Chewing on Veteran's Day

We timed our breakfast so that we could arrive at the Montpelier Veteran's Day parade just as its lead honor guard passed through the intersection of State and Main. In our bellies: maple-syrup pork sausages from the Sharon Trading Post, red-bliss potato home fry with local, organic spuds and onions, and Vermont Compost eggs fried in an 1/8 inch of olive oil to achieve crispy, puffy whites and dense yolks. Bright morning sun made the marchers' job easier, though it didn't do much to bring out spectators to observe the parade (I'm not sure what the thin crowd at the parade says about our country as we continue to wage two wars).

After formally marking the holiday with a parade, we ran some errands in neighboring Barre, Vt. Cookie connoisseurs take note: Main St.'s Espresso Bueno has come close to achieving perfection with its chocolate chip and ginger snap cookies. About four or five inches in diameter, these $1.25 delicious disks of dough have captured the essence of two cookie classics. They're no frills. None are needed. Owner, baker, and barista Elizabeth Manriquez (an integral part of the crew during the golden age of now defunct Geisne's Confectionary), has nailed texture (crispy bottoms, toothy edges, moist and chewy centers) and taste (salty-sweet vanilla batter punctuated frequently with milk chocolate/spicy-sweet molasses). If you love cookies (who doesn't) and you find yourself in Barre, Vt., I highly recommend trying one of each.

After I briefly flirted with the idea of grabbing a Straffod Organic Creamery vanilla milkshake from L.A.C.E. to wash down the cookies on the way back to the car (their shakes are potable bit of heaven), we drove out to the Mad River Valley for a visit with one of our favorite veterans, Johnny, and his family. Before and after our walk down their road, we sat around their table breaking bread (first Red Hen baguette, then sesame bagels from Montreal, then slightly stale La Panciata--all toasted), eating pickled foods from their garden, Maplebrook mozzarella cheese, fresh apple, and dried sausage. I took most of my toast with butter--one of the simple pleasures in life that we should never take for granted. As we broke bread, we talked about wars past and present.

We asked Johnny about his service in the First Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm. He described witnessing a Patriot Missile shoot down an incoming Iraqi Scud missile from the vantage point of a nearby dock loaded with explosives. He cited this as the high point of his combat action. There were apparently some incidents of small arms fire behind the lines, but even then he didn't have to discharge his weapon during the ground offensive. We wondered about how our world would be different if only they'd marched all the way to Baghdad back then; although as Johnny's friends, we're grateful that he never had to fire a shot in combat. We wish the same were true for more veterans.

We bemoaned the elusive nature of world peace, we also tried to appreciate the peace of the present moment. Snacking on simple foods, we friends sat around the table unafraid that our afternoon repast would be disrupted at any moment by sudden violence. In this, we are fortunate.

Halloween '09

Joslyn's cooking club went with a Halloween theme last time around: trick or treat. You either had to bring a treat or a dish with some trick involved (e.g., a surprise ingredient, a play on words, etc.). Joslyn opted for the "trick" theme. Martha Stewart came through for her with an "eye-popping soup" recipe. It's a tomato-herb broth meant to look like blood with eyeballs (mozzarella bocconcini stuffed with olives) floating in it. Jos said it was really good--especially once the mozzarella melted in the hot broth. We had plenty leftover (always a benefit of cooking-club), but I was too grossed out to eat any of it (go figure b/c I ate duck hearts last weekend and I have a beef tongue and oxtail in my freezer, but for some reason my gag reflex drew the line at fake blood and fake eyes).

When the day itself arrived, I couldn't wait to get my hands on some candy. Even though I had a costume picked out and at age 33 am not embarrassed to go door to door competing for candy with 3 year-olds, I wasn't willing to entrust my one day of no-excuses-needed candy bingeing to the randomness of the trick-or-treat market. So around noon, I strolled in to our downtown candy store (you don't know temptation until they put a bulk candy store literally in view of your office window)--Delish--and filled my candy-by-the-pound bag up with the following confectionary melange: sour cherries, gummy army men, gummy penguins, gummy coke-bottles, gummy lobsters (see a pattern developing?), gummy aquarium fish, swedish fish, chocolate-covered gummy bears, "Aussie" black licorice, and Kookaburra strawberry licorice. The bag was nearly empty by the time we hit the candy trail with our little friend Scout.

Halloween is all about candy, right? Wrong if your aunt happens to make a gorgeous tray of brownies to go with dinner after the trick-or-treating is done. And that's just what happened to Scout.

