanderson Hotel, London to Commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Alice in Wonderland

My summer 2016 visit to the UK came a couple of weeks after my 50th birthday. My London-based, youngest sister, Lindsey, celebrated her 40th birthday seven months earlier. A posh tea in town was top of our list of several celebratory outings while we were together on the same continent.

I looked around online at the usual suspects for high tea in the most stylish of hotel settings. I'm not opposed to traditional teas in velvet chairs at tables set with starched, white linens and fellow guests whispering in polite tones. But this time, given that the oldest of Lindsey's two little girls was more than ready for the real deal of taking the train on a Sunday afternoon in her best dress and sparkly ballet pumps for a proper cuppa, I was keen to sleuth out something out of the box and unforgettable.

Good timing, Sanderson Hotel this past year has been inviting guests to tumble down the rabbit hole for the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with a Mad Hatter's Afternoon Tea. Think menus hidden inside vintage books, teapots decorated with kings and queens, quirky sandwich plates with birdcages, carousels and ticking clocks, specialty sandwiches — classic cucumber on green bread, goat cheese Croque-Monsieur, white crab eclairs, scones, red velvet ladybird cake and chocolate coated, coffee-flavored pocket-watch macaroons. A "drink me" sorbet potion completed the suitably eccentric picture, with a selected of fruity and tailor-made Alice teas to boot. We each picked our own teas from a choice of China Black Tea infused with hints of blackcurrant, vanilla, caramel, citrus, bergamot, blue cornflowers and blue mallow flowers.

I made a booking a couple months ahead of time, seeings as this particular tea is, not surprisingly, a hit on the “must-do” lists of London’s elite. Tea is served daily and is priced typically high, as with most of the big treat tea spots in London, between £48 and £65 per person excluding service, £35 per child for children 4-11 years old. 

To our added amusement, we were escorted past the hotel's legendary Long Bar (quite the scene for cocktails later on, I heard), into the restaurant. I had expected we'd be seated in the modern and refreshing courtyard. Deemed suitable for the "VIP" experience, not sure why, our special tea time was taken within a sheer-blacked curtained circular tent-like dome, in a quiet corner of the restaurant. I suppose if you're Gwyneth Paltrow taking tea with London pals you wouldn't want to be gawked at by fellow guests (taking indiscreet selfies). Lindsey and I didn't think we'd have too much of a problem with that, but my niece was suitably impressed by this extra level of enchanted tea taking, creative, visual and delicious enough for her and executed at a super sophisticated level for the grown ups. 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland turned 150 years old in 2015. Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, better known by his pen name of Lewis Carroll, was an English writer, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. He was a natural storyteller, inventing new stories to entertain his friends. 

According to Aliceinwonderland150.com :"Inspired by real events and a real child, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was dreamt up on a summer’s day in Oxford. The river outing with the Liddell family on 4 July 1862, from Folly Bridge to Godstow, is now famous for the Alice story to which it led. Charles L. Dodgson traveled downriver with the Dean of Christ Church, Oxford (the college at which Charles was a lecturer in Mathematics), and his family. Along the way he told the family a story about a bored little girl called Alice who goes looking for an adventure. The family loved it and at the end of that day, the daughter, Alice Liddell, asked for the story to be written down. Charles Dodgson agreed and began writing the manuscript the next day. It eventually took him two and a half years to complete."

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a publishing sensation, beloved by children and adults alike. Among its first avid readers were Queen Victoria and the young Oscar Wilde. The book has never been out of print and has been translated into at least 176 languages.

I wanted to know about the history of this initially stark looking mid-century modern building, listed for its architectural and historic conservation interest. According to Historicengland.org.uk: "The firm of Sanderson was established in 1860 by Arthur Sanderson, an importer of luxury European wallpapers. It transferred its operations from Islington to Marylebone in 1865, and by 1869 was commissioning its own designs in addition to its imported wares.

