Halloween drive-thru, Sonoma Cheese Factory liquor, hoedown with Emmylou Harris

After a huge success and fabulous food last Halloween, Sonoma Overnight Support (SOS) hosts its second annual Halloween Drive-Thru Dinner, which might even surpass last year’s event that drew many raves.

SOS, which strives to house those without homes and feed the hungry in Sonoma Valley, has served 34,000 meals so far this year, now averaging about 5,000 meals per month out of the Springs Community Hall.

Each Halloween drive-thru meal you order will provide 11 meals to a local person in need.

This year chefs Dan Kahn and Dawn McIntosh and capable volunteer chefs will serve a menu of mushroom toast of cremini mushrooms, sautéed with thyme and garlic, finished with balsamic vinegar and topped with Laura Chenel goat cheese and tomato coulis with roasted pine nuts and wasabi microgreens on crostini.

The salad course includes a roasted bosc pear, gorgonzola cheese on local Sonoma greens with port vinaigrette. The herb-crusted prime rib is from a standing rib roast with garlic and sour cream mashed German butterball potatoes and mixed roasted root vegetables. The vegetarian entrée will be a roasted portobello steak with seared French green beans, charred onion and chimichurri. Those root vegetables include young carrots, baby parsnips, French breakfast radish, scallions and shallots tossed in a balsamic reduction.

And the dessert will be a fragrant lemon curd tartelette made from Meyer lemons.

All wines are donated by La Chertosa Wines and Sam Sebastiani.

Ordering options:

•Serving for one: $65 – provides 11 meals for those in need

•Serving for two: $140 includes one bottle of wine

•Serving for four: $275 includes two bottles of wine

Place your order by Oct. 9 either at sonomaovernightsupport.org (click on “Halloween”) or call 939-6777 and leave a message including your phone number, and someone will call you back.

Pick up is at drive-thru at Springs Community Hall (formerly the Grange) from 4 to 6 p.m., Oct. 16. 18627 Sonoma Highway, Sonoma.

Nibs & Sips

Sonoma Cheese Factory

Sonoma’s Best has finally applied for a license to sell beer and wine at the Sonoma Cheese Factory, which Ken and Stacey Mattson purchased in 2020 and have had partly opened on weekends since then.

Previous calls to the ABC showed no application for transfer of license previously, but they continued to sell beer and wine, claiming they could apply the licenses they had at Sonoma’s Best and Seven Branches (formerly Ramekins). Given their multiple LLCs, it’s sometimes hard to track.

Bill Howell moves to Viansa

Bill Howell has migrated to Viansa to manage the tasting room on the hill for Jon Sebastiani and Vintage Wine Estates. Previously Howell served in management roles at Tasca Tasca and HopMonk Tavern in Sonoma.

New jewelry store and ‘artisery’

Finally there is a new tenant going in next to Heidi Geffen’s Tiddle E. Winks on the first block of East Napa Street.

Spiral Jewelry and Artisery is the soon to be newcomer with one shop already established on Kentucky Street in Petaluma.

The word “artisery” puzzled me (and Google) as did the word “foodierge” a couple of weeks ago. From Spiral’s website photos, it appears to refer to artful jewelry.

Napa Truffle Festival

While it is somewhat expensive to attend and enjoy, the January 2022 Truffle Festival has been canceled due to COVID-19 to protect staff and guests.

The good news is that the American Truffle Company has launched Truffle TV featuring Chef Ken Frank of La Toque in Napa, debuting on Saturday, Dec. 11.

Vinyl & Wine

Carneros Resort will host Vinyl & Wine Oct. 1. Well they aren’t exactly “hosting” it. They are playing vinyl records and offering wines from different wineries each month along with a “decadent raw bar station and seasonal small bites” for sale.

Guests looking for fun and good wine get to pay for the wine and raw food bar with a chance to taste some of Scribe’s best on Friday, Oct. 1, and from Gundlach Bundschu on Friday, Nov. 5.

Check it out at Farm at Carneros, 4048 Sonoma Highway, as the resort calls it, Napa. 299-4950.

Rancho Gordo takes over the Chronicle

April fools. Or September fools.

It just seems that way since Steve Sando, everyone’s Baron of Beans, is featured in three upcoming stories in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sando says that the stories are currently behind the Chronicle’s paywall and will be available in print on Sunday, Oct. 3.

There is even a story on how Sando cooks beans. Follow the simple recipe on the side of each package of Rancho Gordo beans and you are home free.

I love to cook them and give them to friends, if they will or can eat beans without getting “musical.” Beans are loaded with everything good. They are rich in plant protein, fiber, B-vitamins, iron, folate, calcium, potassium, phosphorus and zinc. Most beans are also low in fat, until you add some that is.

Steve Sando and his Rancho Gordo beans and crew deserve all the praise anyone can heap on them. He’s very modest about what his Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc Project has done for small villages in Mexico by encouraging and helping them grow their indigenous bean crops, valuing them and selling them to us while educating us on how to respect, cook and share the beans.