You can just see the longing in her eyes as the aroma of cocoa hits her nose. At this moment, her full bag of candy sits forgotten on the shelf in the background; she didn't even dump it out. After downing the square pictured above, Scout started the sadly unsuccessful negotiation with her parents for another one. It was too much to bear as her parents calmly, but firmly resisted her pleas. Making matters worse for me, I was sitting right next to the half-full plate of still-warm brownies and because Scout couldn't have seconds, I couldn't have thirds--it would have made her parents' job that much more difficult.

At this point, you're probably hoping for the brownie recipe that's so good it can make a kid forget about candy on halloween. Well it's so easy, even Rachel Ray could make it. That's because these brownies were from a box: Continental Mills Ghirardelli Double Chocolate Brownie mix. They're scary-good.

Bill's 89th Birthday fiesta!

If you want decent Mexican food in central Vermont, you pretty much have to make it yourself. And that's just what we did to celebrate our friend Bill's birthday.

Bill's fiesta brought me the chance to collaborate with a few of the most talented home cooks around: Bill's daughters Denise and Rilla and his son-in-law Tom.

I had the relatively easy task of bringing two taco fillings to accompany the pork shoulder carnitas Denise and Tom made from the pig they've purchased. For the carnivores, I brought browned, seasoned ground beef from our Flint Brook Farm cow. I also threw together some steam sauteed portobellos with red bell peppers, and one of the last local red onions at the market. As each batch cooked, I added fresh-ground cumin, salt, pepper, chili powder, and lime--all to taste. The mushrooms were a hit as I'd prepared them. But without a sauce, the beef was a little lacking. Fortunately, at Denise's suggestion, the beef came together with help from a hearty dollop of sour cream and a few dashes of adobo.

Before dinner, we snacked on chips and guacamole, crudite, and sliced tart. I devoured chips laden with Denise's smoky guacamole kicked up with roasted peppers from Tom's garden, and savored my one slice of Rilla's sweet-potato, rosemary, walnut, onion, and fontina tart from the pages of Eating Well magazine (recipe here). Rilla's rendition was delicious (Joslyn is making it for dinner tonight!)

When we got to the table, we found the full range of taco accouterments waiting along with this lovely jalapeno pie. I'd never had jalapeno "pie" before so these fluffy, cheesy, spicy folds of egg were a revelation. This was very much a family-style meal with lots of plates passing as we stuffed our tortillas and then stuffed our faces with them.

The best thing about being invited to a birthday party is usually the cake. Bill, however, is more of a pie man. After one bite of Rilla's intricately-latticed, citrus-infused apple pie, all thoughts of cake were banished.

The chefs serve dessert to the guest of honor

Abandoned apples reclaimed

I follow the old saw "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." So far so good on the doctor part and as a bonus I actually enjoy the flavor and texture of apples. They make for a great after-lunch snack in lieu of (or some times in addition to) a cookie from one of the bakeries in downtown Montpelier (La Brioche's standard chocolate chip is the most reliable, with Uncle Mike's deli a close second).

Luckily, for most of the year our Co-op gets good-tasting, Vermont-grown apples in standard eastern varieties like Macintosh and Cortland and even some heirlooms grown in Dummerston, VT by Zeke Goodband on a farm whose orchard dates back to 1791. Round about the late winter/early spring the supply of local apples kept fresh in cold storage since harvest dwindles to the point where the aforementioned cookies begin to play a more prominent role in the daily diet. Of course, I could go with one of the ubiquitous apple varieties from Chile, New Zealand, or Washington state that seem to be plentiful in the supermarkets all year long. But those picture-perfect apples tend to leave me unsatisfied from a taste/texture point of view (usually they are too sweet and either unpleasantly mealy or rock solid) and they don't score so well on the carbon-footprint calculator either.

This time of year, I find another source for my apples. Like much of rural New England, central Vermont is full of derelict apple trees. You see them still at the edge of people's yards, growing by dirt roads, or along hiking trails in lowland forests. In the apple chapter of Michael Pollan's best-seller Botany of Desire, we learn that some of these trees are relics of a time when North America abounded with apple varieties, many of which were produced for home consumption in backyard orchards of just a few trees. These forgotten orchards have become harder to see. Other vegetation grows in around the apple trees and the trees themselves blend in to the tangle when left to their own devices without the careful manicuring they receive at commercial orchards. Many still bare fruit that is as good if not better than the waxy Red "Delicious" apples you find in most cafeterias or convenience stores.

So I've decided to pay more attention to these persistent fruits. Wild apples: once domesticated but now free to grow as they please, often overcoming obstacles they were never intended to face without the assistance of humankind.

