Foodies who used to line up for hours when the fab Made in France/Village Imports would occasionally open its gourmet warehouse to the public, will rejoice at the news:
The former owners have opened a retail store, the Gourmet Corner, 873 N. San Mateo Drive in San Mateo (three blocks south of the Burlingame train station), which is open daily, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Just in time for your holiday gift-giving comes the new rockin’ Food Gal military cap with signature embroidered logo. It’s the perfect accessory for all your food-loving pals, as well as for yourself. Natch!
Choose mocha, olive or black.
Don’t forget, there’s also a wide range of other Food Gal items, including aprons, tote bags, and girly T’s.
Guys aren’t left out, either. Find manly Meat Boy aprons and T’s, named for my carnivore husband.
Enjoy special wines, music, arts & crafts, and a visit from Santa, noon to 5 p.m. Dec. 6-7 at “Holidays in the Vineyards.”
More than 40 Livermore wineries will be pouring their specialties this weekend. Wine tasting prices vary by winery.
Artisan chocolatier Christopher Blue has elevated the art of chocolate making to a whole new level at Chocolatier Blue in central Berkeley, which opened earlier this summer.
Blue, who has worked with the likes of Chef Charlie Trotter of Chicago, is the only chocolatier in the United States to use Amedei chocolate from Tuscany that’s made from 100 percent Venezuelan sun-dried cacao beans. He also uses Five Star organic butter, which has the highest fat content of any butter in the world.
His chocolates are organic. What’s more, the fillings are made using such techniques as grilling, roasting, and sous vide. The packaging is all biodegradable, and much of it made from recyclable materials.
I’ll use my patented scale of 1 to 10 lip-smackers, with 1 being the “Bleh, save your money” far end of the spectrum; 5 being the “I’m not sure I’d buy it, but if it was just there, I might nibble some” middle-of-the-road response; and 10 being the “My gawd, I could die now and never be happier, because this is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth” supreme ranking.
(Today’s post is dedicated with graditude and admiration to my dear gal pals — Joanne, Lisa, and Elizabeth.)
If only we owned enough couture to be part of the “Lipstick Jungle.” And sorry, we’re far too prudish to boast the boudoir high jinks of “Sex and the City.”
What we are is the “Woo Hoo Wednesday Club.”
We are four women of color _ two of us married, and two of us single. Two of us are in our 40s, one is in her 30s, and one is in her 50s. Once merely friendly acquaintances, we are now true bosom buddies, drawn tighter into sisterhood by circumstances beyond our control. Each of us was laid off from our jobs. From the same newspaper. On the same day.
Layoffs are nothing new in Silicon Valley, where life changes in a nanosecond. One year a company is soaring stratospherically; the next it’s plummeting in freefall off the NASDAQ.
Yet for three of us, this was a brand new experience. All of a sudden a pink slip was not a girly, silk undergarment we donned to feel pretty, but something ugly and demeaning thrust upon us that we were forced to wear.
Joanne is a photographer. Elizabeth is a features designer. Lisa and I are writers. For years at our former company, that is what we were. Now, together, we hope to find what we can be next.
For anyone who has been summarily dismissed from a job they not only loved but were damn good at, there is shock, there is anger, there is sorrow, and there is more than plenty of fear.
We lugged all that to the table for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon, as we sat together at a cushy, red banquette over morsels of dim sum and icy glasses of Thai basil lemonade.
It wasn’t long before something surprising happened: As we began devouring dumplings, we also began filling up on collective strength. It was lunch — girl power-style.
Lisa dubbed it “Woo Hoo Wednesday” for how cathartic and empowering it proved to be. After all, nobody really knows what you’re going through except someone else going through it, too.