Rancho Gordo’s headquarters includes a small showroom area where you can buy their products as well as those of Sando’s friends in Mexico along with his large collection of Mexican movie posters. You can email pickup orders to pickup@ranchogordo.com. To place an order by phone, and for any general inquiries, call 259-1935 and press 0. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and Saturday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 1924 Yajome Street, Napa.

Sando recently had to postpone Rancho Gordo’s 20th birthday party until next spring out of Covid caution, but tells the Index-Tribune “20 years sounds like a good long time but I blinked and here we are. We still feel like a start-up — a poorly organized start-up with lots of heart and enthusiasm.”

And that’s why we love him.

Haystack Farm celebrates harvest with Emmylou Harris

Haystack Farm, the Sonoma farm that grows hundreds of pounds of produce and thousands of flowers to give away every week, hosted a private party last Saturday as their first “Haystack Harvest Hoedown.”

Taylor Mac and his band performed behind the old main house. We found Mac to be a wonderfully zany Stockton native who now works in and out of New York. Mac is a remarkable person with an engaging voice, a beard, a headdress made of old plants, a dress, and a shawl, to say nothing of the gold lamé opera length gloves, all designed by Machine Dazzle.

Chefs John Stewart and Duskie Estes often bring their Black Piglet food truck and cook for staff events on the property when Estes isn’t on the job running the fabulously generous Farm to Pantry program, a Santa Rosa nonprofit that distributes donated farm foods to those among us who are extremely hungry.

Volunteers will even come pick apples or plums off your backyard tree if you wish. Estes and Haystack Farm strongly encourage anyone with a little space to grow and donate from their fruit tree, have an extra row available in their vineyard to grow vegetables, or even patio tomatoes to give to Farm to Pantry to distribute.

Since the vegetables were planted at Haystack only in mid-May of this year, Estes and Farm to Pantry volunteers have harvested 12,000 pounds of produce, yielding 43,000 servings donated to Sonoma Overnight Support and others in Sonoma Valley and around the county.

According to Estes, the abundant and beautiful flowers, grown at Haystack by Dan Payne, produce about 400 bouquets a week to be given to cancer patients through the Ceres Project, to La Luz to give to people who come in for COVID-19 vaccinations, to Burbank Homes neighborhoods, and to Farm to Pantry to distribute elsewhere. Estes estimates the bouquets, on average, each make four smiles, resulting in 16,000 smiles a week, and a total of 30,000 smiles to date.

Taylor Mac is actually an American actor, playwright, performance artist, director, producer and singer-songwriter. In 2017, Mac was the recipient of a Genius Grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and was also a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

And then there was Machine Dazzle, a pre-eminent New York costume designer who often creates using only found materials, who put together Taylor Mac’s outfit for the night, and designed and made all of the décor for the Haystack Harvest Hoedown. At 6-foot-5, Machine produced a mobile, a wall of hanging empty wine bottles and a huge ball covered with dead plants that hung from a giant crane erected over a bridge to light the way after dark. The New Yorker has said Machine “embodies a new kind of Surrealism.”

The next course of the evening was dinner at three long tables set by caterer Paula LeDuc on the permanent mowed grass between elegant planter boxes where lots of this goodness is grown. Duskie Estes, executive director of Farm to Pantry and Queen of Glean in Sonoma County, addressed the entire party during dinner and read a Robert Frost poem that is printed on the back of Haystack Farms’ olive green hoodies. She and Haystack are devoted and dedicated to growing and distributing organic vegetables to those in need and hope others will join in.

LeDuc’s crew served platters of three salads to start: peaches on arugula with basil and Parmesan, red and golden Chioggia beets with lemon and pistachios, and tabletop rectangular planter boxes of farmer “Jerome’s Blend” microgreens with little scissors so you could cut your own and enjoy as a salad or topping. Jerome is Jerome Cunnie, a Sonoma Valley High School graduate who looks forward to sharing his farming secrets with our Sonoma School Garden coordinators.

The deep-fried chicken had a crackling and crunchy skin, the sliced hanger steak was grilled perfectly, and the roasted Rosemary fingerling potatoes were addictive. Roasted cauliflower arrived with cornbread muffins and honey butter.

Everyone enjoyed constantly and generously poured Beltane Ranch’s regeneratively farmed sauvignon blanc and Black Pig Syrah.

Then it was off to the barn for Emmylou Harris, unless you stopped by the outdoor kitchen counter loaded with pies and ice cream. Inside the barn, a large peace symbol covered with garden sunflowers was the only and meaningful decoration on the wall.

Wearing her trademark long black sleeveless sheath, she was accompanied by “my boys” on a variety of guitars and bass, and eventually by Taylor Mac and her friend “Laurie” who ran up to the stage and played fiddle for the last few songs, the finale, and encore, creating a true foot-stomping, hand clapping country hoedown.

Emmylou Harris has won 14 Grammys and entry into the Country Music Hall of Fame. She and her friends will play Monday, Oct. 4, at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa.