Food + Booze
by Sara Franklin | Nov 13, 2008 | Food + Booze
Elmer's Store396 Main St., Ashfield(413) 628-4003Open Mon.-Thu. 7 a.m.-6 p.m., Fri. 7 a.m.-9 p.m.,Sat. and Sun. 8 a.m.-5 p.m.Breakfast $1.25-$9.95It took peak foliage and an invitation to a friend's farm in Conway to get me up to Elmer's Store in Ashfield....
by Mary Nelen | Dec 18, 2008 | Food + Booze
"We've got the proteins here—tuna, cottage cheese—and fruit," said the man with the toque (chef's hat), Ralph Webb. Webb is the head of the culinary department at Dean Technical High School in Holyoke. With a team of lunch ladies and...
by Sara Franklin | Nov 20, 2008 | Food + Booze
Stillwaters Restaurant1745 Rte. 2, East Charlemont(413) 625-6200Mon.-Thu. 5 p.m.-8:30 p.m., takeout and delivery only; Fri.-Sat. 5 p.m.-9 p.m.; Sun. 7:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m., 5 p.m.-8 p.m.Entrees $7-$15. On a beautiful, bright fall afternoon, I ventured up into the...
by Mary Nelen | Dec 25, 2008 | Food + Booze
A week before Thanksgiving, over 20,000 people descended on a farm in Colorado. In response to the farm's owners' offer to give away post-harvest root vegetables, cars clogged the tiny streets leading up to the property. Reportedly the farm and its employees...
by Sara Franklin | Nov 20, 2008 | Food + Booze
Bistro Les Gras25 West Street, Northampton(413) 320-4666Tue.-Thu. 5 p.m.-9 p.m.Fri.-Sat. 5 p.m.-10 p.m.Sunday brunch 10 a.m.-2 p.m.Entrees $12-$26Bistro Les Gras has been calling my name since it first opened its doors this past spring. Ever since spending a summer in...
by Mary Nelen | Jan 1, 2009 | Food + Booze
On the first day of Christmas my CSA gave to mea big fat, massive celeriac…Overheard at the Beans and Screens coffee place in Hadley, where two women were sitting at a small table (one of them, "the friend," was bent over a laptop):Woman:? So I'm...
by Sara Franklin | Oct 16, 2008 | Food + Booze
Lattitude1338 Memorial Ave.West Springfield(413) 241-8887Entrees $10-$24Hours: 11-10 Mon.-Thu., 11-11 Fri.-Sat. How we managed to forget that the Big E was in full swing in West Springfield the night we decided to go to Lattitude is beyond me. Stuck in traffic for 20...
by Mary Nelen | Jan 8, 2009 | Food + Booze
Sometimes the concept of the 100-mile footprint—eating or drinking nothing produced farther away than 100 miles—has to be kicked to the curb. New Year's Eve is one of those times. But for those of us who have thoughtfully canned, put up and frozen a...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 16, 2008 | Food + Booze
In restaurants, the line is where the action is. Working the line is reserved for the talented and the desperate. After I interrogated the new chef at the Deerfield Inn on his local food buying practices (foraged mushrooms from a guy named Roger, barramundi fish from...
by Mary Nelen | Jan 15, 2009 | Food + Booze
Another food writer and I were reviewing a breakfast place for his publication. The food was … food. It has gotten to the point that if I don't make it, or if I don't know who made it, I don't care about that food. If I don't know who grew it, it...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 1, 2008 | Food + Booze
In the 1970s, when Advocate founders Geoff Robinson and Chris Austin sat on stacks of their new publication for want of furniture, the only local food they could get their hands on (apart from the broccoli Geoff proudly grew himself) was perhaps a bushel of apples...
by Mary Nelen | Jan 22, 2009 | Food + Booze
In the world of the locavore, one who eats food within a small footprint (100 miles, give or take) of one's home, counting becomes compulsive. Like a prairie woman feeding her family on a scratch farm in Wyoming or the protagonist of Franny and Zooey enumerating...
by Mary Nelen | Sep 11, 2008 | Food + Booze
The first Free Harvest Supper had 80 people in attendance. This year over 750 showed up for what turned out to be Woodstock with excellent food. This early August phenomenon in Greenfield's town center represents a twist on a new restaurant trend. Farm dinners or...
