Nickel Boys (R)

A Complete Unknown (R)

A Black teen with a promising future is derailed when he’s sent to a Florida reform school in the 1960s in Nickel Boys, the Oscar Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominee based on the Colson Whitehead novel.

Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is 17 but already attending college and taking part in civil rights protests. While walking to school one day, he takes a ride from a man who is subsequently pulled over and charged with having stolen a car, which means Elwood is now in trouble for having stolen a car even though he didn’t know the man at all. He’s sent to reform school Nickel Academy, where he’s told working hard will earn early release. This turns out to be extremely untrue; Nickel is a segregated hellscape where the Black kids, some of whom look like they’re barely old enough to be out of preschool, are beaten, tortured and assaulted and used as unpaid labor. Meanwhile, the white kids do some labor but they also play football and are called “mister.” Elwood hangs on to the idea that his loving grandmother, Harriet (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), will work with a lawyer to get an appeal and get him out of there. In the meantime he tries, with varying results, to stay clear of some of the more bullying kids and the more sadistic adults. He has help with this when he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), a kid with more time at Nickel and nobody waiting for him on the outside. Turner seems to both admire and be deeply wary of Elwood’s belief that justice for them, for the wrongs they suffer, is possible. We also jump to the future, decades later in New York City, and see the burden that these boys, now men, carry with them from what happened to them at Nickel.

Nickel Boys jumps around a bit in time, going back and forth between the 1960s and the adult futures of the characters. It also starts with a presentation of Elwood’s life that feels very much like memories — partly remembered moments, faces, sounds. Scenes are often shot from his point of view or, later, from Turner’s point of view. Which means sometimes we’re feeling what’s happening from the point of view of a terrified, somewhat naive Elwood and sometimes we’re seeing him react. And we’re sometimes looking directly at the horrors of Nickel and sometimes just seeing parts of it — a glimpse of a boy who has been beaten, for example. This approach, along with historical photos and news clips of normal life, help to build the horror of this alternate, medieval world happening in the middle of 1960s America. Helping to build all of this are the great performances all around. Herisse gives us Elwood as he comes to better understand what he’s up against at Nickel and formulate a new plan to deal with it. Ellis-Taylor also helps to place Elwood’s story in the larger context of history and how she hoped better things for him than the circumstance he was forced into. A Available for purchase on VOD.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (R)

Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones is once again a single lady but this time has kids and a welcome amount of maturity in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth Bridget Jones movie but possibly the truest one to the characters since the first one.

Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) really did, finally at last, live happily ever after. They have a lovely house in London and two lovely kids — Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic). And their usual suspect circle of friends: longtime buds Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (James Callis) as well as work buds Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and Talitha (Josette Simon) and even, as the kids call him, Uncle Daniel (Hugh Grant) — onetime Mark rival Daniel Cleaver. But then four years before the start of this movie, Mark, on a humanitarian mission, is killed and Bridget Darcy is suddenly a widow. After attending a memorial outing for Mark and getting barraged with advice about moving on and jumping back into dating, a frazzled but determined Bridget decides that she will in fact make an effort to live and be a part of the world. She tries out dating again with the much-young Roxster (Leo Woodall). She heads back to work. She actively advocates for her son, reserved like his dad, with his science teacher Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who dings Billy’s grade for adding “heaven” to an illustration of the levels of the atmosphere. Because this is Bridget Jones, she also worries about her appearance, tries some not-entirely-legal lip plumper, reacquaints herself with her shapewear and says yes to way too many things at her kids’ school. She also turns to gynecologist Dr. Rawlings (Emma Thompson) for advice about everything when she probably needs a therapist, which is really just an excuse to slide the droll and awesome Thompson into a few scenes telling Bridget to just carry on.

