It’s a classic American scene: The lunch lady plops a mysterious jiggling blob onto your tray. The mystery meat seeps juice, slimily mingling with peas and coating the bottom of your milk carton. Just as you have time to gaze down in despair, she cries out: NEXT! Luckily this scene is mostly fiction, but the basic menu of meat, bread, vegetables, and dairy [...]
Last summer, I decided to stay on my college’s campus to have a beautiful Boston summer, instead of returning home to my quaint town about an hour away. I was curled up in my dorm bed searching for new employment opportunities when my cursor dotted across a page I hadn’t seen before. It was a description for a newly-hiring barista job at a [...]
Baking can seem like a daunting task. The hundreds of thousands of videos on social media that either showcase beautiful, complicated masterpieces or unfortunate baking fails of underdone or overdone desserts set a high bar that can seem difficult to clear. There’s also an innumerable number of blogs, courses, and accounts that can leave you feeling lost in the search for a good [...]
What does your perfect afternoon look like? For me, it’s curling up with a hot cup of coffee and a good book. The two components combine into something special, where each contributes to my enjoyment of the other. Turns out, I’m in good company. Many writers and readers over the centuries have voiced their enjoyment of coffee, including the nineteenth-century French writer Honoré [...]
Here at PSG, we have a bit of a collective sweet tooth. Personally, I like chocolate—the darker the better—especially with add-ins like candied ginger or salted almonds. Here are some other favorite candies around the office: Angie loves Kit Kats, but Twix are a close second. Annette likes Cadbury Creme Eggs so much that for her ninth wedding anniversary her husband got her [...]
December can be filled with stress—the holiday season is approaching, the weather is getting colder and work is piling up. Baking is the perfect way to combat this overwhelming season, because it helps you focus on something sweet. If you’re feeling stressed this winter, you could try these yummy dessert recipes: Classic Favorites Apple pie: Save some time by buying a pre-made pie [...]
I’ve been a barista at a European-style coffee shop for almost two years now. Since I’ve started, there have been many customers who look at our large and foreign menu and don’t know how to decipher it. It’s easy to get lost in a list of European names for drinks, so I thought I’d make a short cheat sheet for anyone feeling the [...]
The holiday season may claim to be “the most wonderful time of the year,” but for me and many Bostonians, that distinction belongs to the first week in June. Since 1983, the Jimmy Fund has sponsored the Scooper Bowl® to raise money for cancer research and care. For three days from noon to eight o’clock, the fundraiser dishes out unlimited ice cream to visitors who [...]
When I think back to the most vivid food descriptions of my reading career, it doesn’t take long for Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy to come to mind. As the title suggests, food plays a major role in the plot and is symbolic throughout the book. In the next installment of my literary recipes series, I cook up some Capitol-inspired cuisine! In one [...]
Ever since I purchased my first collection of Sylvia Plath poems in high school, I have been absolutely entranced by the lyrical prose and verses of New England native Sylvia Plath. My copy of her unabridged journals has been loved to near tatters, and I’ve even been known to pay casual visits to her childhood home whenever I find myself in the Jamaica [...]