Add this one to your list of festivals this season – the Preston Royal Village second annual Fall Family Festival. It’s 4-7 p.m. this Saturday, Oct. 22 at the northeast corner of the shopping center.

The event features a petting zoo, food, games and live music by children’s performer Eddie Coker. He writes and sings songs that are encouraging to little ones.

Admission to Saturday’s festival is free.

Hey, while you’re at it, stop by Purple Cow and try out their State Fair menu of fried goodness. We featured it in the dining sections of this month’s Preston Hollow Advocate. Then, you’ll really feel like you’re at the fair.

Chicken and sausage gumbo at Bread Winners Cafe. (Courtesy photo)

Last week, Bread Winners Cafe & Bakery launched its Blue Plate Specials just in time for fall, featuring specialty soups, breads and entrees. There’s a special every week day.

Monday: Chicken and biscuits; Tuesday: Denver pork stew; Wednesday: Short rib stroganoff; Thursday: Fried chicken and waffles; Friday: Fish and chips.

Soups include Sherried mushroom, Tuscan chicken and white bean, butternut squash bisque, sausage and chicken gumbo and beef barley.

For lunch, the cost is $9.99 and for dinner it’s $14.

By the way, today is National Chocolate Cupcake Day (duh!), and Bread Winners will be giving out a free one with every purchase. Our location is at Inwood Village.

The first is Prudence Mackintosh’s “Neighborhood Association.” She tells the story of living in the same house in Highland Park for roughly 40 years, and the important role that her neighbors have played in her life. Though our neighborhood is different from Highland Park in some ways, anyone who resides in a home here will likely recognize Mackintosh’s indebtedness to her older, wiser neighbors as a new homeowner, and her frustration that the definition of “neighbor” has become diluted with the rise of the internet and the loss of older, quainter homes:

“The face of my neighborhood is changing, and it’s not just that the Mediterranean McMansions are winning architecturally. Bulldozers arrive almost weekly to scrape my favorite homes, the ones with welcoming porch swings, interesting histories, bois d’arc paneling, and wooden stair rails polished by the hospitable comings and goings of four generations. In their place, we get fortress-like structures that often house two people who live there only part of the year. I used to be bothered by the lack of scale and the excess of wine cellars, fitness rooms, and media centers, but now what concerns me more is the air of isolated self-sufficiency that these monuments give off. ‘Who needs neighbors?’ they seem to say.”

The second is Mimi Swarz’s “Super Collider,” which takes a close look at Houston ISD superintendent Terry Grier over the course of a year, and overviews the problems plaguing the school district, which is even larger than Dallas ISD. It shouldn’t have surprised me that HISD’s challenges and warring factions run almost parallel to Dallas’. This is a crucial read for anyone intrigued by the topic of public education in large urban settings, and is even more interesting considering that Dallas is still searching for a new superintendent.

“The modern history of American public education is a toxi-comic combination of politics, fads, paranoia, and failure. Everyone and no one has the answer for how best to educate children, particularly poor children, and the fact that they aren’t getting an education is almost always someone else’s fault. Ever since ‘A Nation at Risk,’ the groundbreaking report published in 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, warned of ‘a rising tide of mediocrity,’ politicians and educators alike have been searching for a magic bullet that ensures our kids are college-bound or at least, in the new parlance of the times, ‘workforce-ready.’ “

Spoiler: The story doesn’t find the magic bullet, on the off chance that it does, indeed, exist.

The last is one of the questions posed to the Texanist in his unorthodox advice column:

“This is going to sound crazy since I live in central Dallas, but my back fence neighbor’s chickens are driving me insane. The keepers are a nice young couple, and they give me fresh eggs every week, but the chickens start crowing before the sun comes up, and it’s very annoying. How can I lodge my complaint with them in a way that will not endanger my supply of free eggs?”

I laughed at the question, and the Texanist’s answer, knowing it’s very possible that the offending backyard chickens live in Preston Hollow.

Earlier this week, I told you about Marsh Middle School’s new Tech Cafe, which was part of a myriad of library updates. Last night, the school held a dedication, showing off the new dig and honoring those who made it happen.

Please feel free to comment and comment often. (Click to enlarge)

You may have noticed the new commenting system here on the website with our magazine stories and blog posts. I want to make sure you’re aware of the different features that are available to improve your online conversation with our bloggers and other site visitors.

You can now log in, and there are tons of ways to do that —With your Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google, OpenID or Disqus profile.

Want to log in with your Facebook account but don’t want your comment showing up on your Facebook profile? No problem; it won’t post to your wall unless you purposefully click the button under your comment telling it to also post to Facebook.

Keep conversations together by replying directly to the site visitor you're talking to. (Click to enlarge)

Don’t have a social network profile to log in with? You can quickly sign up for a Disqus profile at the time you comment. Cool thing about that is, tons of other websites use Disqus as their commenting system, so it will recognize you and save your comments with your profile on Disqus.com, allowing you to edit or even delete them later.

You don’t have to log in, but here’s the deal: When you log in with one of your social media accounts or your Disqus profile, your comments show up with your profile pic. And that’s fun!

