Almost as soon as I returned from Las Vegas it was time to pack a suitcase again, this time to drive up to Danvers, MA for a three-day class in geodatabase administration. Yeah, I realize that only sounds interesting to about two other people, but that’s my life.

What a truly weird hotel experience I had. I had booked myself into the Sheraton Ferncroft, mainly because it was across the parking lot from the office park where I needed to go for the class. Since driving in that neck of the woods can be less than pleasant (oh people of Connecticut, think of metro Boston next time you’re tempted to complain about traffic), it was nice not to have to go anywhere. The Sheraton gets props for the things you really want in a hotel: the room was nice (and spotlessly clean), and the staff (what there was of it) was friendly and helpful.

On the other hand, located as it is in MA’s tech corridor, the Sheraton seems to be suffering as much from the economic turndown as everything else around here. How did this manifest itself? Well, the main hotel restaurant was mostly closed. It opened for breakfast in the morning, closed at 10:00 am, and that was it. Similarly, the Starbucks in the lobby (how nice, I thought, a Starbucks in the lobby!) opened in the morning, and closed its doors before noon. Coffee in the afternoon? Sorry, traveler, you’re screwed.

A sign outside the restaurant directed would-be diners to the lounge for lunch and dinner. So for the first two nights of my stay, I ate in the bar. On Sunday night, it was just me and the bartender, who was friendly but sensitive enough to leave me to my book (I always bring a book when I dine alone in a restaurant at night — because really, what else is there to do?). Surprisingly, the food was very good. I had pan-seared salmon, grilled asparagus, and fingerling potatoes. I washed that down with a Harpoon IPA, which was one of the select group of very good beers they had on tap.

Monday night was just a tad better. There was at least one other woman in the lounge (seemingly also traveling on business), and a couple of guys sitting at the bar for their dinner. I had a very good pasta dish with grilled chicken, roasted red peppers, and artichoke hearts in a white wine sauce, a glass of Chardonnay, and molten chocolate cake for dessert.

On my last night there, I drove down to Brookline (there’s that traffic again) and dined at Legal Sea Foods in Chestnut Hills with Bryan and Caitlin. The food was delicious and the company was good. It was nice not having to eat with my face in a book.

Finally, I got to drive home after class on Wednesday night. Between the traffic and the rain, it took me three and a half hours. When I got home, Jim made me a meatball sandwich and served that with a glass of red wine. Quite possibly the best meal of the whole trip.

I coined a word today, inspired by the weather. We’re creeping toward the end of October — somehow I feel like I’ve missed some of it (I blame you, Vegas). Today’s skies have been darkly overcast, and it’s been blustery and cold. It makes me feel nesty… i.e. like nesting. You know… curling up on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, comforting things to eat and drink, the company of my loved one and my cats. Nesty.

Frequently on Fridays we have what we call a nosh for dinner. By the end of the week, everyone wants a break, and what we most like to do on a Friday evening — especially a chill one like this — is enjoy a nibble of this and that, usually washed down with an alcoholic beverage. Sometimes the noshes are store-bought, sometimes I make them. They’re always simple.

Tonight’s nosh: country pate on a crusty baguette, accompanied by a (homemade) spinach ranch dip (yogurt, chopped spinach, an envelope of ranch dressing) accompanied by baby carrots, baby zucchini, and pita chips. I’m planning on starting with a bourbon and water, accompanied by a little pre-dinner snack — the best home-style maple kettle corn I’ve ever had.

Oh, and there’s two choices of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert. Yay Friday.

I popped a Perdue Oven Stuffer into the oven tonight. Nothing says “oh, look, a home-cooked meal” like the aroma of roast chicken. I brush mine with a bit of olive oil and then sprinkle liberally with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

Since I hate to waste a hot oven, the green beans I planned as a side got roasted. I’ve never done that before, and I can tell you I’ll be doing it again. They were delicious. Just rinse, toss with a small amount of olive oil, season with salt and pepper to taste, toss, and lay them out on a cookie sheet. Since the chicken was resting at this point, I kicked the oven temp up to 400, and roasted the green beans for about 10 or 12 minutes.

