"winter" news and stories

No matter how low the mercury dips, Boston locavores still hope for a year-round farmer's market, like Seattle's dreamy Pike Place Market or Cleveland's treasured Westside Market. But the fact is, groups like the Boston Public Market (founded in 2001 to achieve that goal) have yet to make that vision a reality, despite years of fund-raising and public ribbon-cutting celebrations.

But there's been no dithering for Boston's vibrant neighbor to the south. Farm Fresh Rhode Island, a not-for-profit whose mission is to promote locally grown food, is in its third season of its Wintertime Farmer's Market at Hope Artist Village in Pawtucket on Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. through May.

Kwanzaa's come and gone only 43 times, but the community-focused festival has already spawned two distinct food traditions.

When Maulana Karenga created Kwanzaa in the wake of the Watts riots, he intended for African traditions to pervade every element of the invented harvest celebration -- including the Karamu, the feast served on New Year's Eve. Karenga undoubtedly envisioned fellow black Americans marking the holiday with a spread of West African dishes, including yam porridge, spiced rice and fish stew.

But as the festival entered the mainstream in the early 1980s, an increasing number of celebrants opted to ditch the unfamiliar African foods. Rather than serve up the cuisine of a homeland they never knew, they prepared delicacies associated with the African diaspora: Catfish, collards and macaroni and cheese all showed up on Kwanzaa tables.

This time of year always inspires people to spice up their ciders and wines for a little holiday goodness in a glass. Hippocras is a sweetened, spiced wine drink going way back several hundred years. In her book titled "A Sip Through Time," Cindy Renfrow mentions that this drink could have been named for Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician. The name could also refer to the drink being strained through a filter bag familiar to most vintners and apothecaries as a manicum Hippocraticum -- the sleeve of Hippocrates. This bag helped strain out the flavoring bits and pieces.

Spices and herbs have been used for centuries in beer and wine, just to flavor it up and oftentimes to cover up the off flavors of the beverage. Herbs and spices were thought to be good for the health. They frequently served as a bit of a preservative, as well.

Hippocras was a popular celebratory drink for weddings and christenings and other such feasts. It was regularly served after dinner with sweet goodies and brought to the table unheated. Oriental spices were quite expensive so this drink was often associated with having the cash flow for such luxury and nobility.

For more than two decades, Allman Brothers and Gov't Mule guitarist Warren Haynes has hosted Asheville, N.C.'s Christmas Jam, a rootsy benefit concert for Habitat for Humanity. While the event is an annual present for area music lovers, the Jam has now given beer geeks a dose of holiday cheer too.

In February, Mike Rangel, owner of Asheville Brewing Company -- which concocts standouts such as the chocolaty Ninja porter and the snappy, intensely citrusy Shiva IPA -- contacted Haynes' management firm about crafting a beer in conjunction with the concert. Sold. It was a collaboration from the get-go.

"We asked Warren and his wife to choose the style of beer," Rangel says. "They like wheat beers but nothing overly spicy or heavy. Their concern was that we create a beer that was easy to drink, accessible to nontraditional craft-beer drinkers and that people could drink a few over an evening without getting out of control."

We're a sucker for the culinary frenzy of seasonal items when they first hit local menus -- Chesapeake soft-shell crabs, wild Alaskan salmon or Louisiana crawfish. Here in New England, just when the weather turns cold and dreary, that happy tidbit of deliciousness comes in the form of sweet, succulent Nantucket bay scallops. Just don't confuse them with their larger sea-scallop cousins.

These morsels are about the size of the tip of your thumb. The native eelgrass that surrounds the island acts as a nursery for the tender scallops, making them the last substantial wild scallop population on the East Coast, according to Peter Boyce, chair of Nantucket's Harbor and Shellfish Advisory Board. The commercial scallop season starts Nov. 1 and runs through the end of March, but most of the madness happens prior to New Year's, before the harbor freezes over and fishermen can still get their boats out on the water.