In the course of the 20th century, Sanderson established itself as one of London's most fashionable suppliers of wallpapers, textiles and paints. New showrooms and offices, designed by Sir Albert Richardson, were built in Wells Street in the early 1930s, but by the mid-50s the company – granted a Royal Warrant in 1951 after its papers had been used to decorate the Royal Festival Hall – was ready to build on a larger scale.

The architects Slater, Moberly and Uren, who had lately completed the flagship John Lewis store on Oxford Street, were commissioned to design a new headquarters and showroom building to replace Sanderson's original premises in Berners Street."

Design was influenced by US corporate architecture, including the Seagram and Lever buildings in New York. Collaboration between principal architect Reginald Uren, landscape architect John Hicks, interior designer Beverley Pick and artists John Piper and Jupp Dernbach-Mayern places it in the Bauhaus-inspired tradition of the 'art building'.

Construction commenced in 1957 and was completed in time for the company's centenary in 1960. Sanderson vacated the building in 1992 and in 2001 it was converted into a hotel by architects Denton Corker Marshall and interior designer Philippe Starck.

The designer's focus was a surreal Cocteau-like dream world — pared-down, minimalist luxury, tempered with fun and ironic furnishings. My niece was especially delighted to test out the various art form seating throughout the lobby and courtyard (pictured below with her mum, my lovely sister, Lindsey). 

Sanderson Restaurant updates its seasonal menu focusing on British cuisine with a continental influence. Every single member of attentive staff spoke with a different accent from all corners of Europe and beyond, many of whom must be wondering if they, too, have fallen down the rabbit hole, post-Brexit. The cogs on the wheels of London hospitality would grind to an absolute halt if the international workforce disappeared overnight. Quintessential English experiences such as a Mad Hatter's Tea are made all the more cultured and cosmopolitan with such a professional, multi-national team of pastry chefs, kitchen staff and servers. 

Click here for the hotel website, located at 50 Berners Street
London, W1T 3NG
44 0 20 7300 1400

Tea hours are:

Monday through Saturday	12.30PM until 4PM
Sunday	1PM until 5PM

A Visit to Bateman's — Home of Rudyard Kipling

One of my favorite quotes about England, gleaned from my recent visit, this summer, came from the venerable writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book, Kim and multiple other classics. 

For Kipling, the early motor car was a time machine in which centuries slid by like milestones, revealing England (according to wording on signage in the garage at his Jacobean National Trust house Bateman's, where he lived with his family for the latter part of his life) "a land full of stupefying marvels and mysteries . . . a day in the car in an English country is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real."

Rudyard was born in Bombay on December 30th 1865, to John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture and his wife Alice. Rudyard's mother was one four  talented and beautiful Macdonald sisters who each married prominent men, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Poynter, Alfred Baldwin and John Lockwood Kipling himself.

I love a writer's house and in particular, his or her desk. Family and friends know me well enough to plan an outing or two with me in tow when there are literary luminary homesteads in the vicinity to tour. 

My visit to Bateman's was a bit of a surprise — though a good one. I traveled down to East Sussex to visit my sister-in-law Maria and her husband Mark for an overnight with a carefully planned detour the next day to Charleston, home of Virginia Woolf's artist sister Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury Group. Maria had taken a day off work to join me in my cultural pursuit. 

"I've bad news," she announced when I emerged from my dwindling jet-lagged slumber. "It's closed on Tuesdays." July, in England, is apparently not a busy enough month to forgo a weekday closing for the more remote architectural and cultural treasures.

Luckily, my sister Lindsey had suggested Bateman's as a detour, if we had time. Thankfully, the National Trust's terrific organizational skills made for a fascinating tour with some of the friendliest and most informed volunteer docents I've ever come across.    

According to the Kipling Society: "Young Rudyard's earliest years in Bombay were blissfully happy, in an India full of exotic sights and sound. But at the tender age of five He was sent back to England to stay with a foster family in Southsea, where he was desperately unhappy. The experience would color some of his later writing." 

His dad was an illustrator, museum curator and art teacher in India. He created Beast and Man in India: A Popular Sketch of Indian Animals in Their Relations with the People in 1891. He also produced images for some of Rudyard's most prominent works, including The Jungle Book and a later 1901 novel Kim.