Not all of the Bridget Jones sequels made sense or felt true to the characters as they were set up in the first movie way back in 2001 but this one really does feel like we’re catching up with those original characters who have grown and changed but also still care for each other. The friend chemistry with Bridget and her three OG buds feels exactly right, as does her relationship with Daniel and the way Hugh Grant has aged Daniel, maturing him in some ways but very much not in others. Bridget and Mark’s relationship, freed of the middle two movies’ need to keep them apart for nonsense reasons, finally feels like the relationship we’d expect them to have — both what they had before Mark died and how Bridget feels now. Bridget is still deeply in love with Mark, and aware that she will always be deeply in love with Mark and always be with him, to some degree, because of their kids. And she is deeply in love with their family, a family that is still actively keeping him a part of it even as they try to move on without him. She comes to terms, over the course of the movie, with the idea that she can love Mark in this way, always be his Mrs. Darcy, and still make new connections, fall in love again without leaving him behind. It’s sweet and grown-up and unexpectedly romantic. B+ Streaming on Peacock.

One of Them Days (R)

Roommates Dreux and Alyssa have just nine hours to make $1,500 in rent or get kicked out of their apartment in One of Them Days, a very middle-of-the-road-but-in-a-good-way action-on-a-clock comedy.

On the morning of the first of the month, landlord Uche (Rizi Timane) tells Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) that he never received their rent money, which Alyssa’s boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) was supposed to deliver to Uche, and that if they don’t come up with the money by 6 p.m. he’s evicting them. When attempting to get the money back from Keshawn doesn’t work — he’s “invested” it in a line of T-shirts he plans to sell — they attempt to figure out other ways to get $1,500 including donating way too much blood and getting a payday loan. Meanwhile, at 4 p.m. Dreux has an interview with the corporate office of the diner franchise she works for as a waitress; she’s hoping to secure a manager job that could dramatically change her fortunes. Later in the movie, after the women sell a seemingly abandoned pair of Air Jordans, local tough guy King Lolo (Amin Joseph) informs them that they have until 8 p.m. to get him $5,000 for those sneakers, which were his. Thus does the movie regularly count down until potential catastrophes as Dreux and Alyssa find themselves in increasingly desperate and ridiculous situations.

This is a perfectly fine movie with a few moments of standout comedy and very good friends-for-life chemistry between SZA and Keke Palmer. Their chemistry probably does most of the work of making this movie the fun hang that it is and pulling all the characters and wackiness (Janelle James as a phlebotomist on her first day, Keyla Monterrosa Mejia as an unsympathetic payday loan office) together into something that has moments of real heart. B In theaters and available for rent or purchase.

Dog Man (PG)

“Supa cop” Dog Man captures and recaptures and recaptures again the villainous cat Petey in Dog Man, a brightly-colored animated movie based on the graphic novels by Dav Pilkey.

Dog Man (who doesn’t talk but Peter Hastings provides the Dog Man noises) is born when the head of a very smart police dog is sewn onto the body of a not-smart police man with top-notch martial arts skills after both are injured in an explosion. Now containing the best attributes of both man and dog, Dog Man becomes a hero — making friends with kids, playing piano for old people, generally solving crimes and capturing Petey (voice of Pete Davidson). Capturing Petey a lot because this super smart cat keeps escaping from cat jail. Eventually, Petey’s many escapes get the mayor (voice of Cheri Oteri) so mad that she demands that the police chief (voice of Lil Rel Howery) kick Dog Man off the case. Dog Man is mad he can’t go after Petey but he accepts the assignment to keep an eye on Flippy (voice of Ricky Gervais), an evil fish who is dead and definitely not coming back to life unless someone exposed him to Living Spray at the Living Spray Factory and who would do that, that’s just crazy talk.

Meanwhile, Petey, after having a falling out with his assistant who wants to be paid in money rather than bottle caps or chocolate coins, decides to make his own assistant by cloning himself. He didn’t quite realize, however, that one of the steps of cloning was to wait 18 years until the clone matured into an adult, which is how Petey ends up with Li’l Petey (voice of Lucas Hopkins Calderon), an adorable, adoring kitty version of himself who calls him Papa.

