Join local author Amy Traverso at Sofra, 1 Belmont Street in Cambridge, on Monday, October 22, from 6:30 – 9, as she takes us through her fabulous cookbook all about apples! Amy will be preparing several recipes with Chef Ana Sortun, sharing with us her stories and inspirations, and answering all of your burning questions about this fall favorite. Registration for this class includes your own, author-signed cookbook to take home! Fee $130. Sign up at http://applecookbook.eventbrite.com.
Join North Quabbin Trails Association president Bobby Curley and Athol Bird & Nature Club naturalist Allen Young for a look at two outdoor gems, on Tuesday, October 16 from 9 – 1. The group will meet at the Millers River Environmental Center, 100 Main Street in Athol, and proceed by shuttle bus to Skyfields Arboretum, the headquarters of Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, for a walkabout of the arboretum and information about Mount Grace. Then the group will head on to S. Royalston and the brand new P+P loop trail, a short, easy walk along the just-developed eight-mile Millers/Baquaq River trail, before returning to the Center. Please register with Curley at atphocon@yahoo.com. This event is cosponsored by ABNC, NQTA, MGLCT, Americorps and the Athol Council on Aging.
Discover your artistic side in this one-day, Tower Hill Botanic Garden hands-on workshop, to be held Saturday, October 13. Learn how lighting and composition improves your photos, experiment with iridescent glass, explore how to get closer to your subject, and discover why seeing less lets you see so much more. A digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera and tripod are required. A macro lens is strongly recommended. Joel Shore (one of his photos is pictured below) is the instructor, and the fee is $80 for Tower Hill members, $90 for non-members. Call 508-869-6111 to register.
Lee Patterson is past president Noanett Garden Club, Past Chairman of the Amateur Horticulture Competition, and a winner of many blue ribbons and major awards at regional flower shows for her beautiful terrariums and miniature landscape containers (see below). In this October 11 Thursdays at the Hort presentation, Lee will give a demonstration on planting a terrarium which will inspire you to go right out and make one yourself. Presentations will begin at 7pm and go until all questions are answered. The classes are priced at $12 for members and $15 for non-members unless otherwise indicated. There is no need to pre-register and you may pay at the class. For more information visit www.masshort.org.
Members of the public are invited to attend a series of lectures by world-class chefs and food experts, inspired by the Harvard College General Education course “Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to the Science of Soft Matter.”
The lectures, while related to the course, are not a replication of the course content.
All talks will take place in the Harvard Science Center at 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA (unless otherwise noted).
All talks will begin at 7 p.m..
Each talk will begin with a 15-minute lecture by a member of the course staff, which will discuss one of the scientific topics from that week’s class.
Seating for all lectures (except the ticketed lecture with Ferran Adrià on December 3) is first come, first seated. In previous years, many of the talks were already full before they started, but we have a larger lecture hall this year, and can therefore accommodate more people.
Questions regarding the public lecture series: candujar@seas.harvard.edu
Lectures will be available for viewing live online. Watch the live stream. Past archives are available at http://video.isites.harvard.edu/liveVideo/liveView.do?name=Science_Cooking_2012
Science and Cooking aprons will be available for purchase at all public lectures for $15 (cash or check). More details may be found at www.seas.harvard.edu/cooking
The schedule:
October 1: Fina Puigdevall and Pere Planaguma of Les Cols, and Paco Perez of Miramar.
October 8: Raul Balam Ruscalleda of Moments.
October 15: Jose Andres, of Think Food Group, minibar, and Jaleo (also an Iron Chef)
October 22: Wylie Dufresne of wd-50, and Top Chef Masters
October 29 – Dan Barber from Blue Hill Farm
November 5 – Joanne Chang of flour bakery
November 12 – Jack Bishop, Editorial Director at Cook’s Illustrated and an editor on The Science of Good Cooking, with his associate editor Dan Souza
November 19 – Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, co-founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, and author of the massively expensive Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (image below)
November 29 – David Chang of momofuku and Carles Tejedor of Via Veneto
December 3 – Ferran Adria, elBulli Foundation
Harvard thanks sponsors Alicia Foundation, Think Food Group, Whole Foods Market, and Xertoli.
