When most people have to work weekends, it means coming into an empty office and putting in hours of drudgery for no additional pay. Not so for Chowder. (Well, not this week, anyway.)

Lucky enough to score tickets to last Saturday’s $150-a-pop Tour de Champagne (Boston magazine was a sponsor), I showed up at The Charles Hotel a fashionable hour late and surveyed the scene: A mixed bag of giddy French and Bostonian guests, 18 Champagne houses pouring generous (read: half-glass) samples of bubbly, and some of the city’s top restaurants serving hors d’oeuvres. Yes, indeed: Another hard day on the job.

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We here at Chowder view politics and food like our children—it’s hard to choose between the two. You can imagine we’re torn between celebrating Mardi Gras and sitting at home on our couch waiting for election results tonight. But we’ve got some ideas for those who prefer King Cake to delegate counts after the jump.

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During the warm weather months, Boston is blessed with an abundance of local farmers markets. But it lacks a central year-round market along the lines of Seattle’s Pike Place, San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, or New York’s Union Square Greenmarket.

This wasn’t always the case: Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market were once home to a thriving collection of fishmongers, greengrocers, butchers, and bakers (probably even candlestick makers) as far back as the early 1800s. But those vendors were eventually replaced by today’s takeout food stands, making the Haymarket the only year-round source of produce and fish (I’ll leave discussions of quality and atmosphere to another post). (more…)

I’m a purist when it comes to baking. High quality cocoa, pure vanilla extract, and European-style butter all take their place in my shopping cart. So I haven’t had much use for cake mix. Until now.

When I received this Cuisinart automatic ice cream maker for the holidays, I was ecstatic with visions of freshly churned ice cream, sorbet, and frozen yogurt (and even frozen margaritas, as the machine’s fairly extensive recipe insert points out). But for all that unhatched imagination, my boyfriend and I could only think of one thing when it came time to whip up a frozen treat: Coldstone’s Cake Batter ice cream. (more…)