Category Archives: Enticing Events

New Cupcake Bakery, Food Truck Gathering in San Jose & Much More

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A chocolate cupcake from Sinful Bliss. (Photo courtesy of the bakery)

Who’s Hungry for Cupcakes?

Downtown Pleasant Hill welcomes a sinful addition in April — Sinful Bliss Cupcakes, to be exact.

Owner Tammie Parnell believes in celebrating life’s everyday moments with something sweet. After surviving breast cancer, being laid off from her banking job and watching her husband lose his own job, she decided to bet the future on her love of baking.

Her cupcake shop offers a dozen flavors, including chocolate peanut butter cup, Nutella, raspberry and Red Velvet cheesecake. Mini ones are $2 each; regular size ones are $3.25 each. Parnell also does custom designs upon request.

Sinful Bliss Cupcakes will celebrate its grand opening at 10 a.m. April 17 with a ribbon-cutting and free tastings. The event is also a fund-raiser for the Pleasant Hill Middle School Art Department, which will receive 100 percent of that day’s cupcake profits. The students will be creating inspired artwork, which will be displayed at the bakery.

Morever, during the grand opening, children are invited to make their own cupcake design. Fifty of the winning designs will be made and sold on April 23, with profits of the sales going to Pleasant Hill Elementary School.

Custom cupcakes from Sinful Bliss. (Photo courtesy of the bakery)

A Food Truck Meet-Up in San Jose

Aren’t you tired of hearing about all those great food truck gatherings in that city to the North and that other one to the East?

Well, South Bay foodies, you don’t have to feel left out anymore. Here’s the event you’ve been waiting for –  SJEats: A Moveable Feast, noon to 8 p.m. April 2 in the Fallon House parking lot at Saint John Street and Almaden Avenue in San Jose.

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Healthful Pizza, Ruth Reichl Visit, Chef Demo & More

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The Mexican pizza at ZPizza in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy of the restaurant)

Organic Wheat Flour Pizzas in San Francisco

Laguna Beach, Calif.-based ZPizza, which has more than 90 locations nationwide, now has a locale in San Francisco at 833 Mission St., Suite C (at Fourth Street).

The pizza dough is made from certified organic wheat flour, the sauces are prepared fresh daily, and the cheese is part-skim, rBGH-free mozzarella from grass-fed cows. Gluten-free crust and vegan cheese also are offered. Gourmet ingredients include cremini and shiitake mushrooms, as well as truffle oil and the African hot sauce known as pili pili. For delivery, the pizzas are ferried via bicycles to reduce carbon emissions. Gourmet salads, pastas and sandwiches round out the menu.

Pizza choices include the Thai, with peanut sauce, mozzarella, spicy chicken, cilantro, bean sprouts and serranos; the Mexican with housemade salsa, mozzarella, spicy lime chicken, green onions, avocado, sour cream and cilantro; and the Casablanca, with roasted garlic sauce, mozzarella, ricotta, mushrooms, artichoke hearts and parmesan. Pizzas are $10.95 for a small, $19.95 for a large, and $24.94 for an extra-large.

The one and only Ruth Reichl. (Photo by Fiona Aboud)

Ruth Reichl at Stanford University

Join former Gourmet magazine Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl at a free event at the Cubberley Auditorium on the Stanford University Campus in Palo Alto at 6 p.m. March 29.

Reichl, now an editor and author at Random House, will be speaking on “The Intersection of Food, Culture and History.”

A Different Look at Vanilla, Saffron and Chocolate

Sure, they taste good. But did you know all three of those ingredients are rife with politics?

Learn all about the intrigue in getting these three ingredients from harvest to plate at “Politics of the Plate — What’s Behind the Silky Sexiness of Vanilla, Saffron and Chocolate,” 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. March 16 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of San Francisco (Starr King room), 1187 Franklin St. at Geary Street.

Experts Patricia Rain (vanilla), Juan San Mames (saffron) and Mark Magers (chocolate) will be on the panel with moderator Janet Fletcher, a San Francisco Chronicle food writer.

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Food Gal Giveaway — Luxe Ferrari-Red Espresso/Beverage Maker

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One lucky Food Gal reader will win this snazzy Kaldi beverage system.

I like to call this the Ferrari of coffee makers because of the sleek, 125-mph metallic color. Can’t you imagine yourself test-driving this baby in your own kitchen?

One of you will get the chance to do just that because Food Gal is giving one lucky person the gift of a new Kaldi single-beverage system by the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. It’s valued at $149. How’s that for a contest to perk you up on a Monday morning?

