Michele Topor's North End Market Tours

The North End of Boston is the oldest Italian neighborhood in the nation. It's a quaint little section of town, with brick buildings and sidewalks, and pastry and coffee shops on every corner. 


But the North End has much more to offer than what the average tourist comes to find. Michele Topor's North End market tours take tourists around the neighborhood, showing them the most authentic Italian cuisine. I had the pleasure of taking one of the tours just last week. 


Jim Becker, my tour guide, has been working in the culinary industry for about 25 years. He began at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and eventually opened his own Spanish restaurant which won two Best of Boston awards and two Wine Spectator awards. Becker was also the executive chef at Taranta Cucina Mediterranean, a restaurant in the North End for a year before starting his journey as a tour guide. 


So, it's obvious that Becker is an expert in the food industry, and it became more obvious on the tour. Rather than a typical food tour where guests eat their way through a city, this was mainly educational, with a few tastings of course. At the first stop, Maria's pastry shop, Becker spoke about how Italians like their pastry, describing how most will have something sweet around 3 p.m. with their espresso. Staring at the wall of butter cookies in Maria's made my mouth water, never mind all the other pastry they have to offer.


After Maria's, we briefly stopped at Mercato Del Mare, a fish market, and then headed over to Polcari's Coffee. Polcari's is a small narrow store filled with every herb and spice imaginable. One of the shocking parts of stepping in here was the comparison between the Nutella (a hazelnut spread) sold in American grocery stores to the Nutella sold in Europe. The American version has 7 grams of trans fat, while the Italian version, which comes in a glass jar rather than plastic, has none. Becker also showed the us different spices like licorice root and compared the cinnamon stick we find in grocery stores to the cinnamon found in Italy, which is thicker and more bark like. 


Alba Produce was the next market to visit. There is no sign advertising Alba's, which makes it a bit harder to find, but they feature a variety of produce that is unique to the Italian culture, like bulb fennel and chicory. Then, we went to Monica's Mercato which features many different treasures of Italy. This gem of a store, owned by a brother/cousin trio, has a variety of Italian cheese, including a special form of mozzarella they get imported from Italy. They also make their own pasta and bread and have a variety of ready made foods like antipasti and sandwiches. Yum!


Of course this wouldn't be a tour of the North End without some cheese and wine. At The Cheese Shop, Becker spoke about the many different olive oils they offer and discussed what true balsamic is, compared to the balsamic vinaigrette we Americans like to drench on salad, which he calls a "scam." Real balsamic, Becker said, takes years to make, and I can personally say after tasting some, it is ten times better. We also tasted homemade ricotta cheese and Pecorino cheese before heading over to V. Cirace & Son, INC. fine wine shop. Here, Becker spoke about the different wines this award winning store offers and how to pair certain wines with certain foods. 


For those who want to try this wonder of a market tour, they can visit Michele's website to buy tickets. 

Those 18-22, start Tweeting now!

It is pretty clear now that Twitter is a social networking mecca. It gives businesses the opportunity to go viral and people the chance to connect via links, hashtags, and photos. 

But for college students especially, being on Twitter is essential. Sure Facebook is great. We all connect with one another, sharing laughs over the drunken pictures, and checking up on what old high school friends are up to. However, our Facebook profile is not what is going to help us network with potential employers or allow us to make a name for ourselves. If anything, those raunchy pictures and status updates could hurt our chances of getting a job after graduation, and in this economy, who needs that?

Even if you are someone who doesn't want to tweet often, just being on Twitter and checking your homepage will link you (literally) to information you might not have otherwise heard about. I am tired of hearing students criticize Twitter as this Facebook wanna be website. For those who think that way, you couldn't be more wrong. Stop your whining and read this list of the top reasons why all college age students should be tweeting:

1. Follow newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television networks to get all your top news for the day, updated constantly.

2. Follow your school on Twitter and get to know all the new happenings around campus

3. Follow experts in your field of study and stay up to date on news within your career path

4. Get links to internship opportunities and job postings

5. Have the chance to communicate with other experts and professors on Twitter outside of the classroom

And most important, be ahead of the competition!

