Yankee

Homegrown: Free-Range Turkey

Just in time for another jam-packed holiday season, supermarket shelves are lined with big, fat turkeys. You could grab one of these birds for only 99 cents a pound — but that won’t buy you much flavor. This year, we recommend tracking down a free-range turkey from a local farm. Why, when price and convenience […]

Yankee

Antiques: William Matthew Prior’s Paintings

Flat. It’s a word not often associated with beauty or talent. Rather, it conjures up far less remarkable images: flat tire; flat broke; flat as a pancake. But in the world of folk art portraiture, flatness is so desirable, even transcendent, that it practically defines the genre itself. Folk art portraiture, often called “naive” portraiture, […]

Magazine

Natick, MA: Patricia Franchi Flaherty

Patricia Franchi Flaherty Founder, Ovations for the Cure Natick, Massachusetts Every woman knows new shoes are a powerful kind of therapy. “They’re good medicine,” says Patti Franchi Flaherty. Her feet sparkle in a pair of mesh jelly flats, Stuart Weitzman originals. Thanks to Patti’s foundation, Ovations for the Cure, every ovarian cancer patient gets a […]

Magazine

Sportswriter Jackie MacMullan | The Big Question

“As a kid in Westwood, Massachusetts, all I ever wanted to do was play street hockey. My house was at the flattest part of the street, so the games were always right in front. I was the only girl, and some of the older boys weren’t too keen on letting me play, so my dad […]

Homes

House For Sale: Newport, Rhode Island

Residents of the Newport’s Top of the Hill section feel it is the most heavenly neighborhood. And we recently found out why. For one thing, the Top of the Hill neighborhood is just an easy 10-minute walk to the downtown area with all those wonderful shops and restaurants along the harbor. Then, if you walk […]

Vermont

Farmers Diner | (Tod) Murphy’s Law: Buy Local, Eat Local, and Prosper

How local is the Farmers Diner? The first thing you see when you walk in the door of this Quechee,Vermont, restaurant is a jukebox, glinting like any diner jukebox. Some Willie Nelson, some John Cougar Mellencamp. But half the albums are by Vermonters. Phish, sure. But it’s Grace Potter and the Nocturnals who get the […]

Magazine

The Big Question: Opera Singer Lisa Saffer

Lisa Saffer is a 47-year-old diva. She received her master’s degree from Boston’s New England Conservatory of Music in 1984, and today makes her home in Portland, Maine. In the great opera houses and concert halls of the world, she sings in many languages, her small frame launching glorious sounds that reach to the farthest […]

Maine

First RV Vacation in Maine: ‘Take Wide Turns’

I’m standing in the parking lot of a large RV dealership south of Boston, notebook in hand, scribbling furiously as our rental agent points out every button and lever on the 33-foot Winnebago we’ve rented for a weekend of October leaf-peeping up the Maine coast. I have a bad feeling. Two hours in, and we’ve […]

Yankee

Antiques: Federal Furniture

Americans are a loud bunch. We talk big. We act out. We don’t truly embrace the “less is more” mentality. Our heroes are risk takers, and we value action over restraint, boldness over subtlety. I suppose it’s inevitable that a country spawned from revolution would embrace boisterous ideals, but I fear that in doing so, […]

Magazine

Hats Off

The jazz drummer rides it, the marching band member crashes it, and the concert percussionist rolls it. What is it? A cymbal. In 1623, Avedis Zildjian created a secret alloy for making cymbals. When his family immigrated to America, they set up shop in the Boston area. Today, the oldest continuous family-run company in the […]

History

New England by the Numbers | State Facts

20 percentage of Vermont’s trees that are sugar maples — explaining in part the golden-orange and red hues of the state’s foliage season 107 number of years that Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut — oldest burger joint in America — has been cooking hamburgers 2 Babe Ruth’s favorite room at the Cranmore Mountain Lodge […]