Great holiday gift ideas for Petaluma food lovers

The best of the holiday traditions celebrate family and friends, and all that we have to be thankful for. However, for most, there is at least a small amount of anxiety attached to the thought of having to buy gifts for friends, family, co-workers and maybe even clients. Few gifts bridge the gap between cultures, genders and generations as well as those that relate to food.

Whether looking to share your favorite local jams, hot sauces and locally brewed or fermented libation, or wanting to pass along your favorite cookbook or a gift certificate to a great restaurant, Petaluma has everything you could hope for. From cheese making kits to charcuterie and from pickling supplies to Petaluma pint glasses, a few hours spent walking around downtown will help you stuff all the stockings on your hearth.

Wine, beer and spirits

Wine is the most obvious gift and is readily available throughout Petaluma, but which one to choose? Usually on sale in the fall, as the new releases are coming online, anything from a Petaluma GAP winery is sure to brighten the holidays.

This is also where wine club memberships come in handy because we receive email updates from our local favorites. As a member of local wine clubs, such as Barber Cellars, Keller Estate, McEvoy Ranch, Sonoma Portworks and Adobe Road Winery, members not only benefit from all the free members-only event invites, but also are the first to hear about wine sales.

If you really want to impress, a wine club membership is a great gift. With many local options available, one can scale this gift to match any budget. Personally, we get a huge amount of enjoyment out of our Barber Cellars membership because the tasting room keeps our personally engraved glass on hand, always ready for the free refill upon every visit.

We also receive discounts throughout the year, as well as a heads up for their special events, such as their cheese maker nights, gallery events and live music. Equally nice are the never ending invites we receive to special members-only events at Keller Estate's beautiful facility.

Another great spot is Sonoma Portworks, which offers tastings of their wide variety of elixirs, which include sherry, aperitif, ports, grappa and their excellent Sonomic Red and Gold, which are perfect atop everything from salads to deserts.

If you are looking to just grab a bottle, I recommend visiting Vine & Barrel, Charley's Deli & Liquor or Wilibees Wines & Spirits. Each has a great selection and knowledgeable people on staff to help you make your selection.

We regularly visit Vine & Barrel's $10 and under section, which is constantly being updated with great inexpensive alternatives from around the globe.

Gift options for the beer lovers among us are virtually infinite. Most of our local breweries now offer a good number of their beers in bottles and cans, which is a great start. Few things are more festive than a selection of beers that span a particularly brewery's entire line. Currently, Petaluma Hills Brewing Company has a majority of their beers available at the taproom in 22-ounce bottles, which is the perfect size for sharing or for a brewery specific tasting.

Most breweries now offer growlers too, which is a great gift for someone who you know to be particular to a specific local beer or brewery. Another unique gift is to get the beer lover in your bunch a pint glass from each of our local breweries. A Petaluma pint glass collection is hard to beat.

If your friends or family members enjoy a particular bar or brewery, check to see if that establishment has a “leave a drink” board. McNear's Saloon's, Jamison's Roaring Donkey and Petaluma Hills Brewing Company all offer such services. This is a fun way of tipping your hat to your neighbor, giving them something you know they will appreciate, while also supporting our local bars and brewers.

Several distilleries have also popped up in Petaluma recently. A visit to the aisles of Charley's Deli & Liquor, Wilibees Wine & Spirits and Petaluma Market will expose shoppers to everything available from Petaluma's own Sonoma Coast Spirits, Griffo Distillery and Stillwater Spirits. And in short order, Barber Cellars will introduce their single-malt rye to their great selection of wines.

Restaurants and food experiences

One of the best ways to share your love of food with others is to buy them a gift certificate to your favorite restaurant. Personally, I like to take people out as a gift. The more people around the table means a greater chance that you will get to share and taste all the menu items. Whether visiting a new place or an old haunt, it is always a unique experience to share a meal with someone else.

But even you cannot join the gift getter, buying them a gift certificate is more than just buying them lunch or dinner. It gives them an experience that they may not have had otherwise, all while helping to support local food purveyors.

Petaluma Food Tours also offers a unique gift to visitors and locals. PFT visits multiple locations on each tour, tasting the best each restaurant, bar and tasting room has to offer. But guests get more than just a taste from the kitchen. They will also learn about the owners and how and why they do what they do. Visitors build a real connection to the food purveyors that make our town so great.

Crab Feeds are a great way to celebrate our local Dungeness crab tradition. With most falling in January and February, inviting friend and family to join you at a local crab feed fundraiser is a great way to extend the holiday cheer into the New Year.

Books

Food books fall into several categories, and are all great holiday gifts. It should go without saying that buying these locally does a lot more for our community than ordering them up through Amazon.

The first type of book that comes to my mind are the ones that speak to the locavore in all of us. Nobody has done more research into Petaluma's food history and cultures than Frances Rivetti, making her books a must have for any local foodies. “Fog Valley Crush” and “Fog Valley Winter” cover everything from our culturally driven food roots up through our modern farms, dairies and restaurants, readers will have a whole new appreciation for what is available to us here in Petaluma, the Provence of North America.

TV personality, World Food Champion and Petaluma native, Laurie Figone's “Cooking with Laurie Figone” is a great way to get a hands-on Petaluma food experience. Figone uses local food purveyors wherever possible and always offers a refreshing twist to old classics.

Her cookbook also has a unique feature. Simply waive your smartphone or tablet's camera over the pictures of each recipe and a free app will play a video of Figone creating the same recipe in her own Petaluma kitchen right there alongside you. No wonder it has been featured on KTVU and made Sonoma Magazine's Top 10 picks for holiday gifts.

