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This past Sunday in the Chron’s Food & Wine section was a special tabbed section called “Wine Country” with emphasis on the town of Sonoma. Now, I know some of you are tired of reading about or listening to what are the best wineries blah, blah, blah. But hey, you gotta admit there are new wineries and restaurants opening all the time while there are also the tried and try which you never got around to trying. So bear with me this time, follow the links and see what you think about the wineries and restaurants listed for the town of Sonoma. Which reminds me there are those of you who still get confused with the town of Sonoma, Sonoma Valley and Sonoma County, what’s up with that?

The following link is for the restaurant recommendations:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/07/25/FDV91EDJNA.DTL

This link is for the wineries:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2010/07/25/FDKG1EE92I.DTL

“I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”  H. Belloc, writer/historian

Can you tell me,  have you wandered or have you travelled, where and why?

Oh I think I made a joke, get it - whine not. What I’m trying to say is that both our hotels are in the wine country of Sonoma County, Northern CA, but there is a whole lot of other non-winery, family, group, couple, dog kind of stuff to do. If you just came from one of our websites, winecountryqi.com or winecountryfi.com and you didn’t notice all the recommendations for things to do and see - then go back, yes go back and read the site carefully.

Oh, and then try this - visit www.costtodrive.com or www.fuelcostcalculator.com and figure out how much gas and the cost of that gas to get to us and back home. So, you’ll not only have the info on what to do where but you’ll know how much to pay to get here.

Let me know if any of this works for you because it’s summer time and you know and I know you want to go some where and not just stay in your zip code until August.

Well not exactly stomp, but stroll, saunter, maybe even run, on a self-guided tour through four different wineries. Every wanted to walk among the vines and learn about what it takes to get those puppies growing and producing the grapes.  Right now there are four participating wineries, Mantanzas Creek, Paradise Ridge, Balletto Vineyards and Mauritson Winery each route is less than a mile long and the self-guided tours emphasize sustainable farming.  Just show up at the tasting room, ask for a laminated vineyard guide and away you go. Make it a long slow informative jaunt or whip through it and end in the tasting room. With the weather being so agreeable now, there’s no better time to be outside and get your share of vitamin D, exercise and education . www.sonomavineyardadventures.com or 522-5860

My weak attempt at a little Chinese humor. Jook is actually rice porridge, maybe you remember what Oliver Twist asked for more of ? Unfortunately because of that memory association - it was a great movie musical though - rice porridge has a terrible reputation.

Anyway, the reason I bring jook up is because at our Fairfield Inn & Suites last Sunday we had a group of 23 “mainland” Chinese stay. Wow, we thought, here’s a great possibility of a group tour lead. As it turned out as we dug deeper as to who and why these people came to Sebastopol of all places to visit, a business in town actually has something manufactured in China where these people work. And the American business owner decided to bring his Chinese employees over to the US for short tour of the Bay Area and his headquarters in Sebastopol. What a great boss - all expenses paid for 23 employees.

So, because our family is Chinese and we have traveled extensively to Mainland China, Hong Kong etc - we know about missing recognizable food from home. So we made a large soup pot of jook and brought it to them to have for breakfast the next morning. Jook is very versatile because it can be eaten for breakfast, lunch, dinner, when you’re sick, late night snack - anytime really. Well, they loved loved loved it and ate every bit.

Lastly, we added something extra to our jook that a Chinese person will appreciate, preserved scallops - phew, very stinky, fishy smell - but yummy in the jook.  Which brings me back to Oliver Twist, that fishy smell will uphold the negative memories of rice porridge as much as the association with it being the gruel that Oliver ate in the orphanage.

Oh and finally, sometimes a hotel will go the extra mile to put a smile on a wary traveler’s face especially if they’ve travelled over 13 hours to get to us.

On Easter weekend, we took my mother in-law on Saturday to Macy’s on Union Square in SF to view their annual spring flower show. The flower arrangements were lush and colorful and an uplifting symbol to entering spring. Afterward, we mosied over to Grant Ave and walked into Chinatown where my brother in-law wanted to try out a tea tasting shop that had just reopened as a clean, bright, modern hole in the wall place set among the t-shirt shops and the busy main street of Chinatown - Red Blossom Tea Company, www.redblossomtea.com. In the past few years that tea has become the new coffee, I’ve passed over being lured into these shops but because we were with my brother in-law this was an opportunity to see how the tea tasting process worked. Much like wine tasting, you are able to select from a wall of tea containers any number of teas you want to taste. I pot is brewed with the precise temperature of water and you taste until you find your cup of tea. The proprietor told us that many wine enthusiasts are tea enthusiasts, tea leaves taste are affected by region, weather, elevation, oxidation etc. Pricing, well it’s not your mother’s pricing - leaves can start from $4 per ounce up to whatever for that one of a kind leaf that they only carry one time and only have 7lbs of. A person could quickly become a tea snob - just like I know that I’m a decaf nonfat Mocha, no whip fan, I now know I’m a Formosa Oolong Tung Ting fan - who da thought.

Proust

” The real voyage of discovery consist not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”  from good ol’ Proust

It’s time to not take people, places and things for granted

“What is this life if, full of care, we have not time to stop and stare?

- W.H. Davis, Poet and Writer

The weather this morning sucked - drizzle and a howling wind - but I ran any way and it felt good. But most people cringe if they thought they had to run or even worse, run in the rain. So here’s a little tidbit on what to do this Sunday that has nothing to do with rain - hopefully it doesn’t - and nothing to do with drinking - maybe afterwards.

Point Reyes. Over Valentines/President’s weekend that’s where the nature lovers went. It wasn’t too crowded but people were out because it was very “spring-like” weather. We started at the Visitors Center and walked the Earthquake Trail. It was beautifully quiet and educational at the same time.  Then we drove over to the beach, sat and watched the waves crash. It was so misty from the churning water but it wasn’t too cold. By then we were hungry and stopped in Inverness at Pricilla’s Pizza and Cafe for a tasty lunch before driving off to our last stop, what use to be Johnson’s Oyster Farm, and we bought two dozen medium, briny, bivalve molluscs - yum, yum.

Sometimes we forget what we have in our own backyard.  

The waves were churning and spray was every where.

Heirloom seeds! Petaluma’s newest retail store at the corner of Petaluma Blvd. North and E. Washington Street is Baker Creek Seed Bank. Fittingly housed in the historic Sonoma County National Bank building, the seed bank sells heirloom veggie, fruit, flower and herb seeds that your Grandmother or your Grandmother’s mother use to plant. Baker’s main store is located in Mansfield Missouri and this is their 1st store in the West.

In a time where Marion Nestle and Michael Pollen are making us aware of what we eat, many of us are looking at trying our hand at growing the fruits or vegtables our grandparents grew or ate when they were growing up. This is the seed store to visit.

Baker Creek Seed Bank - 199 Petaluma Blvd. North, closed on Saturdays, www.rareseeds.com