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Once a year for the past five or six years I have visited French friends who live in Saint-Sulpice-sur-Tarn, a small village in the south of France that has several good bakeries and butcher shops. The first full day in the village I usually wander down to the boulangerie and…

At 31, Rachel Kohn Obut has farmed and gardened with passion ever since she graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio just over ten years ago. More recently and especially since 2011, she has learned heaps about the therapeutic properties of growing and harvesting vegetables, pulling weeds and planting seeds. As the…

The most trending post on our social media this past month was a message about cilantro on our Facebook page, “Why 10% of the Population Hates Cilantro and the Rest Doesn’t Know Any Better.”  The posting reached, as we write, about 6500 people with 27 likes, 9 comments and 26 shares and strengthened the…

Look what photo we found in a drawer of ours: Slow Food President and Founder, Carlo Petrini, with Susan Campbell (left) and Paula Shatkin (right)! In 2008, in the run up to Slow Food Nation, the first national Slow Food event in the U.S., Carlo Petrini visited us here in northern California and…

As good as Sonoma restaurants can be, it’s probably fair to say that if you want the very best food and wine in this part of the world you won’t find it at any restaurant, at least not during normal business hours, though “best” is certainly subjective. The best tacos…

One hot day, in June of last year, my mom and sister and I drove to Sebastopol for, what my mom told me, was a Gravenstein Apple video shooting for Slow Food.  It was so hot that it felt like our truck was melting. I hadn’t been to Sebastopol much,…

When a popular restaurant closes, albeit briefly, it seems to cause consternation whether in small villages such as Glen Ellen or big towns such as San Francisco. This winter when the small (just 42 seats)  the fig café closed its doors for renovations, foodies in and around Glen Ellen in rural…

The apple harvest in Sonoma County runs about three months, beginning with the arrival of the renowned Gravenstein in mid-August and continuing into November with the late-bearing varieties.  The volunteers of Slow Food are very busy during that time, but the apple trees are busy all year long.  If you want to engage with apple trees now, there’s no better way…

This past November, I was a lucky delegate from our Slow Food chapter to Terra Madre, a biennial gathering of 5,000 delegates from every corner of the globe to share their stories and learn from each other on behalf of the earth, farming, and biodiversity. It is a huge coming-together…