As with the Pilkey books, the movie is humor-rich, with smart visuals that have a hand-drawn askew-ness and clever written elements like spelled-as-spoken words such as “supa” and “OhKay” that all fit with Dog Man’s existence as a comic book by kids George and Harold, the main characters of Captain Underpants. Also like the books, the movie has moments of real heart, such as in Petey’s relationship with Li’l Petey, which is strongly impacted by his own difficult relationship with his father (voice of Stephen Root). This is the kind of story where buildings come alive and turn into lumbering monsters, one of which farts, but also where a character considers the harms of generational trauma and how to break the cycle. But don’t worry, the movie accomplishes its emotional tasks without losing the kid audience! The movie does all its smart emotional stuff under the cover of robots like 80HD and a series of inventions called the “Somethingerother 2000” and pratfalls and dog face licks and just general silliness that don’t slow down the things that keep kids engaged. A In theaters.

Featured Image: Nickel Boys (R)

Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly


Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly (Atria, 241 pages)

Spotify is in the news this month, having recently reported that 2024 was its first profitable year, with 675 million monthly active users and climbing. That made investors happy, but what are the costs? That’s the subject of music journalist Liz Pelly’s timely examination into the rise of the music streaming company, founded nearly 20 years ago in Sweden.

Spotify, of course, is the Godzilla of streaming services, eating the lunch of most of its competitors, although Apple and Amazon also have strong shares of the market. The business model sprang vaguely formed from the forehead of Napster, the digital music-sharing platform — notably illegal — that freed consumers from actually paying for music.

While today’s streaming services, of course, are not free, they remain a mind-boggling value. As Hua Hsu wrote for The New Yorker, “Adjusted for inflation, a monthly subscription to an audio streaming service, allowing convenient access to a sizable chunk of the history of recorded music, costs much less than a single album once did.”

Musical artists and their associated companies, however, have contended that the change has come at their expense, and it’s been a slog to get to the point where most everyone is satisfied. Count Pelly among those who are still pushing back against the changes that streaming has wrought.

Spotify’s goals, apart from making money, are ostensibly to make what Pelly calls “self-driving music” — the ability for a subscriber to “simply open the app, press ‘play,’ and instantaneously get the perfect soundtrack for any given moment or context, without having to search, click, or think.”

But in achieving this on-demand nirvana, Pelly argues that Spotify and other streaming services have helped give rise to a “dynamic of passivity” among consumers, who are spoon-fed what algorithms have determined they will like. Spotify playlists “worked as a flattening, making a scene that was previously sprawling and complicated into something commodified and palatable, cutting out many original voices along the way.”

At the same time, music has become background noise in modern life, and “it follows that a population paying so little conscious attention to music would also believe it deserving of so little financial remuneration,” Pelly writes.

These are all interesting cultural changes worthy of reflection, but Pelly comes to this book as a nuts-and-bolts journalist, not as a philosopher. She tracks the minutiae of Spotify’s ascent, which she was covering in real time, and reports with detail on the inner workings of the company, aided by both named and anonymous employees, some of whom have since left.

That sourcing adds, of course, to pervasive cynicism about Spotify throughout the book. Pelly and her sources are not dispassionate observers, but people with a take, and that take is that streaming, while great for consumers, is not great for artists, who are paid fractions of a cent per stream. And how big the fraction is is virtually impossible to figure out, given the many variants possible, which include the type of streaming plan (free, standard or family?) and even what country the consumer lives in.

“This is all to say: the digit on an artist’s royalty statement is much more complicated than a per-stream rate. And artists are almost always systematically shut out of any sort of transparency around the calculations creating their livelihoods,” Pelly writes, explaining how the digital age has led to a music labor movement.

To be fair, she notes, with every change in technology, the industry has had to adapt. In the 1920s the rise of the phonograph was seen with the same sort of concern that musicians have had about digital music. Musicians went on strike in the 1940s over LP records; they feared unemployment, believing that people were less likely to go see a live performance if they could hear the music in their living rooms. Of course, that’s proved not to be the case; witness Taylor Swift’s proceeds from her Eras tour.

