There are more than ninety restaurants in Harvard Square. This part of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a crossroads for food as well as for education, with places featuring burgers, falafel, Irish stew, pho, tacos, steak, soy ice cream, and just about anything you could think of in between all those.

Of all those places around Harvard Square, Oggi Gourmet is one of the least conspicuous. In fact, unless you have business with Harvard Health Care, are looking for the Fine Arts Box Office, or seeking out the rather low key Harvard Visitor’s Office, you might not even know it is there. These offices, and Oggi Gourmet, are in the Holyoke Center Arcade, just a few steps from the MBTA Red Line stop at Harvard Square.

Given that it is in an arcade (read: passage way), you’ll figure it is not the most secluded or most quiet place to have a meal, and you’ll be right. Still, the lively flow of people through the building makes interesting watching at busy times, and it can slow down to be laid back on an early evening when there’s not as much hustle and bustle. Whatever time you come by, though, the food will be worth it.

The world oggi means today in Italian. Fresh high quality food freshly prepared is the hallmark of Oggi Gourmet’s vision, and they live up to it. Pizza, salads, sandwiches, and burgers rule the menu, with outliers including breakfast muffins and sandwiches, hot dogs, and the occasional burrito special filling things in. Pizza really is the star, and it has been chosen best pizza in Beaton in several polls over the years. House standard combos include baby spinach,roasted eggplant, and feta cheese, roasted pineapple and ham with scallions, and spicy sausage with onions and roasted bell pepper. You can also build your own from a selection of about two dozen ingredients.

Rustic caesar salad shows that the Oggi kitchen folk now how to let good flavors and fresh ingredients speak for themselves. Also on offer are a roasted pear salad with goat cheese and walnuts, and a BLT salad double smoked bacon and vine ripened tomatoes. The sandwich menu holds about a dozen choices, and there are several ways of having a hand packed burger, as well. To this southern girl, it was a surprise to find a hot dog topped with coleslaw as a menu standard in Harvard Square– maybe there’s a southerner somewhere in the heart of Oggi’s menu prep.

In any case, the food is good and fresh, and for the Harvard Square area, prices are reasonable, with pizza coming in at around sixteen dollars for a sixteen inch pie and sandwiches, salads, and burger running about half that. There are several lower priced items, too especially on the breakfast menu, and pizza by the slice is available for lower cost as well. Also there’s a long standing tradition of having an early evening special (Oggi Gourmet closes at 8pm most days) on one day a week of a 16 inch tomato basil pizza for around five dollars. There are other daily specials at times as well.

Oggi Gourmet is a bit of a find that gets lost in plain site now and then. Harvard Square has several more places to eat like that, in fact. Have you found one?

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Great Barrington, Massachusetts is one of those New England towns that appeal to people from places like Boston or New York — in other words people like me. You can park the car and walk around. There are cute stores: expensive kitchen supplies, jewelery and textiles crafted by artisans, meditation mats. There is a movie theater. There is a legitimate theater. There is high test local ice cream (So Co Creamery). And there are great restaurants.

I decided to make it my destination for my first excursion with my new car.  My idea was to head to Rubi’s for lunch — Rubi’s being a coffee house and sandwich shop attached to Rubiner’s, a gourmet grocer in a building that was once a bank.  A modest plan, as I have been there many times before, but it was a seriously rainy day, albeit not as rainy as it was in New York City the day before, when the amount of rain that typically falls in two months fell in one day. Better to take it slow.

I very much enjoyed my lunch of  wild mushroom and eggplant soup, a halloumi sandwich with Cypriot cheese and preserved lemons, a cup of strong coffee and a chocolate chip cookie. I took out my computer and worked for a while. As I walked back to my car I was feeling — it must be admitted –  pretty smug. Look how nice things are outside the city, I thought to myself, as I walked through a gentle rain, got into the car. Terrific food, no floods, and even though it’s August, the streets don’t smell like pee and rotted garbage. A person could live here. The only difference between this and my life at home in Manhattan was that I had to drive a half hour in the car from my weekend house to get to lunch and coffee. No big deal.

And then came the hideous scraping sound.

I pulled over, got out,  and here’s what I saw:

Last week, I mentioned that the car I’d purchased was old and had high mileage. Very high mileage. On my way to Great Barrington, I watched the odometer click to 250,000.  That was also, apparently, the life span of the voodoo doodads that secure the muffler.

I drove slowly to the auto repair place hastily located via GPS, but when I was almost there, I noticed that the hideous scraping had abruptly stopped.

I didn’t stop the car. As should now be quite clear, I am not a car person, my only goal was to get to someone who was as quickly as possible. My honest interpretation of the new silence was that perhaps the thing — I hadn’t yet been formerly introduced to its proper name, “muffler” –  had hit a bump the road and lept back into place.

That is not how gravity works, apparently.

“It’s gone all right,” the repair guy confirmed, after a quick look under the car. I repeated the diagnosis to my husband via cell phone — as it was midweek, he was uselessly working in his Manhattan office, far away from me and my car trouble.  They concurred that it was safe for me to drive the car back to the house.

It was then that my husband impressed upon me the importance of finding the muffler, as he, having received via text message the picture you see above, theorized that it was just some sort of connector that had rusted clear away and perhaps the muffler itself could be saved, indeed if this was the case he could reattach it. Sort of like putting a severed thumb on ice for the surgeon.

