Food Allergies?

We work hard to provide a number of items for Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Vegan and other member requests for their diet.  Food preferences and food allergies are important to us.

For example, there are no peanuts allowed in our kitchen.  We do use walnuts and walnut oil in our house speciality, the apple, endive and blue cheese salad.

While our house pasta is traditional egg and wheat pasta, we also stock a wonderfully flavorful, gluten and vegan penne pasta for folks avoiding wheat or animal products.

All of our vegetarian dishes are 100% vegetarian - no beef stock, no chicken stock in our soups for example.  Our onion soup uses porcini mushroom to get that earthy flavor.  

We are always trying to improve our understanding of food allergies.  Here's a very interesting article which could explain why some lactose intolerant folks can digest goat's milk but not cow milk products:

Mother Jones article on Milk Protein

Wild Mushroom Safari

The unusual summer rain of 2013 made a number of vineyard owners a bit concerned. They don't want their fruit getting too wet. Fortunately, it was a short bit of wet and things dried up quickly.  

But one man was happy about this unexpected turn - our Chef Rick Vargas has picked local, wild mushrooms for 35 years.  We try to tell him NOT to show too much enthusiasm around our grape growers.  Pretend to be at least only slightly over the moon. Why? One of the biggest mid-year harvests in Sonoma in years.

Here we see the results of Mother Nature's weather experiment.  Now, what happens when Rick starts cooking with them?

Organic Chicken Tortellini

Rick's latest is a small plate tortellini.  Organic chicken, porcini mushrooms make the filling for this wonderful dish.  

Here, Rick, Polo and Ampelio go over the final preparations for tonights service. 

Organic chicken and mushrooms, white wines, bacon, heirloom tomatoes, garlic, Redwood Hill Feta, house made chicken stock, herbs, cream.

The beginning of the sauce is sautéing bacon. It is drained, then garlic, roasted pine nuts and chicken stock is added.  Cream is cooked down, with some fresh local feta and heirloom organic tomatoes.  Served over the tortellini with crusty warm sour dough bread.