The New Owners Averted Disaster when a Freak October Snowstorm Knocked Out Power, Almost Ruining their $5,000 Opening Week Food Order By DAVID REID NORTHAMPTON – The long-awaited opening of Jake’s, the iconic downtown no-frills restaurant, got off to a stumble two weeks ago because of the massive October 29-30 snowstorm that knocked out power [...]

As money pours in to buy 120 acres of prime farmland by a Jan. 31 deadline, Grow Food Northampton founder Lilly Lombard is still waiting to exhale. NORTHAMPTON — When Munroe Street resident Lilly Jeffs Lombard adopts a cause, watch out. A longtime advocate for the environment and urban agriculture here, Lombard has a reputation [...]

NORTHAMPTON — This week we are going back to the “random assortment of places I see from my car” method of restaurant selection. Next week will be Asian-themed, and at some point there will be a coffee special. In the meantime, here are my lunches from the past few days: Kathy’s Diner The Meal Chicken [...]

Put down this month’s Cosmo, turn off The Price is Right, and hold on to your metaphorical pants, because this week is all about pizza! That’s right; I hit up four local pizza joints (two in downtown Northampton and two in Florence) and judged them like the soulless critic I am paid (in college credits) [...]

Eggplant Salad – The Greek Way Aubergines to the French, Melazana to the Italians, eggplant traveled from the Iberian peninsula to Sicily, southern Italy and finally Greece. This little bunch was purchased on Saturday morning in Greenfield. The following dish is interpreted from the Greeks from Patience Gray, who wrote “Honey from a Weed” while [...]

About a month ago a guy who has a paper route mentioned to me that he had seen some funny spots on a person’s upside-down tomato plants. Later in the day, a woman who lives in Florence said that she saw the same thing on one, just one, of the leaves on her tomatoes. She [...]

I am not going to be including tax when I am doing these reviews now, so we might want to change the title to “five dollar lunch (minus taxes).” My reasoning for this is that it eliminates the variety I can try because so much food costs $4.95 and I don’t think it’s fair to [...]

I have not been working in Northampton for very long, but something that has been abundantly clear since day one is that there are copious numbers of restaurants. They are everywhere. Some of them are chains. Some of them are one-of-a-kind. Some defy single-sentence descriptions. It’s no secret that money is tight in this economy, [...]

“The leaves that develop from the red protrusions grow more than a food in length and contain a toxic amount of oxalic acid, a substance that can cause illness if ingested. (This fact always impressed me.)” Martha Stewart, Martha Stewart Living, May 2010 I was given a nice bunch of rhubarb from the guys at [...]

Promising “Oddball Farmers, Free-Range Children, Jaw-Dropping Flowers, Hard-Working Musicians” and wholesome locally-grown food and produce straight from the abundant farms of Western Massachusetts, Tuesday Market opens May 4 for the 2010 season. The market is held every Tuesday between 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. in the brick area next to the city’s parking garage and behind [...]

The band played on through the end of summer at the Amherst Farmers’ Market on South Pleasant St. to a very appreciative crowd. There has been a surge not only in farmers’ markets in general, over 100 in this region, according to CISA, but in music at markets as well. At the winter farmers’ market [...]

Hadley grass, so prized, so loved, so chronicled in the Valley that some folks can actually taste on which side of the river it is grown. Like with wine, terroir makes a difference. This time of year there are recipes galore for this New England perennial. In one, the asparagus is transformed into ice cream (!) and then piped into the beginning of the season, keep it simple to best taste this shining star of Hadley, lo these many decades. Recipes [...]

Fiddleheads are in the shy stage of life pausing before unfurling into ferns. Ostrich fern (atteuccia struthiopteris) fiddleheads are edible, forragable, and pretty much free, if you know where to look. They come up in April and May and like alluvial, sandy soil. In western MA, they have been known to grow near the oxbow [...]

I met my wife Priscilla at the Woodstar Cafe on December 27, 2008, when I needed to plug my laptop in next to her table. It was then that I saw she was reading a reprint of the 1966 Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Plan. As both an urban planning and zoning geek and a librarian I [...]

I shot this at Tabella’s Restaurant in Amherst last night. I was impressed. Really good food, and a firm commitment to real farm-to-table politics. The menu changes according to what is available that week. They are all local all the time. I spent about three hours in the kitchen and these guys were pumping out [...]