Sharpen those pencils...or should I say keyboards

There is nothing like the smell of freshly sharpened pencils to get you in the mood for a good class. This week kicked off a new semester of classes and boy was I ready to get writing again. As of right now, it looks like this is going to be a great semester because not only do I adore a couple of my journalism classes, but the professors aren't half bad either. Here are some first class quotes from my professors that make me excited to be a journalist, and should make you excited too:

"You will learn to appreciate journalism as a service profession, one upon which individuals, communities and the country at large depend."
"Pictures are the primary mode of story telling in the modern media."
"Do not show a source you are weak. If they don't want to conduct an interview with you, tell them you will wait."
"You are going to learn to think like a reporter and read like an editor."

I hope that was inspiring. Now onto more important things... A few weeks ago I came across a fascinating article on ReadWriteWeb about a cool new way to research info on the Internet. Apture, a startup web company, allows readers to highlight a single word on the screen and search the Internet for information about that particular word without leaving the page. Crazy right? No, more like AMAZING.

So what does this mean for students like us? Well, for starters, if you don't know the definition of a word, you can just look it up with the click of a button. But if you are a journalist on deadline, and need to do some quick research on your source before you go out for an interview, this is a great time saving technique. Technologies like this are changing online news content and will continue to influence how we write for the web. Apture is the new link.

Check out this video with one of the creators of Apture. He describes how with the help of some journalists his multimedia tool became a hit.

Time goes by too fast

August really has a way of creeping up on you. I can't believe that I have less than 30 days before school starts back up again.

Anyways, with more than half the year over, it is time to reflect on those little New Year's resolutions I made. In a post titled "Some Goals," (original, I know), I wrote that I wanted to have a podcast posted on this blog, learn some HTML code, post pictures, learn more about video documentaries, share thoughts about new media, and get some followers.

Well, three of the six have been accomplished, so I guess I better get moving on learning the whole HTML thing and discover a bit more about video documentaries.

So, naturally, I googled "video documentary" and went straight to the infamously helpful eHow.com . Doesn't get much better than that (well, it does, but you have to start somewhere right?)

This fall I will be starting fresh at a new school, and therefore starting fresh writing for a different college newspaper. While I will still be pursuing a degree in journalism, writing for a college press is not strictly limited to those looking for a career in communication.

Michael Koretzky, adviser to the Florida Atlantic University Press, says "No other extra-curricular activity on campus is better for your career-- no matter what it is-- than the newspaper."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Writing for the student newspaper is no easy task. Every week the staff has to come up with new content that will catch the attention of the student body. Sure, the Student Government Organization may have organized a great concert, but it took them a year to do so. And maybe GSA had a successful fundraiser, but it took months to get it off the ground. The newspaper staff gets a finished product out on the news stand within a week.

Harsh deadlines teach you to stop procrastinating and put you in a pressure situation where you may have to think on your feet to get a story done on time. You gain managing and multi-tasking skills that you may not have learned you were otherwise capable of. And, let's face it, what student doesn't need to brush up on their grammar and writing skills?

As a staff writer for any university press, you gain people skills that you will use throughout your career, no matter what path that may be. I am eager and ready to join a new staff in the fall and can't wait to start seeing my name in print again.

"What's black and white and completely over?"

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-december-9-2008/clusterf--k-to-the-poor-house---final-edition-edition

Nothing is off the record

When do journalists agree to allow a source to be "off the record?" The answer should be never. It seems that sometimes we are afraid to tell a source that everything they said is fair game to be printed. Sometimes our ethics are brought into question and giving a highly recognized source a bad reputation can really impact a journalists career.

Case in-point, Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone Magazine. Rather than receiving praise from his colleagues, Hastings is getting some backlash for not understanding the "unspoken agreement" that you will not embarrass the troops. Lara Logan, CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent, criticized Hastings, ultimately saying she doesn't believe the story, and to her, "something doesn't add up."

We are taught everything is on the record, unless the reporter agrees otherwise. Journalists shouldn't be afraid to take some risks, our job is to write great stories and share great news with the public. If some risks weren't taken to do so, then we wouldn't have a job. 

 I think Steve Buttry sums up the matter beautifully, saying, "Our nation's founders did not protect the press so the press could protect the government."