My response, I’m afraid, was not my most mature. It was probably close to the  reaction as I would have to an instruction to find my own severed limb en route to the hospital. I was still fairly rattled by things making unnatural sounds and falling the hell off my car. I wasn’t sure where the muffler had fallen off, I didn’t think I could spot the muffler in the increasingly steady rain, I was fairly certain I’d get hit by a car during the recovery attempt.

Within a few moments of driving, though,  I did spot the muffler on the other side of the road– I think someone might have moved it over to the shoulder, thank you kind person — and so I pulled over and parked.

In weather conditions now something closer to a monsoon, I waited for a break in the traffic to dart across the road. My pretty charcoal grey sweater that just screamed “weekend in the country” when I bought was quickly sodden — but that was not nearly as bad as what happened to it when I scooped the rusty, dirty muffler into my arms.

Let’s just say the sweater is genuine country now.

As I waited  to cross the road with that muffler in my arms, an act I’ve never before performed or ever contemplating performing, I did not kid myself into thinking that I, too, was a genuine country person.

But perhaps I’m a little less city now.

Did you know that where you are from and where you have been can be traced through a single strand of your hair?

According to this study published in the Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry journal in 2009, a team of  Spanish and British scientists  have found a way to trace your travels by testing your hair by using a laser-ablation technique. This technique is able to detect variations in the sulphur isotopes of a single hair strand over time.

During the study, researchers collected hair samples from three volunteers, two of whom were permanent United Kingdom residents while the third had spent the previous 6 months travelling through Croatia, Austria, and Australia.

Results of testing showed that the traveller’s hair strand had considerable variations in the sulfur isotopes while hair strands from the two home-bound U.K. residents had minimal to no changes.

These interesting results could have huge relevance for governmental agencies interested in tracing the lifestyles of international criminals and terror suspects.

I doubt it’s a test that would be applied to ordinary travelers, but if one day, you’re heading through customs and feel a slight tug on your head, it might just be that you’ve suddenly be tagged for a hair test…

(image credit)

“Europe is in my blood and Texas is in my soul,” says singer and songwriter Christine Albert. Albert grew up with a Parisian grandmother, and family members all around her in New York state as likely to speak French as to speak English. When she moved to the southwest, at first to New Mexico and later to Texas, she carried that experience with her.

She also carried a love of country and folk and Americana music, which turned out to be the way she has made her living, first as a solo artist with a time in Nashville and gigging around Texas and across the country. Later she teamed up both personally and professionally with guitarist Chris Gage. Together they’ve become top artists in the Americana scene as the duo Albert and Gage, and have also created Moonhouse Studio, where they record and produce other artists as well as work on their own projects.

But there was still that “Europe is in my blood” thing. One result is the album Paris, Texafrance. On it, Albert offers a collection of songs in French, some with English lyrics as well, which range from classic love songs from iconic French singer Edith Piaf to impressionist lyrics and jazz inflected melodies from another French icon, Charles Trenet. There’s a song from fellow Texas songwriter Michael Austin which to Albert always held the sound of a French song, so she translated it for this recording, and in a nod to another American songwriter, Jesse Winchester’s song La Louisiane. There’s The French Song, a 1963 hit for Canadian singer Lucille Star, and The French Waltz, which Albert says she heard in the 1970s on Nicolette Larson’s first album, and “I pictured my French grandmother sitting at her window in Paris, waiting for me to visit.”

Through the album, Albert stays true to her own unique sound of being French, American, and Texan, with a style a and phrasing all her own. She well handles songs that move from the high stepping swing of Trenet’s Swing Troubadour through to the closing with Piaf’s Hymn to Love, which does, indeed, take on the character of a hymn, and a rightful closing to a fine journey through a Texafrance landscape in music.

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There’s no reason for the sushi to be as good as it is at Yaki Ten, an unassuming, somewhat faceless Japanese bistro located just south of Lumpini Park on Soi Langsuan. They aren’t known for their sushi–as far as I can tell, they’re not particularly known for anything–and with the sushi buried near the back of a menu that pulls no punches in its perfunctory inclusion of donburi, yakiniku, and other standard Japanese dishes, Yaki Ten treats its modest maki and nigiri offerings with indifference.

I assure you, however, that the maki rolls, especially the spicy tuna, are melt-in-your-mouth delicious. In fact, though I still think that Cape Town’s mall sushi is the best I’ve ever had, this spicy tuna roll, with its harmonious mix of finely minced tuna and green chile peppers, is the tastiest in Bangkok for under 300 baht.

Yaki Ten is located on Soi Langsuan, between Sois 6 and 7. Open daily from 5pm – midnight; closed on Sunday.

We could play the “Must-Eat Food in Bangkok” game every day for years and still have plenty of culinary fodder to feature. In that sense, the ongoing “BKK Must Eats” series doesn’t aim to be comprehensive, nor will it exclusively list dishes that are “the best” of anything (though it might, from time to time, as is this the case this week). The decidely modest goal of this series is to spotlight, somewhat randomly, damned delicious dishes in Bangkok that I’ve indulged on many occasions, and that I recommend you indulge too.

More BKK Must Eats:
+ Early Evening Pad Thai on Soi Chidlom
+ Salmon Agemusubui at Sukishi

_{Photo credit and copyright Brian Spencer}