by Mary Nelen | Mar 17, 2009 | Food + Booze
Wine tastings aren't just a matter of walking around tasting and spitting. When faced with tables and tables of wine offered for free by smiling vintners, some of us might race from Malbec to Pinot to Bordeaux with the abandon of a kid at the Big E. But there is...
by Mary Nelen | Apr 23, 2009 | Food + Booze
This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs."—Woody...
by Mary Nelen | Apr 30, 2009 | Food + Booze
This month and until they run out, the folks at Hungry Ghost Bakery in Northampton are handing out packets of seed. "It's Red Fife," says owner Jonathan Stevens who, along with partner Cheryl Maffey, is continuing his quest to get wheat grown in the...
by Mary Nelen | May 7, 2009 | Food + Booze
Ramps are back! (Although this table hawking wild leeks is at the Union Square Green Market in New York City.) The well-worn sign features ramps for $2.50 a bunch. This sign is a lesson on how best to prepare these garlicky delicacies. For example, if you squint real...
by Mary Nelen | May 14, 2009 | Food + Booze
A couple of weeks ago, while Mexico suffered multiple fatalities due to what was being referred to as "swine flu" (also known as "H1N1"), I visited a pig farm in the Berkshires to do a story and got chased off the place. The 36-year-old farmer,...
by Mary Nelen | Jul 23, 2009 | Food + Booze
Mark Kurlansky wrote Salt: A World History; 1968: The Year that Rocked the World; and Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. His latest effort is a compendium of essays on regional food written by real people in real time. Food of a Younger Land is a...
by Mary Nelen | May 21, 2009 | Food + Booze
Nothing concentrates the mind like gardening. In 1996, when Ricky Baruc and Deb Habib came upon a clearing in the woods near the Quabbin reservoir, they saw healthy soil where there was none.The new alchemist alum gathered their knowledge to become one with the land...
by Mary Nelen | Jul 30, 2009 | Food + Booze
Today, eating locally is a trend. But with the global supply of fossil fuels diminishing, and the widespread use of destructive agricultural practices increasing, our future depends on the availability of regional foods. At Tabellas Restaurant we are committed to...
by Mary Nelen | Jul 16, 2009 | Food + Booze
The famous and near-famous are different from you and me. Take their farmers' markets, for example. In the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, just next to CBS studios, a former dairy farm became a farmers' market 75 years ago whe an oil magnate saw potential at...
by Mary Nelen | Aug 27, 2009 | Food + Booze
For more than three years, Whole Foods has been operating a loan program to small farms that are interested in expansion. It is a national program; the loans are for an average of $42,000 and the interest rate can typically be around 6 percent. Only two such loans...
by Mary Nelen | Jul 16, 2009 | Food + Booze
The movie Food, Inc., produced by Robert Kenner and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, is recommended as a film to bring kids to, not just because it reveals the brutality behind seemingly innocent Chicken McNuggets, but because it is an object lesson on...
by Mary Nelen | Jun 25, 2009 | Food + Booze
Chez Albert is a French restaurant in Amherst where it is nearly impossible to get a table on the weekend. The atmosphere is classic bistro—very laid back, yet very accurate in the rendering of French food. On any given night, regulars can be seen in the dusky...
by Mary Nelen | Sep 3, 2009 | Food + Booze
My niece, a practical 21-year-old, is home for a few days before returning to graduate school. Her degree will be in forensic accounting. She says to me, "Hey, have you heard of Penn and Teller?" "Yes," I respond. This can't be good, I think....
by Mary Nelen | Jun 18, 2009 | Food + Booze
In Franklin County, where small-scale farmers are keeping it in the family by selling locally through farmers' markets and directly to restaurants, a man in Millers Falls is doing business on a national basis.Chef Myron Becker of Myron's Fast Foods sells his...
by Mary Nelen | Sep 10, 2009 | Food + Booze
Jill Richardson has action on the brain. As a blogger for La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board, she makes the recommendations of an activist. In her new book, Recipe for America, she goes undercover at Whole Foods as...
by Mary Nelen | Aug 6, 2009 | Food + Booze
In Northampton, Green Street Cafe is being evicted from its place of business by Smith College. Green Street Cafe, an earnest, passionately French restaurant with the best risotto in town, had a handshake deal with Smith College for years. Parties, lunches, seminars...
by Mary Nelen | Aug 13, 2009 | Food + Booze
A Hampshire College grad, Emma Brewster, has put together a compendium of recipes in a bilingual baedecker to Puerto Rican and American cuisine. There is something to be said for eating Spanish food in summer and that something centers on the controversial herb,...
