New England Public Radio

A Walk In The Woods With Author Of Berkshire Hiking Guide

There’s no way around it: New England is at its “New England-iest” right now. Fall foliage is peaking. Apples and pumpkins are everywhere.

So, what better time to go for a hike in the woods? You’ll find some great hikes all around the Berkshires, according to Lauren Stevens, the author of “50 Hikes in the Berkshire Hills,” which came out earlier this year. With maps and photos and narrative descriptions, it’s a practical guide to what Stevens considers some of the best day hikes in the region.

On a recent hike in the Mount Greylock Reservation, Stevens talked about what he hopes to communicate to people who use his book.

Click the audio player above to hear Lauren Stevens’ conversation with New England Public Radio’s Henry Epp.

Summer Fiction: Allen Steele’s ‘Arkwright’

This week, NEPR’s summer fiction series heads to space. The science fiction novel Arkwright follows a renowned writer, Nathan Arkwright, who dedicates his fortune to the creation of a starship, which he hopes will establish a human colony on a distant planet.

Author Allen Steele of Whately, Massachusetts, is a longtime author of “hard” science fiction. He explained how his writing is different from more popular sci-fi like Star Wars or Star Trek.

Click the audio player above to hear Steele talk about “hard” science fiction with New England Public Radio’s Henry Epp.

MORE BOOKS: NEPR’s Summer Fiction series

Darra Goldstein Talks About Nordic Food And Makes Beet Tartare

Click the audio player above to hear cookbook author Darra Goldstein prepare Beet Tartare and talk with New England Public Radio’s Carrie Healy, who became a beet lover only after eating this Beet Tartare.

Recipe reprinted with permission from Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking, by Darra Goldstein, copyright © 2015, published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

beet tartare

Beet Tartare

Makes About 2 Cups

There’s no typo here! This ruby red beet tartare is a vegetarian take on the classic rabiff introduced to Sweden from France in the nineteenth century. Like many salads, it’s most dazzling in summer, when beets are sweet and garden fresh.  Winter beets will yield a darker garnet dish, not quite so brilliant, and you may want to add a little sugar to perk it up.  Spread these beets on bread or crackers, plate them with cured fish or meat, or scoop them onto a bed of lettuce.  The flavor is beautiful at any time of the year.

Cookbook author Darra Goldstein with Beet Tartare, from her cookbook "Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking."
Cookbook author Darra Goldstein with Beet Tartare, from her cookbook “Fire + Ice: Classic Nordic Cooking.”

1 1/2 pounds beets

1 by 1/2-inch piece horseradish, peeled and chopped

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 small shallot, coarsely chopped

2 tablespoons coarsely chopped dill pickle

1 tablespoon mayonnaise

2 tablespoons minced fresh dill

1/4 teaspoon salt

Freshly ground pepper to taste

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add the beets and cook until tender, 30 to 45 minutes, depending on their size and age.

Drain, peel and chop coarsely.

In a mini food processor or spice grinder, whir the horseradish with the cider vinegar until it is grated.

Place the beets in the bowl of a food processor. Add the grated horseradish mixture along with the shallot and pickle and process until finely chopped. Be careful not to make a puree – the tartare should be minced, with some texture.

Transfer the beets to a bowl and stir in the mayonnaise, dill, and salt.  Season with pepper to taste. Cover and refrigerate for at least 2 hours before serving.

Berkshire Ski Areas Hope Vacation Week Will Jump Start Business

A mild and less-than-snowy December has meant a slow start to the ski season in the Berkshires. Mountain operators are hoping the busy week between Christmas and New Year’s will help jump start business.

Ski area operators say while they’ve been able to make snow on some trails, above-normal temperatures and wet weather have hampered their efforts. Still, some are optimistic skiers will turn out around the holidays. Matt Sawyer of Ski Butternut in Great Barrington, Massachusetts says about 15 percent of the mountain’s business happens over the next week.

“We’re comfortable going into the holiday week with 13 or 14 of our trails open out of 22, so it’s a little bit more than half” Sawyer says. “We’d like to be further along at this point, but this is not uncommon for us at this point of the year.”

Many ski areas closed during this week’s rainstorm in an effort to protect and groom available trails.

 

Bean By Bean, A Coffee Revolution Brews In An Unlikely Spot

Dueling shops serve up top shelf coffee service around the corner from each other in West Stockbridge

Something unexpected is brewing in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Its tiny village center is home to two coffee shops—each of which could be called the most connoisseur-friendly coffee service in the Berkshires. One of them has even figured out how to charge $5.95 for a glass of iced coffee, without it seeming entirely crazy.

The coffee beans that are poured out and ground up at Six Depot were roasted just a few feet away, in a big apparatus visible to customers. A hallway leading toward the bathroom is lined with a dozen burlap sacks, each stuffed with one hundred forty pounds of green, un-roasted coffee beans.

Co-owner Lisa Landy shows off the espresso machine. She grabs ahold of its hand crank, which has to be yanked down for every shot. “You can pull it down and see how hard it is. It really takes a bit of effort, to release it and it releases the pressure. It’s a very manual way of making espresso. It’s very Italian, I used to live in Italy. We kind of fell in love with it. It’s very old school,” she says.

