If you’re up for a last-minute excursion, you might consider heading to the spectacular Monterey Bay Aquarium for Cooking for Solutions, a two-day fete that begins Friday night. The celebrity-studded seafood celebration is designed to focus attention on the health of our oceans and benefits the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.
Festivities begin with a Friday night reception honoring Jacques Pepin, followed by the Cooking for Solutions Gala, which will include a talk by Pepin, who will be introduced by Alice Waters, last year’s honoree. Guests at the party receive a signed copy of Pepin’s memoir, “The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen,” one of the more charming culinary biographies you’ll find.
There are several events on Saturday, including a breakfast with cooking demonstrations, a Sustainable Seafood Information Fair and special farm and vineyard tours in the Monterey area. A few of the tours, including a visit to Jekel Vineyards with Sonoma County’s John Ash as guide, are sold out but events were still open as of press time. For more information, visit the aquarium’s web site at www.mbayaq.org.
Seafood Watch monitors ongoing research about the fish and shellfish we eat. Based on information from several sources in the scientific community, Seafood Watch divides seafood into three categories, the species we can eat with relative abandon, those we can enjoy now and then and those we should avoid entirely. The results are published in a series of national and regional wallet-sized cards, which are updated frequently. The web site includes printable versions of the cards.
Art and Pizza: Tonight, Bricks Pizza – formerly Twisted Vine Restaurant – hosts a benefit for Sonoma County Union of the Arts, a nascent nonprofit organization dedicated to working with local artists in a variety of ways. The evening begins at 6 and includes a silent auction. Bricks is located at 16 Kentucky St., Petaluma, 766-8162, inside the Lan Mart Building.
The inspiration for SCUA comes from Trevor Cole and Todd Grady. For a couple of years now, Zebulon’s Lounge in Petaluma has hosted a weekly literary salon, LiveWire, on Tuesdays. From 7 to 8:30 p.m., guest hosts introduce local writers – some well known, some new to the art – who present short readings organized around a specific theme. All along, one of the unsung heroes of the weekly salons has been Cole, who tends bar and makes sure the music is turned off when the reading begins. The nights usually conclude with a reminder by the host to be sure to tip the bartender. Now young Cole is stepping out from behind the bar to organize this new endeavor.
What really caught our eye about this new project is its focus on music and arts education. As we all know, art and music instruction in public schools has all but vanished and we applaud this grassroots effort to take musicians and artists into the classroom. In addition, SCUA plans ongoing lecture and performance series, screenings of silent films, public concerts and scholarships.
For more information about SCUA, call 318-3512 or write to scua@hotmail.com.
Pinot alert: On Saturday, Woodenhead hosts a party celebrating the release of its ’02 vintage at the crush pad of Topolos Winery at Russian River Vineyards (5700 Gravenstein Highway N., Forestville), from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Among the wines to be tasted are several pinot noirs, including one from Russian River Valley, one from Anderson Valley and two from Humboldt County grapes.
Woodenhead is the love child of Zina Bower, whom we met in a class at SRJC, and winemaker Nikolai Stez, who was assistant to Burt Williams of Williams Selyem fame for 17 years. We tasted the winery’s Anderson Valley pinot noir at last weekend’s pinot noir festival in Philo and we can’t wait to try the other ’02 releases from this new winery. For more information, visit www.woodenheadwine.com or head to the party on Saturday.
Polish your cowboy boots: Last time we checked, there were still tickets available for Saturday’s 8th annual Celebrate Geyserville bash at Clos du Bois Winery. This year, the theme is Wild Wild West and the festivities include a western-wear contest. We’re tempted to go just to show off our new boots. But there are plenty of reasons to join in: beginning at 5:30 p.m., there will be appetizers, wines, a silent auction and a raffle. At 7:30, you’ll be called to a buffet dinner by a chuck-wagon bell. Soon thereafter, Bruce Campbell of CK Lamb will head up a live auction, during which he will make you wonder, once again, if he missed his calling by becoming a rancher instead of a professional auctioneer. Since we love CK Lamb, we think he made the right choice but we’re also glad he keeps his auctioneer’s licks polished at local events like this one. This western soiree will set you back 60 smackeroos per person but 100 percent of the proceeds go directly to Geyserville schools. And it’s way more fun than paying property taxes. For tickets, call Sandy Elliot at 857-4757.
Watershed Day: Don’t forget, Saturday is Watershed Day 2004, a wonderful community get-together that features workshops, information booths, creek walks, food, art, history, music and poetry, all in service of our enormously important watersheds, without which life around here would not be worth living. The event is hosted by the West County Watershed Council and the Gold Ridge RCD. For information, call 876-9329, visit www.bodeganet.com/salmoncreek or write to dshatkin@sonic.net. Watershed Day takes place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Salmon Creek School, 1935 Bohemian Highway, between Freestone and Occidental.
Celebrating salmon: On Sunday, the San Francisco Ferry Building hosts a salmon roast lunch from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.. Several of San Francisco’s best known chefs, including Amaryll Schwertner and Fabrice Marcon, will prepare the lunch, featuring local wild Pacific king salmon. There will be storytelling in the salmon tent, along with live music, sidewalk chalk coloring and, of course, the Sunday Garden Market. The $15 fee for lunch will benefit Nextcourse, a nonprofit educational organization devoted to nutritional education for inner-city children and youth. You can buy tickets at the event or visit www.nextcourse.com. And remember, the best way to get to the Ferry Building is to take the ferry from Larkspur.
Crocodile pheromones: In the early 1990s, Diane Ackerman caught our attention with a remarkable book, “Natural History of the Senses,” in which she takes readers on a poetic exploration of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. If the book had included just one more adjective it would have collapsed of its own weight but Ackerman is masterful at stopping just this side of too much. Some of her follow-up books delivered on the promise made in “Senses,” though others seemed to reveal an author in too much of a hurry. “A Natural History of Love” seemed rushed and superficial, with nary a new insight. Now, Ackerman has a promising new book, “The Alchemy of the Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain.” We think it’s worth a try and if you’d like a signed copy (and don’t forget to take along that tattered “Natural History of the Senses” you carry around), Ackerman is appearing Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at Cody’s Books, 2454 Telegraph Ave., Berkeley. And what about the crocodile pheromones, you rightly ask? Ackerman has had a molecule named after her, dianeackerone, a sex pheromone in crocodiles. If that just seems too weird, take a look at her essay about crocodiles in “The Moon By Whalelight,” a collection of essays previously published in The New Yorker magazine. And be sure to read the chapter about bats, too; it’s one of her finest pieces of writing.
