Boston for grownups. BostonZest is your guide for enjoying a full-flavored life in an unbeatable city. We'll show you that there is life in Boston beyond the "club kids" and students.
Whether you live in Boston, plan to visit Boston, or you are moving to Boston; we'll help you locate great food, fun events, and reliable resources.
It made me so happy to see these neighbors doing Tai Chi in the Public Garden this weekend.
"If there were a ritual dance of the androgyne, Tai chi as performed by this master could be that dance. It is neither a masculine dance nor a feminine dance. It has the strength and grace of both." June Singer
About Photo Tales & Quotes: We keep hearing that people miss our cover photos that ran for years in the Back Bay Sun. That assignment was to provide a photo that showed what the week was like in the neighborhood. Often the photos illustrated favorite quotations. Photo Tales & Quotes is an occasional offering to our BostonZest readers featuring photos along the same theme but taken wherever we happen to be.
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It was such a pleasure to see Winston and his mounted Park Ranger adding a highly visible degree of protection to our parks.
Watching this pair interact with park visitors proved what great ambassadors the mounted patrol and their most attractive horses are for our parks. Each year The Friends of the Boston Park Rangers Mounted Unit have to raise enough money to keep this program going.
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In writing about this book for the James Beard Foundation, Maggie Borden praised it as a, “... masterful exploration of the contributions of African-American women to our nation's culinary landscape. Pages after pages of reproduced archival materials and recipes upend the historical stereotype of black women in the kitchen as illiterate ‘Aunt Jemimas,’ proving how instrumental these oft-ignored chefs were to our dinners and diets.”
Toni Tipton-Martin said about her research, "I eventually owned nearly 300 African American cookbooks ..." dating back to 1827. Her work set me on my own search for food writing and cookbooks that would help me better understand the African American contribution to our shared food culture.
Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs
Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs by Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the roles that chicken, both as the bird and the food, has played in the lives of black women from the past to the present. For some women, chicken led to economic freedom and independence.
This one is not a cookbook but is a fascinating read and, in some ways, connects the others on this list with one food, chicken. This connection with the food lore of the past came to my attention in a contemporary cookbook, Red Rooster by Marcus Samuelsson.
Samuelsson’s cookbook is about far more than recipes, just as his Harlem restaurant Red Rooster is as much about community as it is about food. Each section begins with an essay about some aspect of the multi-dimensional mission that Red Rooster represents to him and his team.
Chicken plays a starring role in his restaurant and his book as he tells of his two year obsession with creating the perfect fried chicken dish that would be worthy of the Harlem chicken tradition.
In an interesting connection to the The Jemima Code, the basement supper club is named Ginny’s after a woman from Harlem who worked for his partner’s family. He wants it to be a place where all the Ginnys would feel welcome.
No list on this topic would be complete without a book by chef and food writer Edna Lewis. Her New York Times obituary recalled an earlier interview in which she said, "As a child in Virginia, I thought all food tasted delicious. After growing up, I didn't think food tasted the same, so it has been my lifelong effort to try and recapture those good flavors of the past." With this in mind, I suggest you read her book, “The Taste of Country Cooking.”
While this column was introduced as a reading list, it is also a cooking list, and I hope you will try some of the recipes and/or menus you come across. All of these books are available from the Boston Public Library.
As a bonus for this online version of this Fresh & Local newspaper column, we have not only linked to the books on Amazon, but also to each author's page, making this a more extensive reading list in case you already know the specific books we selected to feature here.
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For those of us with dogs, our daily routine includes a number of short walks to take care of their needs. Somewhere in that schedule is a longer walk to give you and your dog some exercise and perhaps a bit of fun. On weekends or vacations, these walks may turn into adventures in new settings with great things to see, hear, and for your dog to sniff!
Two-year-old Sam loves his early morning walk. He practiced hissitwhen Penny met him. His person said this daily routine gets her going too!