Still, Pelly sees the problem of artist compensation as something all of us should worry about, even arguing that music, like libraries, should be seen as a “public good,” with public funding and protections. Some people in Europe are even arguing for what amounts to a universal basic income for musicians. In fact, that’s even been tried in Ireland, which experimented with a “Basic Income for the Arts” that gave 325 euro each week to 2,000 artists for three years. France has also experimented with a system that gave artists their own unemployment system, in order to make up for the irregularity of their work.

In her conclusion, Pelly asks, “What’s the ethical alternative to Spotify?,” which is not a question the average American consumer will want to entertain, and Pelly admits there are no easy answers. For those who are not inclined to worry about artist pay — or to consider that “our shared music cultures would be so much more compelling and diverse if so many [musicians] did not need to abandon the arts for jobs with health insurance” — Mood Machine may seem like so much hand-wringing, interspersed with sometimes mind-numbing detail on things like hyperpop and Discovery Mode.

Ultimately, while well-reported, Mood Machine is more a book for insiders than the general public. But insiders and struggling musicians will love it.

B- —Jennifer Graham

Featured Image: Mood Machine, by Liz Pelly

Album Reviews 25/02/20

Sanhedrin, Heat Lightning (Metal Blade Records)

I haven’t checked in with the Metal Blade Records stable in quite a while. This record seemed mildly interesting, given that the New York-based three-piece band’s musicianship is advertised as being top-drawer, which made me think of Rush, a band that was rather interesting for two or three albums before they decided to kind of suck. Ah yes, look at that typical Metal Blade-approved cover art, evoking an AI-created Halloween card created for sale at dollar stores; but wait. Opening song “Blind Wolf” rips off the intro to Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” then combines Savatage and Mercyful Fate and tables some really nice melodic touches. “Above The Law” nicks Buckcherry but in a good way; “Franklin County Line” Slayer-izes the Fates Warning formula. It’s fine for what it is. A —Eric W. Saeger

Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, “Back In The Game,” Warp Records

The only reason I came within a country mile of paying any attention whatsoever to this new collaborative single is its painfully strident “edgelord” factor: “Look everyone, it’s Thom Yorke! And it’s on Warp Records!” Usually I avoid both those things like leper-hospital Dumpsters (my favorite all-time line about Yorke was Dr. David Thorpe’s iconic “Thom Yorke, the man with completely superfluous letters in both his names,” while Warp’s output has never failed to disappoint me; they have a strange fetish for electronic music that’s so boring it makes Postal Service sound innovative), but it was either this or dig through my emails for something great but which most of you wouldn’t care about anyway, so here we are. Pritchard, of Reload and Link fame, previously featured Yorke on the Sigur Ros-ish “Beautiful People” from his (Pritchard’s) 2016 LP Under The Sun; the only thing that made that tune interesting was its New Age vibe and some mildly innovative vocal effects. This track employs the latter trick again but with less boldness; all in all the song comprises dated, government-issue krautrock that sounds like a bonus track from the Saw soundtrack. There, I pretended to care about this, I demand my gold sticker this instant. C —Eric W. Saeger

PLAYLIST

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

NOTE: Local (NH) bands seeking album or EP reviews can message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

• Before I descend into the usual madness about albums good and bad coming out this Friday, Feb. 21, here’s something important. You guys know I’m a big supporter of New England-based singer-songwriter Kris Pedersen, whose award-winning Tom Petty-meets-Florida Georgia Line/Kings Of Leon-style music is amazingly well-written and well worth your support. You may also know that he’s had a very tough slog of it, but on Feb. 9 the absolute worst possible thing happened. A fire consumed his family farmhouse in South Wallingford, Vermont, in no time flat; his home and all his possessions were totally gone before the fire department guys could even get set up. He and his wife April have literally nothing left but the clothes they were wearing that day, and that’s where you rascals come in: Kris’s fan base stepped up immediately to start a donation page, which is already up to around $3,500 at this writing with a $5,000 goal (and no limit), but he’s obviously going to need a lot more than that to get back to business, so if you’re feeling it, please do give. “Mutual aid” is a big thing nowadays, as you probably know, and this is as deserving a cause as you could ever imagine, so if you have a few bucks to spare, please donate to Kris’s GoFundMe pool at this page: www.gofundme.com/f/support-kris-and-family-after-devastating-fire. It’s the best way for you to help out this struggling world-class artist.

