Hidden in plain sight, a tiny kitchen sits on a busy Curtis Park street. Called Good Things to Eat, the storefront produces amazing scratch-cooked meals.
It’s not exactly a restaurant, but mother-daughter team Delcy and Elinor Steffy create delightful, satisfying meals. I want more of it.
Let me set the stage. Picture a hot October night on Franklin Boulevard. There’s a line out the door at Gunther’s Ice Cream. Flavor of the month is pumpkin.
Curtis Popp is a residential interior architectural designer. Over two decades, he established a reputation as a talented, creative and sought-after home design consultant.
Along the way, he found a side project, his family’s unconventional tri-level Land Park residence.
Popp grew up in Land Park. He and wife Sue, a nurse, were raising their two children there in a small, traditional house on Perkins Way.
But the interior designer couldn’t stop thinking about the nearby tri-level.
“One day, in the middle of the Great Recession, I saw a For Sale sign spring up on it,” Popp says. “The timing wasn’t good. And it took several visits to get Sue interested because the house at that time looked nothing like it does today.”
For an artist, inspiration comes from anywhere. With ceramic artist Peter VandenBerge, anywhere equals a lifetime of adventure.
“Adventure can take any form,” says VandenBerge, born in the Netherlands in 1935. “It can be in the studio making art, it can be in Indonesia in the rice fields riding the big, horned buffalo. Everything is an amazing adventure. Those are the kinds of things you can remember and that come out in your work.”
It’s not often a high-end retail store moves from the Bay Area to the Sacramento area. But the village of Fair Oaks is the new home to Terrestra, a destination for handcrafted home accessories.
After establishing locations in San Francisco and Mill Valley, Terrestra co-founders Amy Satran and Ray Kristof decided to downsize and move their gallery closer to the Sacramento home they purchased six years ago.
Satran and Kristof are a tech couple with backgrounds in multi-media. They met decades ago at Apple and started Terrestra in 2003. Today they consider themselves semi-retired in Fair Oaks Village while overseeing the gallery.
“Amy and I have always been collectors, and I grew up in France and enjoyed it from an early age,” Kristof says.
Having spent the past year on the Sacramento County Grand Jury, I can confirm Superior Court Judge Steven Gevercer is right when he says the grand jury exists “to make government accountable.”
Being a juror carries the responsibility to investigate local government. The aim is to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and promote accountability and transparency.
Interested in becoming a grand juror? Online applications open Nov. 20 and run through December. There’s a formal interview process, which I’ll discuss in a minute.
Sacramento makes safe choices when it’s time to elect a mayor. For the past half-century, voters picked nothing but incumbents or experienced City Council members to lead City Hall.
With one exception.
In 2008, voters rejected two-term mayor Heather Fargo in favor of Kevin Johnson, a retired basketball star who returned home to build charter schools and buy real estate in his Oak Park neighborhood.
Today voters have a chance to install another political amateur in the mayor’s office.
Flojaune Cofer, a public health nonprofit policy director, is running against longtime State Assembly and City Council member Kevin McCarty.