One friend calls this “the long walk.” We call it "Poppy’s exercise" because she will gladly go inside on her puppy pads to avoid being outside. But she does need to move her little body and get her pulse rate up at least once a day, so we take her for a mile or two trot around the neighborhood.
A Study on Walking the Dog
A recent study titled, “(Just) a Walk with the Dog? Animal Geographies and Negotiating Walking Spaces,” argues that “... walking with dogs represents a potentially important cultural space for making sense of human–animal relations. We show how the personalities of both dog and walker can shape not only walking practices, but also the human–animal bond. We contend that the walk is a significant arena where relations of power between animal and human are consciously mediated.”
It makes you think about the interactions you see as people walk their dogs. Is the dog having fun? Are the dog and human interacting or are they on separate missions? Who is training whom?
One of Poppy's favorite snow day activities is to run in the snow with Ed. Look at that waggin' tail to see how much she enjoys this.
Be A Dog!
One command you should regularly give your pal on the other end of the leash is, “Be a Dog!” To us that means Poppy can follow her nose, sniff at the corners, or hop up on a bench and relax. She gets a turn to do what she wants on the walk.
Other times we may need some faster-paced exercise and she will have to walk along with us to allow us to get what we need from the walk.
It's a matter of give and take. Sometimes Sam gets a longer walk. Sometimes Poppy gets to play in the snow. Sometimes Sam's person wants to get home sooner. Sometimes we want to walk faster. Everyone should get a turn now and them.
Get to know all of our Sunday Dogs at Boston Dogs.
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We usually start nagging you to take down your holiday decorations before Valentine's Day but considering the weather, we waited until this holiday weekend to post our plea this year.
It is way past time to take down those crinkly, brown greens that went up in December.
Instead of festive, they now look depressing.
This goes for the parks department too. Although why anyone would think this lovely bridge needs to be hung with dead stuff is beyond me. If you can't take down holiday decorations in a timely manner, don't put them up.
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You may have walked by the statue of Alexander Hamilton on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall dozens of times. Did you ever wonder who the three men are in the bas-relief profile on the base?
Here are a few tidbits you may not know about this statue of Alexander Hamilton.
This sculpture has been located between Arlington and Berkeley Streets on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall since 1865.
It's one of the few surviving works by Dr. William Rimmer, whose father claimed to be Louis XVII, heir to the French throne.
In the book, A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, Marty Carlock says Rimmer's interest in anatomy led him to a career in medicine which he practiced for a few years. Rimmer became a full-time sculptor at age forty-five.
This is the only sculpture carved from stone on the Mall. Since Rimmer was self-taught, he used his own technique to create it. According to Public Art Boston, this technique makes the sculpture "particularly fragile and difficult to maintain."
The Friends of the Public Garden have taken on the responsibility for restoring and then providing annual maintenance of the artwork in The Boston Common, Boston Public Garden, and Commonwealth Avenue Mall.
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Here's a rundown of what's open and what's closed in Boston on Presidents' Day and the MBTA schedule changes, plus information on Boston trash pick-up and parking information for February 20, 2017.
We publish these resource pages early to assist you in planning your holidays. We'll keep updates coming as new information is published. Follow us on Twitter to learn about updates.
Restaurants, bars: Open
Convenience stores: Open Supermarkets: Open
Retail stores: Are allowed to open if the owners choose
Liquor stores: Open if the owners choose
City, Town, State and Federal offices and facilities are closed: This includes Schools, Libraries, and the Postal Service (express mail will be delivered). Only emergency services are available.
Financial Services: As the British would say, this is a Bank Holiday with both banks and the stock markets in the United States closed. Some international markets are open. In recent years, we've noticed some banks keep some branches open at unexpected times so check with your own bank.
Boston Parking: You don't have to feed the meters. Other parking rules apply.
Boston Trash and Recycling:
The city has changed the way it publishes the schedule for holidays so that you now have to go to thecity site and look up your specific addressin order to get information.
MBTA Schedule for Presidents' Day, February 20, 2017, is not published as of this writing. Here's what happened last year to help you with planning.
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