Food bloggers unite!

Well, Anali and I met for cof­fee. So it wasn’t really a rally of food blog­gers, or even a very large meet­ing of Boston-area food blog­gers. But what we lacked in quan­tity, we made up in qual­ity con­ver­sa­tion, cov­er­ing top­ics from phys­i­cal ther­apy, to the inter­sec­tion of jour­nal­ism and blog­ging, to siteme­ter (Lisa knows WAY more than I do, but she inspired me to come home and fool around with my stats…), to our mutual love of Volk­swa­gens. Lisa, who writes Anali’s First Amend­ment (go check it out now! go on! I’ll be here when you get back…) and I have been play­ing email tag for­ever (my fault) about get­ting together for cof­fee, and she sug­gested The Spot­ted Apron, a bak­ery that’s recently opened on Cam­bridge Street in Boston, just before the inter­sec­tion with Charles Street. What a great place, espe­cially in light of the three chain cof­fee stores nearby– Au Bon Pain, Star­bucks, and Fina­gle A Bagel. For­tu­nately, this bak­ery was doing land-office busi­ness– there was a con­stant stream of peo­ple com­ing in and out, and all the dif­fer­ent things I tried (there and to go) were well worth the visit. They’ve got pas­tries and bread, but they also have good look­ing sal­ads, sand­wiches, and panini.

As my dig­i­tal cam­era is on the fritz, I bought a dis­pos­able one and have to have the pho­tos devel­oped– I hope them come out alright. (I felt so retro, wind­ing the frames for­ward and every­thing!) I’ll post a real overview once the pho­tos are devel­oped, but in the mean­time, please check Lisa’s site to read about her take on the place. I am sure the peo­ple at the bak­ery were won­der­ing why the heck we were tak­ing so many pho­tos, inside and out­side the store. And I’m sure that the fel­low behind the counter who boxed up my to-go items was won­der­ing if we were jour­nal­ists or some­thing, which might explain why I got such a ginor­mous and care­fully arranged bag– I am sure they won­dered even more when we both spent more than five min­utes out­side after leav­ing, tak­ing pic­tures of the front door, the store front, the street view, etc. I will post one sub­stan­tive thing about the place now, along the lines of “you learn some­thing new every day”– they have an open-ish kitchen, and we were both entranced by the sight of one of the bak­ers scrap­ing the peel from fresh gin­ger root with a spoon. I’d heard that was the best way to do it, but I was skep­ti­cal until today. It looks like it works like a charm– the baker just trimmed off the tough nub­bins with her knife. And it’s a good thing it seemed to work so well– she had a ton of gin­ger to peel!