• British techno-funk-blues singer Neo Jessica Joshua is better known as Nao, and her new album, Jupiter, will be out this Friday! Her resumé is top-level, including singing backup for such peeps as Kwabs and Jarvis Cocker, and six years singing in an all-girl a cappella group called The Boxettes. And so I must take her very seriously, and thus I shall remove my (true fact) custom-designed T-shirt that reads “Your Band Completely Sucks =(” and approach this section with all the professionalism I can muster, excuse me while I open this box of Jolly Joes grape jellybean thingies to ensure that my brain has enough reserve sugar for the task! So I am watching the visualizer video for her new song, “Happy People,” and let me just say that she is blessed with a bubbly voice that sounds kind of like a Munchkin; the music underneath is sparse and lo-fi, a combination of acoustic guitar and authentic-sounding Afrobeat, in sum a very island-vacation feel to this. It is very nice, yes.

• Singing human Patterson Hood, a co-founder of the band Drive-By Truckers, releases his fourth solo album this Friday, Exploding Trees & Airplane Scream! The spearhead track is “The Pool House,” whose video features the stupidest-looking puppet I’ve ever seen, doofing around in a quaint doll house or whatnot. The music is an eclectic but listenable mixture of Bon Iver and corporate country & western, sort of like what you’d hear if Garth Brooks toned things down in order to do a Robert Palmer trip from 1990, you know, when he did that dumb Marvin Gaye cover tune.

• British wimp-indie bros The Wombats are up to six LPs as of this Friday, with their latest, Oh! The Ocean. “Can’t Say No” is a twee-ized ripoff of Echosmith’s two big hits, you know the ones. Nice but completely disposable.

• Lastly we have Boise, Idaho-based producer-DJ-whatever Trevor Powers, who goes by the nym Youth Lagoon, and his new album, Rarely Do I Dream! “Speed Freak” is wicked cool in my opinion, a ratty, crunchy no-wave/electro joint with an ’80s-pop center. —Eric W. Saeger

Featured Photo: Sanhedrin, Heat Lightning (Metal Blade Records) & Mark Pritchard & Thom Yorke, “Back In The Game,” Warp Records

Chocolate Mint Crinkle Cookies

By John Fladd

[email protected]

A brief lesson in food science

There is a trick that some bartenders use called “fat washing.”

It means is that anything that is soluble in fat is usually soluble in alcohol, and vice versa. For the past decade or so, really dedicated bartenders have used this fairly random chemistry fact to bring together bourbon and bacon, or rum and brown sugar.

This recipe turns that process on its head. Fresh mint is steeped in warm melted butter, which strips the mint’s minty mintiness away to give a startlingly delicious flavor note to these deeply chocolatey cookies.

Chocolate Mint Crinkle Cookies

A rubber or silicone spatula will make this recipe easier.

4 Tablespoons (half a stick) butter

¼ cup (28 g) fresh mint leaves and stems, chopped

¾ cup (90 g) all-purpose flour

¼ cup (21 g) cocoa powder

1 teaspoon baking powder – if you don’t remember the last time you bought baking powder, it’s time to replace yours

¼ teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt

½ cup (106 g) brown sugar

1 egg

4 ounces (114 g) bittersweet or semi-sweet chocolate – I like the chocolate chips from Trader Joe’s; they have a cocoa content of about 53% and a nice deep flavor

¼ cup or so of granulated sugar

½ cup or so of powdered sugar

Melt the butter with the chopped mint in a small saucepan over medium-low heat, and simmer until “fragrant,” which is recipe language for “Don’t burn it, but cook it until you can smell the mint.” The mint will cook down like spinach. Remove the saucepan from the heat, and let the mint steep in the melted butter for half an hour.

In a small bowl, combine the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. Set it aside until you need it.

Melt the chocolate in the microwave, 20 seconds at a time, stirring until all the lumps disappear.

After the butter and mint have spent half an hour getting to know each other better, use a fine-mesh strainer to strain the butter into the bowl of your stand mixer. If the butter has set up a little reheat it briefly on the stove to remelt it.