Profile pics are way better than the gray avatar guy. (Click to enlarge)

Your profile pic, along with an excerpt of your comment, shows up in our Recent Comments box on the side of the website to the right. And your neighbors would much rather see your pic over the gray-silhouette-shadow-man-avatar thing that shows up as a default.

Other features include the ability to reply directly to another site visitor’s comment, to include a photo with your comment, and to subscribe to notifications of other comments on the string.

But for those of you who straight-up just want to comment like the old days without all the fluff — you can still do that, too.

If you have any questions about this, send me an email.

Don’t let the hard-to-pronounce-name fool you. Zio Cecio Cucina Italiana is a new, casual and family friendly restaurant coming to the old Cafe Italia space on Lovers Lane. It’s set to open Tuesday, Oct. 18.

The open kitchen concept comes from Italian restaurateur Francesco Farris, and the menu features dishes inspired by his Sardinian roots. There’s wood-fired pizzas, beef and pork ragu in a San Marzano sauce, quid ink-infused spaghetti with fresh clams, ravioli filled with potatoes, fresh cheese, mint and a light rosy tomato sauce and braised veal shank in Barolo wine reduction.

‘Tis the season for new Italian restaurants in Preston Hollow. First Dough, then Princi Italia and now Zio Cecio.

Update: The Dallas Morning News Eats Blog reports the opening has been pushed back to Friday, Oct. 21.

North Haven Gardens hosts a pumpkin planting workshop and party at 1 p.m. Saturday. The cost is $45 and includes a pumpkin already cleaned, a selection of fall annuals, herbs and veggies, seasonal accents and planting mix. Register today as the class size is limited.

The Shops at Park Lane hosts Hot Dames & Chili Flames 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, featuring a Les Dames d’ Escoffier of Dallas culinary treasure sale (Saturday) and a chili and chowder cook-off (Sunday) with live music and samples.

It’s your last chance to view the current exhibit at Norwood Flynn Gallery. “Poets and Cattle” features the painting of Oak Cliff artist Ray-Mel Cornelius and closes Saturday.

Race route from the Race for the Cure website. Click on the photo to enlarge.

The Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure begins at 7:30 a.m. this Saturday at NorthPark Center with hundreds of teams running and walking to support breast cancer awareness. The event will cause some street closings in our neighborhood throughout the morning.

- The northbound side of Hillcrest between Park Lane and Aberdeen will close 7:30-10 a.m.

- Park Lane between the Central Expressway service road and Boedeker will close 5:30-11 a.m.

- Boedeker between Northwest Highway and Park Lane will close 6:30-11 a.m.

There’s still time to register for the race by 5 p.m. Friday either online or in person at NorthPark, Luke’s Locker and the Shops at Park Lane. You can register on race day at 6:30 a.m. inside NorthPark. The award ceremony is at 9:30 a.m. after the race in the mall parking lot near Macy’s.

If any dapper dudes need to update their accessories, stop by Ken’s Man’s Shop at Preston and Royal 4-8 p.m. Friday for a trunk show that benefits the Bill Hunt Scholarship Fund, which was established in honor of Ken’s first employee. Each year, a deserving Garland high school student.

Supporting local charities is nothing new for the owners, Ken Helfman and his son Kory. Editor Christina Hughes Babb wrote about them in the September 2010 Advocate.

The trunk show features designer items, including Bailey hats, Spivey cufflinks, Butterfly bow ties, Eye Bobs sunglasses and more. There also will be drinks and snacks.

The key to success for regional wine is not so much about quality or even pricing. It’s about producing wine that reflects the place where it is made. Regional wine will never be successful if it’s nothing more than a knockoff of what’s being done elsewhere — and where it’s being done better, as well.

That’s why the best regional wine has a sense of terroir, whether it’s a New York riesling, a Missouri norton, or a Virginia viognier. The top producers in those states know they have to compete with California, but they have also realized they don’t have to do it on California’s terms. They can do it on their terms.

That’s what we’ve finally figured out in Texas. There has been a revolution in the past five years, with growers and winemakers embracing warm climate grapes in a way I never thought possible. Today, we have quality wines made with tempranillo, roussanne, syrah, sangiovese, blanc du bois, black Spanish, and viognier — grapes better suited for the Texas terroir than the traditional French varietals. Even the state’s biggest producers, who can sell (and need to sell) chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon because they’re in grocery stores, are using these new varietals to produce fascinating wines.

One of the best examples of the revolution is McPherson’s La Herencia ($14, sample, available at Central Market), a tempranillo blend that has the Spanish grape’s varietal characteristics yet retains a Texas quality. It’s richer and more full than a Rioja, the best-known tempranillo from Spain, with more red fruit. But it’s not too fruity or too tannic or too alcoholic, like so many California wines. Serve this with barbecue, almost any main course with rice (like jambalaya), and even some roast or grilled chicken dishes.

One of the other hats I wear is as co-founder of DrinkLocalWine, where we focus on wine made in the 47 states that aren’t California, Oregon, and Washington. We’re holding our fourth annual regional wine week this week, and there are articles and links to regional wine throughout the country, including Texas. Regional wine is part of significant changes going on in the wine business that much of the wine business is missing, and Texas wine has played a key role in those changes.