The Jungle Book was published in 1894. Rudyard wrote it while living in the States. He married American, Caroline “Carrie” Balestier, in January 1892 —the sister of his friend, writer and editor Wolcott Balestier. The Kiplings purchased land deep in New England from another of Carrie's brothers, Beatty Balestier, in Vermont.

The Kiplings returned to England after a quarrel with Carrie's family, in 1896, first to Rottingdean in East Sussex, then, seeking seclusion a couple of years after the tragic death of the first of the couple's three children,  to the lovely seventeenth century house called Bateman's near Burwash, also in Sussex, where Rudyard spent the rest of his life.

Kipling foresaw the First World War and tried to alert the nation to the need for preparedness. He was employed in writing propaganda material for the British Government during the war years. The Kiplings suffered a second crushing bereavement with the death of their son John, at the age of 18, in the Battle of Loos in 1915.

Above photo only: National Trust

Kipling is considered one of the most prominent literary figures to have lent his voice to the politics of imperialist Europe. In India today, his works are studied as an example of such specific genre. For many years, Rudyard's books and poems were excluded from Indian academic curriculum. 

 Maria and I sat in the tea room at Bateman's and chatted about recent hot topic Brexit news. I would not have been at all surprised if the man of the house had strolled by, pulled up a chair, poured himself a cup of tea and shared with us his trademark no-nonsense take on the current state of affairs. The world is a vastly different place than it was in the early 1900s. Still, such small corners of England remain the same, despite the political turmoil and cosmopolitan urban influence.

Photo od Rudyard Kipling from 1915 biography by John Palmer, published by Henry Holt and Company in New York: [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Aqus Cafe Presents — Gig Posters by Petaluma Poster Artist Katie Kincade. Artists Reception, Saturday July 23rd, 2016 3-5pm

Calling All Home Cooks — Your Chance to Win Big With Gloria Ferrer For Your Tastiest Appetizer

Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards, local producer of California’s most awarded sparkling wines is searching for the tastiest appetizer recipe in the country to pair with its Sonoma Brut.

Budding home cooks age 21 and over are encouraged to channel their inner-foodie and submit their signature appetizer recipe for the 2nd annual nationwide contest. All appetizers will be judged on originality, perceived taste appeal and perceived ability to pair with the Sonoma Brut, a wine that’s been produced by the Sonoma County-based winery since it was founded 30 years ago.

Each recipe entered will be reviewed by a panel of wine and food experts to select the top 18 semi- finalists to participate in three live Regional Semi-Final Cook Off events scheduled to take place Los Angeles, California, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas in September. Only three competitors will move on to the National Finals scheduled for Saturday, October 15, 2025 at Gloria Ferrer Winery in Sonoma, California. For official rules and to enter by August 31, 2016, as well as event ticket information, click here.

“After 30 years of great sparkling winemaking, Gloria Ferrer knows that nothing kicks off the start of a terrific gathering with friends and family than bubbles paired with a few small bites,” says Gloria Ferrer Vice President of Marketing Eva Bertran. “Last year’s winner, Donna Wolfe, a reference librarian from Hamilton, New Jersey wowed us with her Fried Lobster & Goat Cheese Stuffed Zucchini Blossoms with Sweet Thai Chili Dipping Sauce. We can’t wait to see your entries this year and we are thrilled to welcome a new panel of judges to help us critique them.”

Gloria Ferrer has tapped five expert foodies from around the country to serve as judges at each of this year’s events:

Chef Stuart O’Keeffe—Glorious Bites Semi-Final, Los Angeles, CA
Stuart is an Irish celebrity chef, food writer and TV personality best known for his appearances on Food Network’s Private Chefs of Beverly Hills, NBC’s Today Show, CBS’s The Talk and his AOL series Kitchen Daily 101. His recent cookbook “The Quick Six Fix,” which focuses on recipes that consist of 6 Ingredients, 6 minute Prep and 6 minute Cleanup published by Harper Collins, went to #1 in Cookbooks the first week on Amazon.