Explore the streets of Portsmouth New Hampshire in the footsteps of George Washington when he visited the city in 1789. See where he took tea with his secretary’s mother, Mrs. Lear, attended services at St. John’s Church, and was feted at a reception at Governor John Langdon House. The tour returns to Langdon House, which Washington thought “may be esteemed the first in Portsmouth,” where you can use your ticket for a tour of the house at half price.
Registration is required. Please call 603-436-3205 for more information. Purchase tickets now at www.historicnewengland.org. $6 for HNE members, $12 non-members. There will be two tours, one beginning at 11 and a second beginning at 2. The tours begin at the Governor John Langdon House, 143 Pleasant Street in Portsmouth.
These adaptable arthropods are some of the oldest land-living animals on Earth. They thrived in lush coal forests 300 million years ago, survived multiple mass extinctions, and today encompass 4,500 species, including some of the most beautiful and colorful insects on the planet. Nurturing parents, these insects often carry and protect their young, and some species even feed them with a kind of “milk†made from their own bodies! Who are they? The answer may surprise you. They’re cockroaches!
You’ve already heard the negative propaganda. Now come learn the real and amazing truth about these much maligned and misunderstood insects in a new mini-exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
The exhibit is the latest installment in the museum’s Exploring Diversity series in the exhibition Arthropods: Creatures that Rule. It opens to the public on Saturday September 29, 2012. The Harvard Museum of Natural History is located at 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA, a 7-8 minute walk from the Harvard Square T station. The Museum is handicapped accessible. For general information please call 617 495 3045 or visit www.hmnh.harvard.edu.
With a mission to enhance public understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the human place in it, the Harvard Museum of Natural History draws on the University’s collections and research to present a historic and interdisciplinary exploration of science and nature. More than 198,000 visitors annually make it the University’s most-visited museum. Image from www.godofinsects.com.
White-barked birches hybridize freely, suggesting that current species are too narrowly defined. Even the well-known common native North American paper-bark or canoe birch (Betula papyrifera) causes consternation. Birch expert Hugh McAllister of University of Liverpool and Ness Botanic Garden will explain a bit about the white-barked birches’ propensity to cross-pollinate and thus confound taxonomists, on Tuesday, October 2, from 6:30 – 8 at the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum. He will discuss birch distribution around the world while showing images of his research travels and herbarium specimens and posing some as-of-yet unanswered questions that keep this botanist awake at night. Free, but registration requested at www.arboretum.harvard.edu.
The New England Botanical Club will host Dr. Chad Jones, Assistant Professor of Botany and Environmental Studies, Connecticut College, for a meeting to be held Friday, October 5 in the Haller Lecture Hall (Room 102), at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 24 Oxford Street in Cambridge. The meeting is open to the public. Dr. Jones will speak on Patterns of Exotic Species Colonization in a Forested Landscape. Chad Jones is interested in a wide range of topics in plant ecology. His research has involved two major themes: plant succession and invasive species.
Professor Jones has studied plant colonization following a broad array of disturbances ranging from volcanic eruptions and the retreat of glaciers to gopher mounds in mountain meadows. Among other topics, he has examined spatial patterns of dispersal, factors that limit plant colonization and effects of disturbances on plant diversity.
A second area of research involves investigating patterns of spread of invasive species. He uses statistical models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to predict the potential distributions of invasive species at several scales.
For more information, visit www.rhodora.org.
Michael Dosmann, Curator of Living Collections at the Arnold Arboretum and past Garden Club of the Back Bay speaker, will lead a walk through the Arboretum on Sunday, September 30, from 2 – 3:30. The Arboretum is committed to growing a diverse and comprehensive collection of plants. In particular, they are growing six important genera for the North American Plant Collections Consortium, a group of public gardens working to conserve plants with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Public Gardens Association. Learn more about the six genera that make up our “national collections,†the importance of preserving biodiversity, and current research using these plants. Free, but register on line at www.arboretum.harvard.edu.
In case of inclement weather, contact 617.384.5209.
