Maple syrup prices have gone right through the sugar house roof. At roughly $10 for a mere pint of maple syrup, it now costs more to top off your pancakes than your car. (If you filled your tank with syrup, that is.)

Leaning over the small vat of warm fresh milk, Louella Hill grabs a metal tool known as a cheese harp, and begins to swish the harp in figure-eight-like movements, cutting young curds that feel more like slippery jelly than dense chewy cheese. She does this to separate the curds from the whey – and is just one step in a process used to create Divine Providence -- Rhode Island’s first artisan cheese.

The story of the milkman traces a century of change in New England home life. Once an essential connection between farm and home, the milkman has become a part of our regional folklore and is the centerpiece of SPNEA’s latest exhibition, From Dairy To Doorstep: Milk Delivery in New England, 1860–1960.

Taza is serious chocolate, stone ground in a Somerville factory from organic cacao beans imported from Costa Rica, Mexico and the Dominican Republic. Which doesn't mean that it isn't delicious, and addictive, and everything else about chocolate that makes people swoon. But it isn't candy.

This may look like deer hunting camp, but it's not. And the men aren't here for a night of poker—no poker chips or playing cards required. Flour, butter, sugar, cinnamon, and apples are the ingredients needed for this men's night—Men's Pie Baking Night, at Shelburne Orchards, in Shelburne, Vermont.

Destination spas are flourishing from Maine to Connecticut, either as day spas or attached to resorts, and a visit can do wonders to chase away the winter blahs. Whether you go to slough off dry, flaky skin or luxuriate in the sensation of expert hands kneading away months' (years'?) worth of accumulated stress, you will leave any of the following spots feeling like you had a mini vacation.

Chocolate treatments, Reiki, & Vichy showers...Andrea Pyenson offers up a glossary for the unitiated to the winter-defying power of the Spa.