Rice salad: Cooked basmati rice (nothing added during cooking), dried cranberries, dried apricots (cut in thirds), a handful of fresh parsley, a half-cup of toasted pecans (halved). Dress lightly with a lemon vinaigrette.

Good dinner.

I’ve just returned from the 2009 BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, the third such event I’ve been to and the fourth time I’ve been to Vegas. We left home at 4:00 am on Wednesday, October 14 and returned around 1:30 am on Monday, October 19. Five days away from home means an awful lot of eating out, and since we were sandwiching (no pun intended, I don’t think) our meals in between a lot of other things, we really didn’t pay that much attention to the quality of the cuisine. I’m sure there’s a lot of incredibly fine dining to be had in Las Vegas. We just haven’t had the time to go looking for it yet.

Having said that, here’s what I ate and drank while I was in town:

• Burgers at In-N-Out (my friend Josh ordered for me so I could get one done properly — the hot peppers just make the whole thing even better)
• Excellent draft beer and high quality bar food at The Pub in the Monte Carlo (the flatbread pizzas are excellent, as are the scrumptious onion rings)
• The usual more-food-than-anyone-can-eat breakfast at the Black Bear Diner (Jim and I managed to eat there a second time on our last day in town)
• A very good dinner at Garden of the Dragon in the Hilton (oh, and the house specialty drinks were quite good, too)
• Another very good dinner at the Yard House out in the ‘burbs, in a very Vegas-y shopping mall (the sliders that my friend Phillip ordered were quite possibly one of the best things I tasted the whole time I was there)
• Very nice cocktails at the Rhumbar at the Mirage
• A halfway decent burger at the Paradise Cafe in the Hilton — this was a meal of expedience
• Cold beer fresh from the bathtub in a suite at the Hilton

We were disappointed to discover that Hacienda Margarita in the Hilton no longer serves dinners. This has been one of our favorite meet-and-greet-and-drink-and-talk spots, and the food was cheap and pretty decent. The margaritas were good, too. They still serve those, but I never got one this year.

Dunkin Donuts does not exist on every street corner in Vegas. Jim drove 30 minutes one way to get 2 dozen donuts and a box of Joe while we were there. Some people got to go to A&W Root Beer and have a float. I wasn’t one of them.

It was really nice to have a home-cooked meal last night, I can tell you that.

We just got back from the Lobster Shack. We knew that they’d be closing after Columbus Day, so this was our window of opportunity.

Lobster rolls are a quintessential summer food. Sure, I could get a lobster roll in any of a dozen seafood shacks hereabouts any time of the year, but they’re just not the same thing. In much the same way that I like to cook turkey only at Thanksgiving, I like to eat lobster rolls only in the summer (okay, this is early autumn, but you get the point).

As is often the case with things that are truly sublime, simplicity is the key here. Lobster meat, butter, a toasted split-top hot dog bun. Perhaps the faintest splash of fresh lemon juice. That’s all there is.

And now that it’s over for the season, we’ll turn our appetites toward heartier fare. I’ll keep an eye on the calendar come spring, though.

In this day of declining print advertising revenues, it comes as no surprise when another publication closes its doors. This week, Condé Nast announced that Gourmet, the grande dame of food magazines, will cease publication with its November issue. The 68-year-old glossy has long been in the vanguard of magazines devoted to the pleasures of the table, achieving its reputation long before there were celebrity chefs on The Food Network to tell us what to eat. Its current editor-in-chief is renowned food writer Ruth Reichl, who left her post as restaurant critic at the New York Times in 1999 to take the position.

When I was a young woman just venturing into the world of cooking, Gourmet and Bon Appétit were the two “serious” food magazines on the market, and for a while I had subscriptions to both. Sure, there were recipes galore to be found in women’s magazines, the kind my mother would often pick up at the grocery store checkout, but that was everyday food aimed at the everyday cook who needed to get a reasonably tasty dinner on the table in a hurry. Gourmet and Bon Appétit were marketed toward upscale readers — women who entertained frequently and who had food budgets that allowed them to purchase only the finest of ingredients, and schedules that permitted them to hunt those same ingredients down. (As I look back at myself in my mid-20s, when I neither entertained nor had much of a food budget, it’s clear that my reach exceeded my grasp in more ways than one.) Bon Appétit (which is also published by Condé Nast and seems to be surviving in this current economic climate), with its more down-to-earth recipes and slightly less elite tone, was always my favorite of the two.

