Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands- An Excerpt and a Recipe

By Linda Ronstadt and Lawrence Downes, with photographs by Bill Steen

(July 14, 2023)

Growing up the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants and a descendant of Spanish settlers near northern Sonora, Ronstadt’s intimate new memoir celebrates the marvelous flavors and indomitable people on both sides of what was once a porous border whose denizens were happy to exchange recipes and gather around campfires to sing the ballads that shaped Ronstadt’s musical heritage. Continue reading

“The New Mediterranean Jewish Table”

Recipes by Joyce Goldstein

Joyce at stove.jpg

For thousands of years, the people of the Jewish Diaspora have carried their culinary traditions and kosher laws throughout the world. In the United States, this has resulted primarily in an Ashkenazi table of matzo ball soup and knishes, brisket and gefilte fish. But Joyce Goldstein is now expanding that menu with this comprehensive collection of over four hundred recipes from the kitchens of three Mediterranean Jewish cultures: the Sephardic, the Maghrebi, and the Mizrahi.

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 You Don’t Have to Be Jewish

A look at the 43rd San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, 2023

(July 19,2023)

By Gary Meyer

One would expect that such an event would offer films with a direct connection to Judaism but that is only a small part of the story with features like Remembering Gene Wilder, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, and Food and Country, highlighted in this year’s Festival.

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Fabulous Food and Film Await at CAAMFest 2023

By Geneva Anderson

(May 12, 2023)

 

When it comes to Asian-focused cinema, nothing beats the Bay Area’s CAAMFest.  The 11-day festival, which prides itself on culturally relevant stories that you won’t see anywhere else, offers 55 events grouped under film, music, food, and ideas.  For the first time since 2019, CAAMfest will be a fully in-person experience and the programming reflects the reality that people have been changed by the pandemic; that they think, feel and engage differently. Browse the program and let yourself be moved by the call to gather and “to lift each other up after in the audacity of our stories.”  

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Lulu By the Bay

by Thomas Gladysz

(Updated May 8, 2023 to inclde photos from the May 6th performance)

On Saturday, May 6, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is set to screen Pandora’s Box at the Paramount theater in Oakland. This legendary silent film, which stars Louise Brooks as Lulu, can rightly be described as a Bay Area favorite. In fact, as exhibition records suggest, Pandora’s Box has been screened more often in the San Francisco Bay Area than anywhere else in the United States.

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Six California Kitchens-Recipes for Sally Schmidt’s Portuguese Duck & Sausage plus Apricot & Cherry Clafoutis

Six California Kitchens is the quintessential California cookbook, with farm-to-table recipes and stories from Sally Schmitt, the pioneering female chef and original founder of the French Laundry.

Sally Schmitt opened The French Laundry in Yountville in 1978 and designed her menus around local, seasonal ingredients—a novel concept at the time.

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