Call me crazy, even out of touch, but I associate wine with rolling hills and dusty cellars instead of modern technology.

However, at Wine Riot Boston, last weekend’s three-day wine tasting party at the Park Plaza Castle, photo booth flashes, a DJ and even a Smartphone app were artfully paired with reds and whites from around the globe.

Wine Riot is one of several events hosted by California-based organization Second Glass, which welcomes those intimidated by the complexities of wine to taste and learn in a fun, relaxed environment. And by fun, I mean carnival-like fun. There were blue and white awnings, tall stilt-like signs highlighting the region in which you were presently immersed (South Africa? Oregon? Bordeaux?), neon signs, local food vendors — e.g., Upper Crust Pizzeria and Cow & Crumb Baking Company — and even a fake tattoo stand. All of these ringed the room, providing respite from the Riojas.

Attendees, mostly in their twenties and thirties, could hop from one continent to another or spend half an hour in the Loire Valley (like this girl here), sipping and chatting with different wineries. (Tyler Balliet, Second Glass president and co-founder, encouraged the “unexpected questions”– even ones as simple as ‘What is Burgundy?’). Continue reading →

Here’s a chance to pull out your recipe box and have some fun.

Our neighbors over at Here & Now are doing a special program for Mother’s Day (May 13 this year) that’s based on the recipes your mom or grandmom has passed down to you.

What’s your favorite? What’s the family tradition behind this recipe? How did your mom (or grandmom) make it special?

Here & Now wants to know. And they’d love your photos, too, especially if you’ve got a hand-written recipe card or a dog-eared cookbook with personal annotations made right there in the margins. Click here to read the details about their upcoming Mother’s Day show and how you can play a part.

What’s my favorite recipe from my own mom? There are literally too many recipes to count — Baked Maccaroni, American Chopped Suey, Eggplant Parmigian, Risotto Milanese, Plum Cake and Blueberry Pie quickly come to mind. But I have to say I treasure our family’s strufoli recipe most. Lose this, and I lose a piece of my identity. Know what I mean?

Just a few photos to share with you readers from last night’s Taste of the Nation Boston fundraiser for Share Our Strength — the national nonprofit devoted to ending childhood hunger in America.

Cooking Matters Massachusetts, the local arm of SOS, is dedicated to the same cause through teaching culinary and nutritional skills to low-income families throughout our Commonwealth, all in the name of ending hunger and, of course, empowering families to eat more healthfully. I had a lovely talk with Mass Director Alicia McCabe, and I can assure you there’s plenty for volunteers such as ourselves to do!

Read PRK’s recent post about Cooking Matters, and consider getting involved.

And, yes, the food was excellent. (Thanks to Hamersley’s Bistro, Haley House Cafe, Davio’s, Cuisine En Locale, Blue Frog Bakery, Athan’s European Bakery and Cow and Crumb Cookies.)

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Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day. Remember, love our Mother Earth often and well — for food’s sake!!! To celebrate, join Picnic for the Planet – Boston on Boston Common, beginning at 11 am.

LOCAL BITES

The Health of New England’s Seafood
Next Sunday, April 29, is your best chance to learn about the health of our region’s fish stock and the health of our fishing industry. Let’s Talk About Food (LTAF) is again organizing a superb event, this time at Harvard University, with a line-up of seafood-related professionals from all walks of the industry. Tickets are $10 for the 1-5pm program; there is a free, related event Sunday evening at the Museum of Science. Read more and order tickets at the LTAF site.

Needham and Newton Unite
On Monday, April 30th, Spring Seasonings: Tastes of Our Neighborhoods is being held at the Boston Marriott Newton Hotel, 5:30-8:00pm. Honorary Event chairman Roger Berkowitz of Legal Sea Foods has marshaled together 40 fellow restaurateurs and chefs from Newton and Needham to participate, including not only Legals, but also Spiga, B Street, Petit Robert Needham, Bokx 109, the Center Café and Tu y Yo. Chestnut Hill’s Urban Grape will be supplying beverages. Tickets run $30 apiece. Continue reading →

Intrigued by a local start-up we caught word of last summer, PRK sent Radio Boston intern Annie Ropeik into the field to interview a husband/wife team from Arlington, MA, producing a great-tasting, all-natural ‘green’ popcorn.

Annie Ropeik
Radio Boston

Does the microwave popcorn world — a world of artificial flavorings and chemical-laden packages — seem a bit burnt out to you? Arlington couple Kristy and Coulter Lewis, owners of rapidly growing start-up Quinn Popcorn, would say there’s a kernel of truth in that.

Named for Kristy and Coulter’s baby son, Quinn bills itself as microwave popcorn reinvented, and it’s popping up in farmers markets and Whole Foods stores all over Massachusetts and beyond.

“It was such a stale category,” Kristy Lewis told me over the phone recently as she drove home from a demo in Wellesley. “We wanted to do something totally different.”

The biggest hurdle, she said, was the bag. Continue reading →

Spring creeps up on you. In New England, it’s not unusual to have a raw, cloudy 39-degree day followed by one with pure sun, blue skies and temperatures that soars to 86 degrees. It flip flops this way throughout the season—teasing you with glimpses of good times to come.