Her husband Flavio Lichtenthal chooses the beans and roasts them. A two-minute stroll away, at Shaker Dam Coffeehouse, coffee maven John Stanmeyer doesn’t roast the beans, but he selects them while traveling the globe for his other job, as a contract photographer for National Geographic.

Next to a fully digitized espresso maker, there’s a fragile-looking contraption, with a large glass bulb suspended above a network of glass tubes and brass spigots. It’s a Kyoto-style cold brewer, ordered from Japan. This technique is not recommended for someone in a rush, barista Skyler Ruderman explains. “You know, you get about three liters after 12 hours of work. That’s like, a very, very small amount of coffee. And it uses an incredibly large amount of beans to make that,” he says.

And that’s how we end up with that six-dollar cup of coffee.

Ruderman weighs out exactly 140 grams of beans, picking them out one by one until he gets to that magic number. After grinding them, he uses a horsehair paintbrush to push down the stray grounds stuck to the sides of the container. As he carefully adjusts the air pressure on the cold-brewer, it looks like he’s conducting a chemistry experiment.

And in a way, these two coffeehouses, which both opened in July 2013, are conducting an experiment. Local residents can find a more basic cup of coffee at the Public Market next door to Shaker Dam. But many appear to be choosing these two gourmet options.

Ruderman says he’s not sure how West Stockbridge quietly became the coffee capital of the Berkshires. “I was, like, walking to my car after work and it hit me that this is a town of thirteen hundred people. And you’ve got two just, really dedicated, really different coffee shops in this little place. And it’s like, how is this working? And yet it does.”

It works, though not just off the business of the town’s residents. West Stockbridge benefits from its proximity to Tanglewood and other tourist attractions, as Berkshire Chamber of Commerce president Jonathan Butler points out. “While West Stockbridge population-wise is small,” he says, “there’s quite a bit of activity there and geographically they’re located in a pretty convenient spot.”

In particular, It’s an easy stop for travelers exiting the Mass Pike. As for that Kyoto-style cold brew? Even to a skeptical reporter, it was wallet-lightening but… delicious.

 

Updated on October 1 at 8:00 am to better describe the item that is poured out and ground up at the beginning of the story.

The Sound Of (New) Music

Up the road a ways from Tanglewood, progressive musical collective takes a different approach to classical training

The music of Beethoven and Bach gets a lot of attention in the Berkshires every summer. But amid the more august offerings, there is a musical collective that wants to rip the powdered wig off traditional classical music. Playing the work of living composers, and using unconventional methods, they are interested in anything but a musical history lesson.

Leading a string ensemble of about twenty musicians an hour before their public recital, conductor Brad Lubman gives his players an unusual criticism—they sound too polished, clean, locked in with each other.

“What I’m getting is it all sounds like you’re going like [sings a note], lets go now [sings a note]. It shouldn’t be that way. It should be disturbing.”

These players face a sort of pressure that’s not so common for classically trained musicians—the composer of the piece they’re playing, Julia Wolfe, is sitting right there in the front row of the otherwise empty auditorium.

Lubman has them try it again. He’s happy with the results.

Wolfe is one of three founders of Bang on A Can, a collective of musicians based in New York City who write and perform what’s known in the biz simply as new music—which is a less descriptive, but also a less oxymoronic term than “contemporary Classical,” which could also work.

Thirty-eight highly advanced music students, mostly in their 20’s and known as Fellows, are in residence at MASS MoCA in North Adams for Bang on a Can’s annual summer institute. It’s about 45 minutes north from the much more widely known training program at Tanglewood. The caliber of musicianship here is similar, but the daily agenda is a little different. It might include morning yoga, African drumming, and some work with Latin jazz. Or, as Wolfe points out, building instruments from spare parts.

“Really getting back to the fundamentals. What’s this tube, and how does this plastic tube—if you add some keys to it and a mouthpiece, that becomes an instrument. Well it makes you look at your own instrument maybe in a different way because you’ve now constructed one. Just trying to crack it open, and crack open how you think about making sound and making music,” she says.

The music here fits in with and sometimes plays off of the art on view in the MASS MoCA galleries. Wolfe’s piece was performed for a rapt audience in one of the larger galleries, underneath an undulating wave of translucent tubes created by Teresita Fernández and forming a sort of otherworldly cloud cover. Another piece was performed in the separate building devoted to Anselm Kiefer’s work—with all the lights shut off.

Sarah Goldfeather is a violinist who also leads an Americana band. She’s a Fellow here, and says that seeing the reactions of museum patrons who walk into a gallery recital, whether accidentally or on purpose, is part of the experience.

“Watching them come upon us playing music in a little corner—it’s fun to sort of share that with everyone. Some people are maybe expecting a different kind of music when they go to a concert,  and they say: ‘Oh, this is unusual. New music. OK, this is not Mozart.'”

Things wrap up here on Saturday with the Bang on a Can marathon, six hours of music by both fellows and faculty, including special guests like Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche, and the composer Steve Reich’s re-working of two songs by Radiohead.

Mozart has the day off.