by Mary Nelen | Jun 4, 2009 | Food + Booze
On a sunny day in May, a man emerges from a field in Sunderland and walks up the hill to a farm house. At his back are people hovering over early beds of greens and in the distance is Mt. Sugarloaf. He is wearing a starched shirt, tails out, and shades his eyes in the...
by Mary Nelen | Jun 11, 2009 | Food + Booze
"We're lucky to have this girl," says the new head chef at trendy Allium Restaurant in Great Barrington. Michael Pancheri is referring to a woman who heads up a farm just down the road in Egremont. After doing documentaries about farm life, Laura Meister...
by Mary Nelen | Jun 30, 2009 | Food + Booze
This time of year in the Valley, people from every walk of life are combing the fields for strawberries. For some, it's tough on the back. For others, it's an all-you-can eat orgy. If a cache of strawberries happens to make it home to your house, here are a...
by Mary Nelen | May 28, 2009 | Food + Booze
"It took me a lot of time to find a place like this," says chef Casey Douglas, gesturing across the field, basket in one hand, clippers in the other. As a professional chef in the area where he has worked since the early '90s, Douglas has been trying to...
by Mary Nelen | Nov 5, 2009 | Food + Booze
Elmer's General Store in Ashfield is all things to some people. Last week, Senator Kerry's staff saw fit to cross the worn threshold of the combination store/restaurant to find out "what the people want," according to an in-store announcement. If...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 15, 2009 | Food + Booze
At the Mass Mutual Center in Springfield, a New York author and political activist stood up in front of a crowd of around 150 people to speak his mind about the state of hunger in the U.S. and the state of things in the Valley. Joel Berg, formerly an official of the...
by Mark Roessler | Jan 14, 2010 | Food + Booze
At the junction of curving roadways, Zach Gorham’s restaurant, Eclipse—now less than a year old—looks out onto Northampton’s Main Street. Eclipse stands at the bend where Main Street angles toward Smith College, providing a clear view of both...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 22, 2009 | Food + Booze
Harvest is the arc and the aggregate of food in the Valley. Suddenly the summer food spectrum is spread before you. Even with a blight on tomatoes and potatoes (and a very bad season for tobacco leaves due to wetness, lack of sun and cool temperatures), we are rich in...
by Mark Roessler | Jan 14, 2010 | Food + Booze
Once upon a time, in some foreign pub I can’t remember, I drank a cider that haunts me until this day. It was a hard cider, but it looked more like a beer. A cloud of yeast and fruity bacteria made the drink too dense for me to see through, and it had an...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 29, 2009 | Food + Booze
I picked up two 50-pound bags of spring wheat from Allen at Lazy Acres farm in Hadley. I was sent by Jonathan at Hungry Ghost Bakery in Northampton. My job was to fetch wheat berries from last year's wheat-growing experiment and bring them back to the bakers. For...
by Mary Nelen | Nov 12, 2009 | Food + Booze
Mr. Heartbreak, the New Man, come to farm a crazy land…—John Berryman, The Dream Songs The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts has announced that the Food Bank Farm will be no more. The reasons are more complicated than "it was a tough couple of years...
by Mary Nelen | Nov 19, 2009 | Food + Booze
Several weeks ago it was announced that the Food Bank Farm CSA in Hadley, which sold farm shares to consumers and supplied produce to the Food Bank Farm of Western Massachusetts, is closing after almost 20 years. Locavore spoke with Andrew Morehouse, executive...
by Tom Vannah | Nov 26, 2009 | Food + Booze
I opened the door of the henhouse, let the birds out to scratch around in their run, and went about the daily chore of collecting eggs. I reached into each of the laying boxes and removed the eggs, many of which were still warm.That's when I saw it. My eyes...
by Tom Vannah | Dec 10, 2009 | Food + Booze
Driving back to the office after lunch a few days before Thanksgiving, a fresh bag of organic chicken feed in the back of my truck, I snapped on the radio and tuned into the Thom Hartman Show—for my money, the very best talk show on radio.Hartman, a brilliant...
by Tom Vannah | Dec 17, 2009 | Food + Booze
I don't claim to be much more than a passable cook. I can make some tasty meals and, if it's any indication of latent talent, I don't need to follow a recipe most of the time. Still, I spend little time honing my skills. But for a glance at an occasional...