Of course the world has changed a great deal since then, and a good many home cooks, serious and otherwise, have found their way online. In spite of a bookcase full of cookbooks (which I sometimes like to read the way other people like to curl up with a mystery novel), I find myself opening my laptop more often than not when I’m looking for meal ideas.

You can hardly swing a spatula without hitting a food-related site, regardless of whether you’re looking to get restaurant recommendations from the hometown crowd, argue about what really goes into a proper minestrone, or settle on what kind of cookware to buy. As with everything else online, readers need to assess for themselves whether any given site is a good fit for their particular interests. Here are a few places I visit regularly:

Epicurious is Condé Nast’s digital presence in the world of food. It collects, as their press page says, “more than 25,000 professionally tested recipes from the premier brands in food journalism, 50,000 member-submitted recipes, and web-exclusive original content from Epicurious.com editors and leading food authorities around the world.” Free registration gives you the opportunity to save recipes in your own recipe box, annotate recipes (only you can see the notes), and participate in the online community. I probably grab a recipe or at least an idea from this site on an average of once a week.

Chow is a good place to catch up on news and trends and has a nice selection of recipes and entertaining ideas. Free registration allows you to contribute to their online community Chowhound, where you can swap ideas and recipes and get restaurant recommendations from locals no matter where you’re traveling.

Cook’s Illustrated is the Consumer Reports of the food world and is the only — yes, only — web content I pay for. And I pay for it gladly. The site is free of advertising (just like their print publication), which allows them to offer readers unbiased reviews of products ranging from canned tomatoes to cookware sets, from microwaves to olive oil, and everything in between. Run by Christopher Kimball, who is the anti-celebrity chef host of PBS’s America’s Test Kitchen, the site is heavily oriented toward testing and data analysis, which appeals to the empiricist in me. When the folks at Cooks want to make a beef stew, they make 50 beef stews and then tell you exactly what combination of ingredients and cooking techniques makes it perfect. Their recipes are clearly explained, unfailingly successful, and even an experienced cook like me can pick up tips here. Their search engine leaves a great deal to be desired, but that’s one minor quibble in a sea of goodness. A yearly subscription currently costs $34.95, and I consider it to be money well spent.

Last but not least, Wednesday always brings a smile to my face in the form of the New York Times’ Dining & Wine section. There’s always at least one recipe worth trying, regular contributor Mark Bittman is always well worth reading, and the pictures are nice, too.

I don’t think I’m going to be missing those magazines at all.

Yesterday, Jim and I trekked to the swamps of New Jersey to watch Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band blow down the old Giants Stadium (a new one is being constructed adjacent to the old one). Going to a Bruce concert at Giants Stadium is kind of a special thing — y’all know he’s a Jersey boy, so the audience tends to be filled with the hometown crowd and kindred spirits from the Tri-State area (like us). One of the most appealing facets of a warm weather Springsteen show is the parking lot tailgate, and at Giants Stadium shows it’s always marked by a pretty festive atmosphere. Yesterday’s was only slightly dampened by the weather (which was rainy on and off, and therefore dampening); there were people playing football, people grilling burgers and dogs, and Springsteen music blaring from all directions.

After we stunned ourselves by actually securing the wristbands that would guarantee us entry into the pit, we retired to the back of the van, where we partook of a very nice picnic lunch that consisted of the following:

• Tortellini and Pesto with Grape Tomatoes
• Pepper/Herb Encrusted Dry Salami
• Fresh Mozzarella
• Concord Grapes

The salad was really easy — fresh tortellini from the supermarket mixed with about 3/4 pint of grape tomatoes and a container of store-bought pesto. The dry salami has become a favorite around here for antipasto. I sliced that thinly, and sliced the fresh mozzarella. The grapes we ate straight out of the container — like eating grape jelly!

For dessert, we cracked open a box of cinnamon cookies. Beverage was sparkling water (we don’t do beer at concerts as a rule, mostly because we need to drive long distances afterward).

I also bought some Greek olive hummus and pita chips to dip, but we found the rest of it so satisfying that we never even cracked that open.

The show, by the way, was fantastic.