Category: Books

Hiking with Your Dog in Greater Boston

This time of year, we always see a flurry of visitors to our post reviewing the book, Best Hikes with Dogs, Boston and Beyond. We thought we'd bring this gem to our newer Sunday Dog fans who might want to take a hike with their own Sunday Dog. Just click on that link to jump over to it.

Invest in this book and enjoy the weekends ahead by letting Jenna and Tasman guide you to some "hidden pockets of magic" in Boston and beyond.

And, because we wanted to have a little someone for all of you who tune in each week to see what local dog is in the BostonZest spotlight, we thought we would feature Miss Summer in her neat carrier. She spends her days with her person Rose walking other dogs. Sometimes Summer walks and sometimes she rides. It's a great solution if your small dog is not quite ready for a long hike!

And, there are companion books for hiking with your dog in other areas of the country. Click here to see if there is one for your next outdoor destination with your furry friend. Below are the direct links to Boston, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and outside New York City.

Get to know all of our Sunday Dogs at Boston Dogs.

Details:

Words: Penny Cherubino

Summer's photo: © 2012 Penny Cherubino

(Bookcover courtesy of Mountaineers Books, all rights reserved)

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often, those add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

June 3, 2012
Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin Enters the James Beard Hall of Fame

One of my daily reads, A Proper Bostonian, gave me the great gift of an introduction to Laurie Colwin's books. Somehow, it hadn't registered with me that this essayist, that I had read in Gourmet and The New Yorker, also had books I should read.

I borrowed the Boston Public Library copy of Home Cooking for far too long and when they wanted it back, because another fan requested it, I bought my own copy.

Last week, the James Beard Awards placed Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin in their Hall of Fame for cookbooks. However, this is far more than a cookbook. It does have some recipes, but it also has stories flavored with witty and wise insight.

A big thank you to Ms Proper for putting so much enjoyment into my evening reading sessions. I think my summer reading list will include the rest of this author's books. That should make for a warm, relaxed summer with lots of gentle laughter.

By the way, here's where you can find the rest of the winners of the James Beard Foundation Book Awards. Just click on the category under, "Browse more book awards" in the left hand column.

What's on your summer reading shopping list? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen

Details:

Words: Penny Cherubino
Cover art courtesy of Vintage Books

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often those add a great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you. We do reserve the right to edit ads and links out of comments.

May 7, 2012
The Food Lover’s Guide to Wine: Book Review
With our sparkler of the month on March 1st, we mentioned that we had put The Food Lover's Guide to Wine on our book wish list. That afternoon, we received an email from the authors Karen Page & Andrew Dornenburg saying they would love to send us a review copy.

It arrived a few days later and hasn't made it to a bookshelf yet. It has spent a few nights beside the bed as Penny's relaxation reading, we've used it explore a couple of new wines, and we're planning to feature some recommended producers as our Sparkler of the Month.

Learn in various ways from a collection of great wine lovers.
- If you were hanging outside our door, you might have heard us reading quotes from the book to one another. It has the greatest collection of quotes from wine lovers and wine experts you can imagine. Boston's own Cat Silirie is often cited.
- Ed loves the pronunciation guide in the core listing of wines, grapes, and wine topics.
- The system used to emphasize the importance of wine grapes, characteristics, and producers (by using bold and all caps in lists) is brillant and intuitive to use.
- The end chapters on matching wines with foods, cuisines, and courses will have us exploring new options.
- We love the gold boxes with great asides on topics. A few are already marked with page tabs.
- Since these writers believe that the wine you like is the right wine for you, they've prepared a series of recommendations based on your own taste. If you like a flavor, for example almonds, they give you a list of wines to try. If you like a particular wine, they give you others with similar flavor profiles.
A Great Interview Grabbed Our Attention

We first hear about The Food Lover's Guide to Wine on the Heritage Radio Network show, A Taste of the Past. Penny listens to podcasts of food shows while she cooks, and this one was good enough for a shared listen during an afternoon of crab-cracking and conversation.

Host Linda Pelaccio began by covering the history of American Wine (the book contains a timeline) and then a discussion of the book that really gave us an insight to the authors' points of view and how this book would fit into our collection. Here's a link to that show.

Meet the authors and hear what some experts say about this book.

We are not only recommending this book to our readers, we'll be buying copies as gifts for wine-loving friends. It is a treasure and we expect it to look a bit worn and well-used pretty quickly. It may even suffer a few wine stains but we doubt that Karen and Andrew will mind.

Here are more books from this team:

The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity, Based on the Wisdom of America's Most Imaginative Chefs

What to Drink with What You Eat: The Definitive Guide to Pairing Food with Wine, Beer, Spirits, Coffee, Tea – Even Water – Based on Expert Advice from America's Best Sommeliers

Becoming a Chef

and of course

The Food Lover's Guide to Wine

Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:
Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2012 Penny & Ed Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often those add a great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you.
April 10, 2012
Peaceful Places Boston, Book Review

Last month, we had the pleasure of attending a Boston Society of Architects Placemaking presentation by Lynn Schweikart, author of Peaceful Places: Boston: 121 Tranquil Sites in the City and Beyond. She is a kindred soul who enjoys, promotes and, with her book, will help preserve havens in our area.

As Lynn showed slide after slide of some of our favorite spots, she must have noticed us nodding in unison and smiling at one another in agreement. We've shared some of these places with you, our readers, over the years and hope you will consider adding this book to your Boston books collection.

Lynn lists 121 sites and tells you what she feels is special about each one. She also includes: directions to reach them, times they're open to the public, and reasons to go there.

Here are a few of the place that we have covered that Lynn has included in her book.