As soon as the sun gets serious so does my will to be outdoors more, get the garden planted and start eating more vegetables. Spring demands that I raise my healthy food consciousness. And after a winter of soups and stews and too much meat, I am more than happy to succumb.

I was rummaging around the kitchen yesterday and found some farro—a nutty whole grain that is simple to cook — and root vegetables from the last winter farmers market. I also grabbed a few asparagus and chives and leeks (that miraculously wintered over) from the garden. Look left.

I call this my “Ode to the End of Winter Salad.”

You can use virtually any vegetable you have on hand in this salad, as farro is very adaptable. You can also add cubed feta cheese. (Recipe after the jump.) Continue reading →

Have you ever shopped at a pop-up market? They’re hip, and they showcase amazing-quality food and real entrepreneurial spirit. But a viable business model for vendors, they’re not.

Alex Loud, Chapter President of Slow Food Boston, describes below his view of the pop-up market phenomenon, and what we consumers can do to keep demand for high-quality food — and food craftsmanship — alive.

Alex Loud
Slow Food Boston

I recently attended my first “pop-up market” which, I have to say, was pretty cool. I came home with three pounds of pork belly, a whole pâté, four Meyer lemon donuts and an insanely good chocolate whiskey cake. It was a haul I’d be proud to bring home from the finest snooty store, much less a venue that basically amounted to a foodie flea market.

If you haven’t heard of the concept of a pop-up market, it’s pretty simple: gather some friends who have things to sell, find a venue, use social media to popularize it and, bang, you have a market for a day. This one in particular was organized by Vadim Akimenko, a young man you might characterize as a pop-up butcher. Despite having trained at the Culinary Institute of America and having experience in a variety of commercial butcher shops, Vadim has been unable to raise funds to open his own locally-focused butcher shop anywhere in greater Boston. As such, he works out of a culinary incubator, consults, teaches classes and organizes the occasional market.

It occurred to me afterwards that Vadim and his market are broadly representative of two trends in this country — one hopeful and one decidedly less so. Continue reading →

It’s a three-day weekend for many Bostonians, and so far I’ve spent my extra day doing something I never have time to on a Monday: baking.

Does that sound unappealing with today’s muggy weather? Perhaps — but these banana coconut muffins, from Cookie and Kate, were worth heating up the apartment. They’re not too sweet, but they are intensely coconut-y, rich with the fruit’s flakes and oil. They’re a tropical, summery snack. I suggest taking them down to the nearest spot you can watch the marathon for an al fresco breakfast amid today’s excitement.

LOCAL BITES

Share Your Strength: Help End Hunger
Taste of the Nation Boston kicks off next Thursday, April 19, at 7pm at Hynes Convention Center! This is a fundraising event for Share Our Strength and its nation-wide campaign to end childhood hunger in America. The evening will feature over 70 of Boston’s great restaurants, 30 wineries, specialty cocktails, a silent auction and live entertainment. (Read the local backstory on SOS from PRK: Why Cooking Matters).

A Premeditated Riot
Wine Riot Boston is returning to the Hub next weekend. Beginning Friday, April 20, 7-11pm at the Park Plaza Hotel, you can work your way through 250 wines from all over the world — tasting, pairing, app’ing (is that a word?), getting educated and interacting in booths (no joke, that’s what they’re sayin’). Read more about this planned Riot, and buy tickets online.

Get Reel, Whole Foods
This month Whole Foods Market launches its “Do Something Reel” film festival — a series of “provocative” documentaries about food and environmental issues. First in line is “The Apple Pushers” (immigrant entrepreneurs / urban food deserts) which will be shown on April 22 in various theaters around the US. A live panel discussion will stream afterwards from Austin, TX. Click here for info on the Boston screening.

Drumlin Farm and…Chocolate
Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary in Lincoln is hosting an “Evening of Chocolate” on April 27, led by Drumlin Farm’s Tia Pinney and Walter Plante, co-founder of New Leaf Chocolates (and blogger behind Koko Buzz, featured here at PRK). Knowledgeable and passionate, Plante will share where cacao is grown, how chocolate is made, how to care for it and factors that influence its flavor and texture. Registration required. Continue reading →

With the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic just days away, news coverage of the disaster has kept apace — understandably so. It’s a riveting event in our modern history. A true nightmare whose retelling by the survivors causes you to freeze, fingers poised, mouth agape at the details. The stories, on many a level, are eviscerating.

Yet there is a twinge of romanticism in our collective remembrance of the Titanic. It’s the era, isn’t it? The incredible opulence of the ship, the lifestyles of the first-class passengers who boarded it — what they carried with them, what they wore and were adorned with before the ship went down. Photos of retrieved objects and Hollywood’s re-creations, of course, feed our imagination.

But the Titanic was an entire self-contained community afloat for over a week. What did they feed all those souls needing nourishment for the course of the voyage to New York? The ship sailed from Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, with 800 bundles of asparagus, forty thousand fresh eggs, forty thousand sausages. And so much more edible fare, not to mention the necessary cutlery, the dishes, the glassware, the linens, the teacups. Here’s how we know: the menus survive. Continue reading →