On July 31 we left Boston and traveled to Concord! We stopped at Flour bakery on the way to the train station for a final breakfast pastry. I got their sticky bun again, which was one of my favorites. And… I also got several of Flour’s cookbooks! I got the original (called “Flour”) and a sequel (called “Pastry Love”) which had been autographed by Joanne Chang (*glee*). We also picked up a Hazelnut Dacquoise cake to carry to Concord with us! It turns out that this was a specialty cake, only made to order, and not something they keep on hand. We were surprised by this because we’d seen it in several of their pastry cases… but then it had disappeared later in the week and none of their bakeries had it any more. Turns out they only make them to order. The cakes at their bakeries earlier in the week were in fact the leftovers from another order. So we ordered one – there was barely enough time to get it done but they made it happen for us, which was really kind. We picked it up that morning and I carried it, by hand, on the metro and on the train all the way to Concord. We had a wait between metro and train in Cambridge, so instead of waiting in the train station we walked a block to a nearby bookstore (with all our luggage – but it’s all wheeled carry-ons so it’s pretty compact, and we parked them out of the way. We also had the cake.) This turned out to be a FANTASTIC bookstore. I went to the cookbook section as usual, and I was stunned at what a huge section it was: several bookshelves, top to bottom! I recognized many of the cookbooks that were on their shelves – they had most of my favorites -- which gave me great confidence that I’d probably love the OTHER cookbooks on those shelves too. Somebody was choosing excellent cookbooks for their collection. I pulled a few cookbooks down and flipped through them and they looked great. I tend to go for modern cookbooks with highly developed, flavorful, and varied vegetarian dishes which use vegetables instead of starches, as well as well-developed soup and appetizer sections. My style is to make entire meals out of those components. I’ll make a full vegetarian dish or salad for dinner, or I’ll serve two or three smaller dishes like a cup of soup, and small bowl of flavorful vegetables (maybe from the ‘appetizer’ section). We are not vegetarian – I do serve meat, but it’s usually as an accent in a larger dish, and then only a few times a week. I rarely serve a piece of meat cooked on its own: maybe only a couple times a year. I also don’t serve large piles of carbohydrates, like rice or pasta, to us adults, though I do serve more of those to the kids. They passed us in calorie intake a couple years ago and that’s one way that I serve them more and us less, while still all eating the same thing. To support those goals I steer away from meat-centric and starch-centric cookbooks, which means cookbooks specifically on those topics, but it also means avoiding older cookbooks which tend to emphasize meat more. I have an older Czech cookbook I never use because it’s almost all meat and starch. Traditional Americana cookbooks, for their part, tend to assume a three-part meal of a central meat and two less-important “sides” consisting of one starch and one vegetable. The vegetable sides in these cookbooks tend to be uninteresting, even bland, and unable to stand on their own as a whole meal (which is, I believe, why vegetarianism is so baffling to many traditional white American eaters. They can’t imagine eating only ‘steamed broccoli’ or ‘boiled brussels sprouts’ or ‘microwaved frozen peas’ for dinner. And I agree with them – I wouldn’t want that either. The key is to find super-flavorful vegetarian dishes that can totally stand on their own as a whole meal. There are thousands of such dishes out there, but they aren’t in the traditional meat-and-starch-centric cookbooks). Anyway, within these constraints – I’m looking for lots of highly flavored vegetarian dishes -- I am open to any and every cuisine. I gravitate toward modern cookbooks, which tend to emphasize the lighter and more vegetable-centric dishes of those cuisines. I also like cookbooks that explore less-familiar-to-me cuisines written by people who now live in America, because those authors have already done the necessary work of finding really good substitutions from what is available here. And in this bookstore, I found SHELVES of cookbooks like this. I was really excited and flipped through several of them, but I didn’t have time to do much more. I took some photos of their shelves so I could research their selection later. Then we went back to the train station and caught our train to Concord! Leslie and Bill were waiting at the station for us with two cars. They took us to a lovely deli for lunch were we got delicious sandwiches, and then ate them near Old North Bridge where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. We visited the museum and walked all around the bridge and surrounding area, reading everything. I enjoyed imagining what the start of the Revolution was like, and exactly what happened. The events were, in some ways, so very small… just a little bridge and just a few people were involved. And yet those small events ultimately had enormous consequences for centuries to come. Back and Leslie and Bill’s house we moved in to their lower floor. They have a whole separate apartment down there, with three bedrooms, bathroom, a kitchenette, washing machine etc.! They’ve had various relatives and friends stay there over the years, and on this visit that’s where we stayed too. It was marvelously convenient, and so good to be able to pop upstairs and visit with them, and still have space down below to relax and have quiet time on our own too. They made us a lovely dinner, with delicious crab cakes, and we had the hazelnut dacquoise cake for dessert. It was, as anticipated, delicious!