Kitchen Garden: Everbearing raspberries are sweet reward in fall
The raspberries are warm from the golden late afternoon sun as I pluck each one ...
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Maine Dish
Maine Dish: How to make a mighty fine chicken
“You should roast us a chicken,” my husband suggested. “Remember the days?” I nodded and ...
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Maine Dish: Short peach season inspires muffins
With the onset of fall weather, shorter days and cooler nights, my dining room is lined with trays of pink tomatoes, bright blue-green pears, and fuzzy orange peaches. This “fruit-ripening” station allows me to harvest the produce before the critters like squirrels and coons raid the garden. I check the fruit daily, processing or eating …
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Tomato-seed saving slimy, rewarding
Nobody ever told me that farming was a glamorous way of life, and it’s just as well. At my first farm job, I supervised a field of rotting tomatoes. We were growing them for the preservation of their seeds, to be sold to Johnny’s Selected. Each day I would gather the squishy fruits with the …
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When life gives you beans and tomatoes, add some mozzarella
As a space saving measure on our tiny plots of gardens sculpted into the granite boulders, we grow many of our crops vertically. Up rather than out. Shell peas, sugar snap peas, fragrant sweet peas, cucumbers, Scarlett Runner Beans, tomatoes, peppers and four varieties of pole beans. Anything that can be trellised is “trained” to …
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Savoring basil fresh or as pesto all winter
Fresh annual herbs and summer dishes go together — dill with cucumbers and yogurt, cilantro in salsas, chervil in creamy soups. But it’s hard to keep them productive. In hot weather they quickly go to flower, leaving barely enough foliage to garnish a deviled egg. That’s why basil is such a wonder. It flowers too, …
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A must-have, melt-in-your-mouth cake
One of my early food writer heroes was Marjorie Standish, longtime columnist for the Maine Sunday Telegram. In addition to writing for the paper for 25 years, she published several cookbooks highlighting sensible, down-to-earth Maine recipes. These recipes were often those shared by her readers and Maine households all around the state. I still have …
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Kitchen Garden: The soil beneath our feet takes time to improve
It’s often said that a green thumb is a dirty thumb. The best way to learn to garden is simply to start doing it, with a sharp eye out for the way plants grow successfully in the wild. Certain rules apply, and whether these are unchanging natural laws, and part of a grand plan, nobody …
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Maine Dish: Fruit salads for warm evenings
During the hot, dog days of summer, our dining style becomes more casual and relaxed. The gardens and farmers markets are bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables that are a delight to devour during the intense heat. The fresh produce comes with the added benefit of being healthy for your body. My favorite part of …
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Kitchen Garden: Almost time for a pesto party!
It didn’t make the front page, but sometime toward the end of the second millennium, basil replaced parsley as America’s most popular herb. Much of the thanks goes to pesto, the gloriously green Italian pasta sauce that set the nation’s food processors humming back in the ’80s and is now as much a household word …
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Maine Dish: Live it up with lobster cheesecake
Summer is a busy time for Maine families as we try to squeeze in every ray of sunshine before the long, cold winter. Our home becomes a literal bed-and-breakfast as we delight in entertaining family and friends with picnics on the beach, hikes in the mossy Crockett Cove woods preserve, sunset suppers and cocktails on …
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The stir-fried iceberg lettuce, please
The “hungry gap”, between the end of storage crops and the summer food avalanche, is well behind us. The problem now is what to do with all those vegetables. Sometimes this is easy: storing spring beets in the fridge, cooking down extra spinach into a creamy purée, freezing the peas and beans. But lettuce is …