There’s nothing peewee about the kiwi
Fuzzy kiwi fruits burst on the American scene in the trend-hungry 1980s, but smooth-skinned hardy ...
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Maine Dish
To bisque or not to bisque
On a recent foodie trip to Portland we enjoyed three delicious and innovatively different meals. ...
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Devising crop rotation plan makes fun winter diversion
Open any gardening book and it will tell you that crop rotation is a beneficial practice. The principle is a simple one. You don’t plant anything in the same place where it grew last year, and preferably not the year before that, or the year before that. Rotating results in healthier, better-yielding crops, partly because …
A taste of home
Every year in January we have an artistic project here on Deer Isle known as Fun-A-Day. The premise is simple: participants pick a project like take a photograph, paint a series of pictures, create a quilt, or bake a cake and work on it every day. Then in February, we share our work with the …
Rhubarb rules in late winter, spring
I’ve never understood strawberry rhubarb pie. It’s considered a classic recipe, but most true classics follow the old gardening calendar, using fruits and vegetables in season. They go back before the days of freezers and diesel trucks. Strawberries and rhubarb taste fine together but in the garden, they are not precisely bedfellows. Rhubarb’s main claim …
Iva McFarland was known for her yeast rolls
The year 2020 is big for Maine, as we’ll be celebrating our 200th birthday year as an independent state (no longer part of Massachusetts!). Even though we know the indigenous peoples of Maine have been here for thousands of years, this opportunity to explore more “recent” Maine history and learn about how Maine became a …
Shelter and savor root vegetables all winter
Kitchen Garden Thank heaven there are still some gardeners who grow root vegetables. Not just spring radishes, baby carrots and petite leeks, but rows of big, bulbous beets and hefty rutabagas. These folks raise bushels of potatoes, wheelbarrow loads of cabbages, sacks of onions. With muddy fingers, they dig for buried treasure as cold weather …
Amy Hutchinson’s stuffed mushrooms a treat
Maine Dish At a recent Deer Isle potluck supper, I enjoyed the most delicious stuffed mushroom caps. They were golden, bite-sized morsels, perfectly cooked, with a nice and buttery, garlicy and clam flavor. And so easy to eat! Unlike many stuffed caps, these mushrooms were not greasy, watery or runny. The tasty tidbits were the …
Feasting on fall’s bounty
King Arthur would have known just what to do. My heftiest chef knife was plunged to the hilt in a blue Hubbard squash twice the size of a Thanksgiving turkey and only a heroic effort would remove it. I found that by drawing the handle toward me as far as it would go, then thrusting …
Thanks for the leftovers
We’re enjoying the Thanksgiving holiday in Ithaca, N.Y., visiting with our daughter Emily and son-in-law Kent. It’s a break from the clan tradition of feasting at my mother’s family homestead in Norway, Maine. No 25-pound turkey, mounds of mashed potatoes, squash casserole, Robin’s buttermilk rolls and Aunt Jen’s pies. Instead of the assorted collection of …
Keep the spirit of our forebearers’ first feast
Of all our national holidays, Thanksgiving holds a special place. It’s apolitical and nondenominational. It brings families together. It conjures up a brief moment when we were not trying to dominate or extirpate the people who arrived before us on this continent. And it’s all about food. We know very little about that “First Thanksgiving” …
Preserve bounty of autumn fruit in chutneys
Looking for something new, exciting and festive for your family’s Thanksgiving dinner? How about chutney? A spiced fruit condiment whose origin food historians have traced back to 500 BC in India, chutneys were an early form of food preservation adopted by the Romans. The sauces later travelled to the British Empire, where the Brits added …