Beat the melted butter and brown sugar until they are thoroughly integrated — maybe three minutes on medium speed. Add the egg — just the inside, not the shell — then the melted chocolate. Reduce the mixer to its lowest speed, and add the flour mixture — a couple of spoonfuls at a time, so it doesn’t poof up in your face — just until everything is barely mixed together.

At this point take a good look at your cookie dough. If it is stiff and PlayDoh-like, you can move on to the baking phase. If it is a little loose, put it in the refrigerator for half an hour or so to stiffen up.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Divide the dough into balls of one tablespoon each, about the size of a ping-pong ball. Roll each of the balls in the granulated sugar, then in the powdered sugar, then transfer it to a baking sheet with a piece of parchment paper or a silicone baking mat. Place the balls about 2 inches apart; with a little creative reordering, there should be room enough for all of them — about a dozen.

Bake the cookies on the middle rack of your oven for five minutes, then turn the baking sheet and bake for another five minutes, then remove the baking sheet from the oven and let the cookies cool thoroughly. They will have gratifying cracks and crevices across their tops, accentuated by the powdered sugar.

What you will have ended up with are dark, chewy, richly cocoa-y cookies with a minty flavor — but not minty like toothpaste, or breath mints, or mint-chip ice cream. These have a cool, fresh zing to them that makes them something special.

These are second-date cookies.

Featured photo: Chocolate Mint Crinkle Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

In the kitchen with Amanda Spooner

Chef at Honey Cup Tea Room in Manchester. Spooner is also a caterer and personal trainer. “I was raised in the restaurants with my dad. I was busing tables at 6, 7 years old and then, around 12, was doing catering with my aunt’s company, Sunshine Catering. … My first job out of high school was at the Black Brimmer as a hostess, then as a server and a bartender. Then I went to La Carreta and was a bartender over there, and then I had my first baby. At that time I took a different [path]. I started catering, but I also was intrigued with health and wellness so I ended up getting my certification to be a personal trainer. I’ve been in that industry, maintaining my certification for about 20 years now. My husband and I ended up opening up Big Kahuna’s Cafe and Grill out of Merrimack. I operated that for about 10 years. When Mara [Honey Cup owner Mara Witt] started thinking about the concept of having her own place, she came to me and asked if I would be up for helping her out. … I had full artistic, creative freedom with this. The only thing I had to really do was home in on how she wanted to see everything, how she wanted to feel. And from that point I was able to curate a menu.”

What is your must-have item in the kitchen?

All I need is fire. If I have fire, I can cook anything. We’ve done open pit cooking. I’ve done rustic-style cooking, open flame. An oven’s great, but I can cook anywhere with anything. And that’s probably my strongest suit as a chef. Also love. Love is what makes food great.

What is your favorite thing on your menu?

I think the “Chaffle” is really cool — the loaded potato waffle with cheddar, egg and potato. But our turkey sandwiches are the bomb, with herb cream cheese. I love the fresh herbs. I add in sage, basil, and thyme, garlic, and just emulsify that all together. It’s magical.

What is a trend you are seeing in food in New Hampshire?

I think we’re seeing a lot more of the cultural foods — things like African cooking, things that are becoming trendy on TikTok. There’s more of an interest in the flavors from around the world, which I admire.

What would you have for your last meal?

Lobster. All the lobster I could stuff in my face.

What is your favorite thing to cook at home?

In the summertime, I love cooking over fire. Then in the fall with the harvest, the harvest vegetables, the produce is just so beautiful … I love making stews with bones and bone marrow; it’s just rich, hearty, nourishing quality food.

1940s Recession Chocolate Cake

This cake was popular during the Great Depression and World War II because it uses no eggs, butter, or milk—ingredients that were often rationed, so it’s also vegan!