Nycci Nellis—Glorious Bites Semi-Final, Washington, D.C.
Nycci is a food and wine journalist whose website, www.TheListAreYouOnIt.com, has been called "one of the DC area’s premier resources for information about all things food and wine in DC and beyond,” by the Washington Post. She is a regularly featured guest on DC’s Fox and CBS affiliates, is co-host of the weekly DC area food and wine radio show, Foodie and the Beast and is a dominant presence on social media for her thousands of devoted followers.

Linda Nguyen—Glorious Bites Semi-Final, Austin, TX
Linda is addicted to travel and delicious bites and sips and has been sharing her adventures in travel and cuisine on her food blog Girl Eats World since 2009. Currently, she also serves on the board of Austin Food Bloggers Alliance.

Sara Deseran—Glorious Bites Finals, Sonoma, CA
Sara is a longtime San Francisco-based food writer and the editor-at-large for San Francisco magazine. While contributing to magazines such as Saveur, Women's Health, and C magazine, she has published four cookbooks, most recently Tacolicious (Ten Speed Press). The latter is no coincidence. Today, on top of writing, she works as the Director of Marketing and Branding for Tacolicious, the growing, SF-based restaurant group she co-owns with her husband Joe Hargrave.

Executive Chef Jennifer Luttrell, Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company---Glorious Bites Overall Judge Jennifer Luttrell has been the Executive Chef of The Fork, my favorite regional Culinary and Educational Center on the Giacomini family dairy at Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company in Point Reyes, California, since 2011. As an added bonus to this year’s competition, Gloria Ferrer has partnered with Jennifer to create a delicious appetizer using the iconic Point Reyes Original Blue!

Download custom appetizer recipes from judges including Jennifer's perfectly paired Apple-Onion Chutney Point Reyes Original Blue Crostini as well as information on the Gloria Ferrer Sonoma Brut and full bios for all of our judges at www.gloriousbites.com.

A pioneering history and approach to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay have made Gloria Ferrer Caves & Vineyards a leader in California sparkling wine for almost 30 years. Founded in 1986 in Sonoma, California, by the Ferrer family of Spain, Gloria Ferrer combines the best of sparkling wine growing history with the bounty of the Carneros wineg rowing region using time-honored méthode champenoise winemaking traditions and centuries-old sustainable practices. Gloria Ferrer produces the most awarded California sparkling wines that have won over 400 gold medals and received 50 outstanding 90+ point ratings in the last 5 years. Discover the Glorious Life at www.gloriaferrer.com.

First Missive From Post-Brexit Trip Over The Pond

Time for a post after a hiatus as I traveled over the Pond to visit family in the UK immediately post Brexit. I'm still processing the experience after talking (mostly listening) to so many people with so many different takes on this monumental and controversial decision made by the popular vote.

I'll be posting more on my travels in the next few weeks, though we're the midst of moving house and everything is a bit topsy turvy. 

My journalism college friend Bev whom I visited in Wanstead, handed me a print out of a poem by newspaper man, playwright, poet, short-story and children's writer John Agard. This super talented artist was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1949. He moved to the UK in the late 70s to become a touring lecturer for the Commonwealth Institute, traveling to schools throughout the UK to promote a better understanding of Caribbean culture. In 1993, John was appointed Writer in Residence at the South Bank Centre, London and became Poet in Residence at the BBC in London.

It felt to me, after more than my fair share of pots of tea, scones, jam and clotted cream, that his immigrant voice in his popular "Alternative Anthem" poem continues to capture the spirit of the people and how they move forward as a nation in the wake of the decision to break away from the European Union.

 

"Put the kettle on

Put the kettle on

It is the British answer

to Armageddon.

 

Never mind taxes are rise

Never mind trains are late

One thing you can be sure of

and that's the kettle, mate.

 

It's not whether you lose

It's not whether you win 

It's whether or not you've plugged the kettle in."

John Agard — for full poem click here