Allandale Farm

Arnold Arboretum

Boston Public Library Courtyard

Boston HarborWalk

We could go on and on but, even for us, there are new places to visit and new ways to think about other places as urban escapes. We highly recommend this book and plan to make it a list that we'll explore in the years ahead.

For those who read us from other parts of the country, the publisher has some peaceful books for other cities.

Peaceful Places: Boston: 121 Tranquil Sites in the City and Beyond

Peaceful Places: Chicago: 119 Tranquil Sites in the Windy City and Beyond

Peaceful Places: San Francisco: 100+ Tranquil Sites in The City and the Greater Bay Area

Peaceful Places: Los Angeles: 100+ Sites for Tranquility Across the City of Angels

Details:
Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Cover art © 2012 Lynn Schweikart

April 5, 2012
7 Things We Learned at the BPL Conservation Lab!
After a rebinding, this Liber Chronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle) from 1493 now opens completely.

Penny and I recently had the chance to go behind the scenes at the Boston Public Library’s (BPL) Conservation Lab to meet the talented experts who are preserving history one piece at a time! These specialists repair and stabilize rare books and documents to ensure that these items remain available to all of us.

Keeper of Special Collections at the BPL, Susan L. Glover (above) put it best, “They are wonderfully skilled, they are passionate, they are dedicated, and what they do looks like magic.”

We were so impressed, here are:

7 Things We Learned at the BPL Conservation Lab!
- The lab is only able to get to about 1% of the work that is needed.
- Some items can deteriorate just sitting on a shelf due to material content.
Conservation Assistant, Chris Letizia tests leather to bind a 12th Century illuminated manuscript.

And, here are their recommendations for your own items.
- Keep your valued pieces out of direct sunlight, away from acidic paper.
- Don’t store personal treasures (clipping, letters, etc) in basements (too humid) or attics (too hot).
- Handle them little, keep them unfolded in folders or archival albums.
- Never use any kind of household tape to make repairs.
- If you discover what might be an important item, contact the BPL Conservation Lab for advice and recommendations. (617-536-5400)
For more information, check out the BPL Rare Books Department

What's on your shopping list? Remember to click over to Amazon from here to support this site!

Details:

Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photography: © 2012 Penny Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often those add a great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you.
February 15, 2012
Hearty, Herby Split Pea Soup

My favorite split pea soup recipe started out as the one in Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells. She takes a simple pea soup with ham recipe and adds lots of garlic herbs and spices– thyme, marjoram, parsley, and cloves. I took her recipe and added big pieces of carrot and a dose of cumin seed toasted and then ground.

I love Patrica Wells' cookbooks because the recipes always seem to work, and she has a very relaxed style that invites you, as a cook, to make changes and finish the dish in differnet ways. With this I took her up on not puréeing the soup but serving it in a rustic, chunky style.

If you would like to learn from a real pro and love little tips tucked into the pages of a cookbook, I highly recommend this one, Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells. I've learned a lot from this outstanding food writer.

Details:
Words: Penny Cherubino
Photos: © 2012 Penny Cherubino

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often those comments add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you.

January 26, 2012
The Serious Eats Book is a Seriously Good Gift for…
One of my favorite food sites, Serious Eats pubished a really wonderful book this year. Serious Eats: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Eating Delicious Food Wherever You Are, will make a Seriously Good Gift for a food-loving friend who loves to travel for food or find great food when they travel.

How do you know if someone is a serious eater and would love this book? Fortunately the team has put together a simple test to help you decide. They say to ask the following:

"Are you a Serious Eater?
1. Do you plan your day around what you might eat?
2. When you are heading somewhere, anywhere, will you go out of your way to eat something delicious?
3. When you daydream, do you often find yourself thinking about food?
4. Do you live to eat, rather than eat to live?
5. Have you strained relationships with friends or family by dictating the food itinerary—changing everyone’s plans to try a potentially special burger or piece of pie?"
If you're nodding your head as you read, you'll want this book! And, if you're like me you'll turn right to the pages for your favorite locations.

The Boston area is well represented.

Serious Eats executive editor, food-lab guru, and recipe czar J. Kenji López-Alt has serious Boston connections. He's an MIT grad who has cooked in some of Boston's top restaurants and spent a few years working behind the scenes and in front of the camera at Cook's Illustrated and America's Test Kitchen.

Serious Eats Up and Down the Price Scale & Recipes too!

Lets take burgers as one example. The book covers What Makes A Great Burger, Burger Styles, Regional Burger Styles, The Hamburger Fatty Melt, Got Buns Hon?, Where the Beef Is: 30 Great Burgers, and the Patty Melt.

They tell you where to find the best regardless of price. Five Great Chefy Burgers details the ledgendary offering at Craigie on Main along with others great burgers they've found around the country.

But, they also cover the Five Fast-Food Burgers Worth Your Time, including a new entry in our area, Five Guys.

Finally, they devote pages to Making Burgers At Home. Remember, this team holds a daily conversation with a vast community of food lovers. They have tested and then incorporated the tips from this remarkable resource.

Reviews

This book has had rave reviews from the New York Times, The Amateur Gourmet, Publishers Weekly, Mercury News, and Weekender.

For yourself or someone else, we highly recommend this book. Leave it out, and you'll find yourself picking it up and getting lost in the 368 pages of delicious!

Serious Eats: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Eating Delicious Food Wherever You Are.

Details:
Words: Penny Cherubino
Cover Art courtesy of Clarkson Porter Publishers, NY

Disclosure: Penny is a paid, freelance contributor to Serious Eats. Here is our full disclosure policy.

Note on Comments: We monitor comments constantly and anything that is pure spam, inappropriate, or nasty is swept away. In addition to readers' comments, we welcome hearing from the people, places, and services we cover. Often those comments add great insights for our readers. As long as it doesn’t become a pure ad, we’d love to hear from you.
December 19, 2011