by James Heflin | Dec 24, 2009 | Food + Booze
It seems like every Mexican restaurant on the planet bills itself "authentic." Maybe most of them really are authentic, if by that you mean possessing yellow walls and serving Corona.But really, truly authentic? That slippery term can be interpreted many...
by Tom Vannah | Jan 7, 2010 | Food + Booze
Rain lashed the bus as it began its final descent into Geneva. In the distance, lights along the near shore of Lake Geneva blinked and smeared with each stroke of the windshield wipers. As bad as the weather was, at least it had finally stopped snowing. The trip from...
by James Heflin | Dec 31, 2009 | Food + Booze
Deep in the darkest reaches of my basement, something daunting lurks: a wheelbarrow load of winter vegetables. Carrots glint in the glow of a bare bulb and alien-esque celeriac lurks on a nearby table. They all lie in wait, demanding to be sauteed. It's enough to...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 8, 2009 | Food + Booze
James Howard Kunstler, author of World Made by Hand and The Long Emergency, is an unlikely prophet, but a prophet he is. Two weeks ago on a Sunday night, fans lined up in front of the Mahaiwe Theatre in Great Barrington, where his name glowed in old-fashioned marquee...
by Monica Bhide | Jan 7, 2010 | Food + Booze
Last year I gave a speech on Indian food at the French Embassy in Washington, D.C. and mentioned that I used garlic in my mustard-fish curry. An older lady approached me afterward, very upset. She had never heard of garlic being used in mustard-fish curry. How dare I...
by Mary Nelen | Oct 1, 2009 | Food + Booze
There has been quite a lot of talk about health care reform. Now the ugly truth about what is actually making us sick is lumbering into view.Author and food oracle Michael Pollan recently stated, "The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in...
by Tom Vannah | Dec 3, 2009 | Food + Booze
My eight-year-old daughter looked up from her menu and demanded for the millionth time in her life, "Daddy, what's your favorite food?"She knew the answer, just as she knows my favorite color, favorite animal, favorite movie, favorite sport. And she knew...
by Mary Nelen | Sep 24, 2009 | Food + Booze
What is better than having a row of bright red tomatoes lined up in your pantry for winter consumption? Nothing is better, but what is worse would be if all you had in your pantry for winter consumption was a row of bright red tomatoes. There is no time like the...
by Mary Nelen | Sep 17, 2009 | Food + Booze
Last month at the Free Harvest Supper where the rich, the poor and everybody in between eat for free, there were a couple of surprises: for one, grass-fed lamb as a "passed app" for those waiting in line with hats, forks and plates in hand. As usual, the...
by Tom Vannah | Feb 25, 2010 | Food + Booze
Unless you travel the Mohawk Trail through Shelburne Falls frequently, you may find yourself whizzing by this amazing little restaurant without knowing enough to stop in for an unexpected and truly memorable experience: the Mohawk Diner, located in a clean, bright but...
by Taylor Eason | Apr 2, 2010 | Food + Booze
The phrase “organic wine” freaks out most Americans, summoning up images of pot-smoking hippies living in communal sin. But organic vegetable farming, aka “green farming,” is quickly moving towards mainstream. How many times in the past two...
by Stephanie Kraft | Apr 1, 2010 | Food + Booze
In Western Massachusetts, a browse around farmers’ markets or stores like Atkins Farms leads customers to heirloom varieties of vegetables and fruits, especially tomatoes and apples, one of the best known of the latter being the Northern Spy. The heirloom...
by James Heflin | Mar 26, 2010 | Food + Booze
I thought I knew what coffee was: a blazing hot convergence of burnt styrofoam slurry, battery acid and steam, its top glistening with an oil slick of “creamer.” Why folks stood around in the basement of the church politely tittering over cups of the stuff...
by Mark Roessler | Mar 25, 2010 | Food + Booze
My parents immigrated to the United States from Australia, arriving in New York Harbor in the 1960s, and settling in a town on the Hudson River. Unlike people of other nationalities who choose to make a new life in America, my parents did not bring with them a burning...
by Steve Almond | Mar 18, 2010 | Food + Booze
Like most matzo ball worshipers, I declared my allegiance young. My first distinct memory of Passover involves attempting to eat a matzo ball for each of the 10 plagues rather than dripping a dab of wine onto my plate, a ritual that struck me (even then) as kind of...