Servings: 8-10
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 30-35 minutes

Ingredients:
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons vegetable oil (or melted shortening)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon white or apple cider vinegar
1 cup water

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Grease an 8×8-inch baking pan lightly with oil or non-stick spray.
2. Mix dry ingredients: In the baking pan (or a mixing bowl), whisk together the flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.
3. Make wells: Using a spoon, make three small wells in the dry mixture—one for oil, one for vinegar, and one for vanilla.
4. Add liquids: Pour the oil, vinegar, and vanilla into their respective wells, then pour the water over everything.
5. Mix gently: Stir the ingredients until well combined, making sure there are no dry spots, but don’t overmix.
6. Bake: Place in the oven and bake for 30-35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
7. Cool and serve: Let the cake cool in the pan before slicing. You can dust it with powdered sugar or top it with a simple icing if desired.

Featured Image: Amanda Spooner. Photo by John Fladd.

Shakes and teas

New shop offers beverages with purpose

By John Fladd

[email protected]

Sean and Gina Wren picked a challenging location for a health-oriented business. PowerThirst, a shake and tea bar specializing in nutritional supplements, is located directly between a Mexican restaurant and a Domino’s Pizza on Mast Road in Goffstown. Two doors down is a tobacco and vape shop. On the other hand, there is a gym in the same plaza.

PowerThirst owner Sean Wren said the location has actually worked in their favor.

“We definitely have had a nice steady increase in traffic from the gym next door,” he said. “And then having the new Mexican restaurant next door [La Vaka Mexican Restaurant], it’s been fantastic, because I see so many people walking by, going into the restaurant, looking up, looking at our sign and looking in our window. I’ve had a number of people say, ‘Oh yeah, I was going to eat next door and I finally had a chance to stop by; I want to see what this place is all about.’”

What it is about is vitamin- and nutrient-enriched shakes and teas.

“PowerThirst is technically classified as a nutrition club,” Wren explained. “and what we provide are beverages for people who are looking to be more positive and health-minded. The teas have B vitamins, antioxidants, any number of our boosters for hydration, electrolytes, and things like collagen and different supplements to help with their overall health. The protein shakes provide protein and other nutrients. The goal is to keep everything tasting good, but also keeping it at a very low sugar content so people can be mindful of total caloric intake throughout the day.“

Customers order a tea drink or a shake at the counter, and the Wrens customize it according to flavor and the customer’s specific requirements. A long-distance runner might ask for different nutritional supplements than a power-lifter, for instance.

“If they have the time,” Wren said, “I would talk with them and ask them what they’re currently doing. And then just give them some general guidelines as to things they might want to try, because in the world of fitness and nutrition … everybody’s body’s different. There’s no cookie-cutter approach of ‘this is what you have to do if you want to be good at X’. It’s going to be a little bit different for everybody.”

Wren looks at his job as providing a counterbalance to some of the dubious nutritional information that many people are bombarded with.

“It’s a tough place to be if you’re someone who’s trying to get into fitness and you don’t have a lot of background in [nutrition],” he said. “Because while the internet is fantastic, you can find anything you could possibly imagine on there, and, there are a lot of charlatans out there and there’s a lot of people selling snake oil and just telling you this is the new hot thing that’ll change your life. My goal here is to provide people with the most simplified, straightforward answers to get them moving in the right direction and make a lot of those decisions for themselves and be as informed as possible. Because yes, you’ll have people who like a new supplement will pop up and everybody says it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. And then a year goes by and all of the actual research comes out, it doesn’t do anything.”

That relaxed, comfortable attitude is reflected in the interior of PowerThirst. There is comfortable seating, and space for customers to sit and talk with each other or to take their time enjoying their drinks.

“I didn’t want to set this up and have it be too over-the-top gym health-related,” Wren said. Someone who doesn’t necessarily go to the gym all the time or is in that space would think, ‘Oh that’s not for me.’ We want to feel very welcoming to anybody who just enjoys a delicious beverage, wants to make some slight changes in their life, all the way up to people who are like hardcore athletes, gym goers, high school athletes.”

PowerThirst

Where: 553 Mast Road, Goffstown, 937-2412, powerthirstnh.com
When: Open seven days a week: Monday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Featured photo: PowerThirst owner Sean Wren. Photo by John Fladd.

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