Kathleen Weber's “Della Fattoria Bread…” is not just filled with “63 Foolproof Recipes” but also tells the intriguing story behind one of America's greatest baking families, which is based here in Petaluma. Grab a copy while you are at the shop, and you may be lucky enough to get your book signed by any or all of the Weber family and friends that help run the business.

For the cheese lover in your group, “Cowgirl Creamery Cooks,” by local cheese legends Sue Conley and Peggy Smith is a great option. Step it up a bit by supplementing this gift with a selection of cheeses and crackers from Petaluma Market and there is a fairly good chance you'll get invited in to stay and sample along with the recipient.

Another great gift for the chef in your crowd is a culturally specific cookbook. Sure, there are tons of French and Italian cookbooks, but choices for less celebrated cuisines are becoming more popular. It seems like almost daily I see a new cookbook highlighting Portuguese, German, Irish, Nordic, Spanish and a plethora of Asian cuisines.

Food

There is no way to cover all the local food options, so I am going to name just a few of my favorites. Even having lived here most of my life, I am constantly surprised at just how diverse our local food options are.

One of my favorite gifts, both to give and receive, are the sauces from F.A. Nino's. I write about, cook with, dip into and sometimes even drink them straight, so it is no surprise that I think they make great gifts. And for the holiday season, every Friday through Sunday, they are offering their stocking stuffer special of buy one, get one free out at their facility on the north end of town.

Always respecting flavor over fire, I simply buy one of everything F.A. Nino's offers for each of the sauce lovers in my circle, knowing this will be a treat that will last them well into summer barbecue season.

Sonoma Spice Queen also has great seasoning gift options. Introducing people to new salts and other seasonings is an experience they will always cherish. While there, pick up some of LALA's jams and spreadables, which range in incredible flavor combos from Apple Butter and Blueberry Balsamic to Brandy Peach and Habanero Honey. LALA's jams are also available at Barber Cellars, Thistle Meats and Petaluma Coffee and Tea.

Along with all his great wines, and awesome European inspired happy hour menu, Jason Jenkins at Vine & Barrel now offers pickled veggies from his own Petaluma Pickle Company. Locally grown and pickled, with recipes he learned from his grandmother, this is a great addition to any holiday table.

For the meat-lover in your midst, nothing is better than the gift of local beef jerky. I recently received a selection of jerky from Bud's Custom Meats and could not have been happier. Most of Bud's flavors are only available at their shop in Penngrove, but you can find their Cowboy Candy all over Petaluma. Fallon Hills jerky is available at Charlie's Deli & Liquor. Other great local jerkies include Stemple Creek Ranch and a wide array of choices at Angelo's Meats.

A slightly more interactive gift, that is not only healthy but also helps support our local farmers directly, is the gift of a Community Supported Agriculture membership, which helps connect people directly to their food providers. Local CSA's include Green String Farms, Coastal Hill Farm, Petaluma Bounty Farm, First Light, Tara Firma Farm and Chileno Valley Farm.

If you are creatively challenged or out of ideas, I highly recommend a local food gift basket. Shops like Barber Cellars will include local wine, cheese, crackers, and jams and can customize them to any size. This is a great way to show a client that you appreciate their business, while helping support Petaluma's small business owners.

Home and garden

We start every Petaluma shopping trip at the corner of B and Fourth streets, where three of our favorite shops are located. We can usually check off half our holiday gift list by visiting Rex Hardware, Free Range and B Street Mercantile.

For everything from every day tea kettle to fancy French presses, we always start to Rex Hardware. Whether restocking our pickling supplies or purchasing a new cast-iron pan, Rex takes you back to the days when hardware stores sold more than just hammers and nails. And what we cannot find for the kitchen at Rex, we will surely find just down the street at I Leoni. With everything from cookbooks to table cloths, I Leoni is a cornucopia of housewares.

Across the street from Rex, B Street Mercantile leans more towards the artsy side, but has a ton of food-related items, like Petaluma branded pint glasses and great food related artwork.

Next to B Street, Free Range has an incredible amount of interesting and useful household items packed in to their tiny shop. From Kombucha-making kits to cutting boards to bottle openers of every design, we never leave Free Range without something new for our home.

For the gardener Radish is a great addition to our downtown shops, as is Moj San Gift and Garden Gallery just across the D Street bridge at the corner of Wilson and East D streets. For handmade tools, seeds, back yard bee supplies and a ton of other great stuff, you should not miss a visit to the Seed Bank.

Halfway between Barber Cellars and the Shuckery, Truck & Barter is the newest gift shop to open in downtown Petaluma and is a feast for the eyes. This shop may seem sparsely stocked at first, but after spending a few minutes perusing their shelves, you are guaranteed to find something that piques your interests.

Don't shop from home

The best advice I can give you when shopping for the foodie in your bunch is to visit the plentiful, friendly, and locally owned shops around Petaluma. Midway through writing this article, I ventured downtown to meet up with some friends for a quick bite to eat and a drink. I could have written another entire article simply based on what I saw in just the first few store windows. The choices are endless but it makes such a difference to actually touch what you are buying, and to get recommendation directly from our local shop owners.

Common to all food related gifts is the reality that some special thought went into its selection. More than simply giving a loved one a gift with monetary value, often ordered over the internet, local gifts relating to food are meant to share an actual experience. Whether it is the taste of a great bottle wine or beer, creating a dish from a recipe book, sharing a special dinner at your favorite restaurant, or adding a cool new tool to their kitchen, foodie gifts share a real experience that will remain in the recipient's memory long after the holidays are over.