You can make espresso, brewed coffee, tea and other specialty beverages just by inserting a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf capsule in the machine. The Kaldi has a twin pressure system, so that you get high pressure to create the crema on an espresso, and lower pressure for brewed coffee and tea. The machine, which can accommodate a variety of mug sizes, comes with a sampler pack of 12 capsules containing coffee, tea and espresso.

Contest: Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be accepted through midnight March 19. Winner will be announced March 21.

How to win?

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Food Gal Giveaway — Tickets to the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show

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A gorgeous protea. (Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show)

Step inside the 26th annual San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, March 23-27, for a real whiff of spring.

Get ideas for your own backyard by checking out 20 full-sized garden installations from top Bay Area designers, including a 6,000-square-foot “Homestead” by Star Apple Edible Gardens of Oakland, which will feature a chicken coop and demonstrations on beer and jam making.

Indeed, this year’s show — which takes place at the San Mateo Event Center — is full of foodie fun. For the first time, the show will feature a series of cooking demonstrations by Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley (March 26), Sean Baker of Gather restaurant in Berkeley (March 23), and Jeffrey Stout of Alexander’s Steakhouse in Cupertino and San Francisco (March 25).

Additionally, the Livermore Valley Wine Growers Association will debut a new wine garden tasting area.

A garden exhibit from a previous year. (Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show)

The show also will include seminars, book signings, a farmers market and a marketplace with more than 200 vendors selling everything from plants to seeds to tools.

Filmmaker Deborah Garcia will be showing scenes from her newest documentary, “Symphony of the Soil,” which examines the state of community based and scientific growing practices around the globe.

Advance tickets are $16 online for a single day or at the door for $20. A multi-day, all-show pass is $25; a half-day pass is $15; and children under $16 are admitted free at all times.

The Food Gal is happy to be able to give away three pairs of multi-day passes. Yes, tickets good for any and all days of the show. Tickets are valued at $50 per pair.

Contest: Entries are limited to those who can attend the show in San Mateo, March 23-27. Entries will be accepted through midnight March 12. Winners will be announced March 14.

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Food Gal Giveaway — Chef Gabrielle Hamilton’s New Book

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Chef Gabriel Hamilton's new memoir.

“Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef.” The title says it all, doesn’t it?

It’s the new memoir (Random House) by Chef-Proprietor Gabrielle Hamilton of much-loved Prune restaurant in New York, which is adored by other chefs for its soulful, no-nonsense approach, as well as for its roasted marrow bones, fried sweetbreads and extensive menu of Bloody Marys.

I’ve always been impressed by the articles Hamilton has penned for the New York Times Dining section. With a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, she’s one chef who really knows how to craft a beautiful, evocative sentence.

I just started reading her book (which I received a review copy of). It’s  a frank, honest recounting of her rather bohemian childhood, raised by her set designer father and former ballerina mother in a burnt-out, 19th Century silk mill in rural Pennsylvania, where they threw great parties complete with baby lambs roasting on spits and wine bottles chilling in the nearby creek. That life came crashing down when her parents split up when Hamilton was only in her teens. She started smoking, shop-lifting and got her first job washing dishes in a restaurant when she was only 13.

She spent many tumultuous years trying to find herself, before opening her restaurant, which she called “prune,” after the nickname her mother had for her as a child.

As she wrote about her vision for the restaurant, “There would be no foam and no ‘conceptual’ or ‘intellectual’ food; just the salty, sweet, starchy, brothy, crispy things that one craves when one is actually hungry. There would be nothing tall on the plate, the portions would be generous, there would be no emulsions, no crab cocktail served in a martini glass with its claw hanging over the rim. In ecstatic farewell to my years of corporate catering, we would never serve anything but a martini in a martini glass. Preferably gin. I wanted all of that crammed into this little filthy gem….”

Meet Hamilton when she visits the Bay Area this week. She’ll host a dinner with Book Passage at Left Bank restaurant in Larkspur, 6:30 p.m. March 10. Tickets are $100 per person or $170 per couple, and includes dinner and a signed copy of her book.

March 11, she’ll conduct a book-signing at noon on March 11 at Rakestraw Books in Danville. Tickets are $20 each. Reservations are required by calling (925) 837-7337. Then, that evening, she’ll be the guest at a special dinner at Camino restaurant in Oakland. The evening starts at 6 p.m. with Negronis, hors d’oeuvres and a book-signing, followed by dinner at about 7 p.m. Tickets are $100 per person. Reservations are required.

March 12 from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., Hamilton will swing by Omnivore Books in San Francisco for a book-signing.

If you miss those events, you’ll be glad to know that Food Gal is giving away one free copy of Hamilton’s book.

Contest: Entries, limited to those in the continental United States, will be taken through midnight PST March 12. Winner will be announced March 14.

How to win?

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