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 [...]

NORTHAMPTON – Jake’s, the popular “no-frills dining” restaurant in the heart of downtown, and the building that houses it at 17 King St., were sold July 15 by longtime owner Daniel Workman to a Westhampton couple, Gary J. and Carol A. Perman. Records from the Hampshire County Registry of Deeds show that the Permans paid [...]

NORTHAMPTON — At 10 in the morning on an intensely hot Friday, I walked into Halo Couriers, Brion Stracensky’s new bike shop at Roundhouse Plaza downtown. While he does sell bike gear,  Stracensky’s bread-and-butter is a messenger service. I had never met a bicycle messenger. In fact, I was under the impression that they had gone [...]

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 [...]

Hamp Crew will be sending its Men’s Varsity Eight boat to the 2010 US Rowing Youth National Championships after a superb showing at the Northeast District Championships on the Merrimack River in Lowell last weekend, qualifying with a time of 6:29.475 in the 2000-meter event with a third-place finish in the final heat. The District [...]

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 [...]

Noho Pride, the all-volunteer organization that organizes Northampton’s annual Pride Parade and Rally, works year-round for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality in Western New England. The group, a member of the international network known as Interpride, has applied for tax-exempt non-profit status, and is looking forward to a strong, bright future. “We have developed [...]

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 [...]

Suleiman Mourad and Rana Knio both adore Sunnyside Childcare Center at Smith College. Sunnyside is the cooperative preschool, housed in a rambling old house at the end of Paradise Road, that Mourad and Knio’s children—Jude, five, and Alya, nearly three—attend. Rather than seeing the school as merely a drop-off spot, Mourad describes their Sunnyside experience [...]

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 [...]

We came home this afternoon to find the bees in the early stages of swarming! Swarming is a natural reaction to favorable conditions by bees. They create a new queen and about half of the bees leave the hive with her to form a new colony elsewhere. This may be good for the bees, but [...]