To be sure, there's a lot of trial and error in this endeavor. Aesthetically, you've got to channel Joni Mitchell's "i'll take spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees" attitude. Many of these reclaimed apples have blemished skins, but there's nothing wrong with them. After rinsing them in the sink, I feel safer eating these than I do most of the store-bought varieties that have been sprayed with chemicals and pawed over by countless people and machines. On the flavor front, I've spit out more than my share of bland or bitter first bites from mystery apples plucked from the low-hanging branches of long-untended trees. As Pollan writes, many of the varieties were grown for apple jack--a form of hard cider--and so don't make for good eating.

Every once in a while you can be rewarded for shaking the right tree.

Two weeks ago, I encountered such a tree while I was out for a walk along a dirt road in the countryside surrounding Montpelier. The tree was battling to be noticed, set back about ten feet from the road in wet soil among a stand of other second or third-growth hardwood trees all with spindly limbs reaching for the best place in the sun. Its fruit, shown above, was covered in a light-yellow skin accented with dashes of red. Underneath, the flesh was crispy-but-not-hard and bursting with sweet-flavored juice. It tasted exactly like an apple should taste, but at the same time I am hard pressed to compare it to any of the varieties I've gotten from the store. I liked it so much that I shook the tree again until I'd gathered enough of the golden orbs to fill my lunch bag for the week.

The world is full of rare and overlooked flavors. To be an award-winning eater, you must learn to seek them out. If you're lucky, you won't have far to look.

Farmers market finds

The summer's wet weather presented a huge challenge for local vegetable farmers. Though they've had less overall to offer in terms of variety and quantity of produce, I was still able to come home from last week's market with some amazing specimens of our area's cultivated and wild edibles.

Exhibit one: this stunning heirloom tomato grown by Jael Pulskamp (I hope I spelled her name right) at her Main Street Market Garden plot on the site of Vermont Compost--less than a mile from our home and the marketplace. It was an honor to purchase this tomato. As we walked home from the market, people literally stopped on the street to marvel at it and discuss its beauty with me. Some people even asked me if they could hold it. I was glad to oblige, knowing that so many gardeners had lost their own tomatoes to the blight this summer.

Exhibit two: these chicken of the woods mushrooms. Though it's a bit of a cliche to say that something "tastes like chicken" the flavor of this fungus really does resemble that of its feathered namesake when cut into small pieces and sauteed thoroughly in butter and/or oil. These particular shrooms were foraged by farmer and master mycologist Alan LePage. Earlier this summer, I bought some delicious lobster mushrooms from him. Not only do those taste like lobster, they actually look like lobster meat too when cooked. Nature is so amazing in this way.

Cooking for a cause

"Turning environmental values into state priorities." That's the tagline of the Vermont League of Conservation Voters. As "guest chefs" (no kidding, that's how they listed Joslyn and I on the invite) for a fundraiser held by the League in Montpelier a couple of weeks ago, our challenge was to turn the diners into donors.

I'm very pleased to report that the event was both a culinary and a financial success. My versions of trottole with creamy sun-dried tomato pesto (above right) and creamy pesto genovese (aka basil pesto, above left) were two of the dishes that kept prospective supporters coming back to the buffet table. I used organic Culinary Circle pasta--the new Shaw's brand. I give it high marks for cooking up al dente even as I boiled it in two pound batches, and holding its shape nicely even as I roughly and somewhat hurriedly mixed in the pesto. At $1.49 per pound, it was the same price or cheaper than non-organic name-brand pastas Shaw's was selling.

Now for my recipes (each makes enough for 1 lb. of pasta):

Basil Pesto

3 cups packed fresh basil leaves

3 medium garlic cloves unpeeled

1/3 cup pine nuts

3/4 cup pecorino romano cheese

16 oz homestyle ricotta

extra virgin olive oil

In a small skillet over medium heat, toast the unpeeled garlic cloves for 5-7 minutes. If the skins start to brown then they are done. I picked up this tip from Cook's Illustrated. Before I came to this technique, I could never stand to use the full amount of raw garlic called for in most pesto recipes b/c the raw garlic imparted a sharp and unpleasant flavor that tended to overtake the basil's subtler licorice notes. Toasting the cloves really mellows the sharpness.

After the garlic is toasted remove and set aside.

Then place the pine nuts in the skillet, tossing them often until they too take on a light golden brown color.

Peel and halve the garlic cloves, placing them in the bottom of a food-processor work bowl.

Add the basil leaves, pine nuts, and approximately 12 tablespoons of olive oil.

Process the ingredients together, pausing as needed to scrape down sides of the work bowl, until they have combined to a mostly-uniform dark-green paste.

Transfer the paste into a large mixing bowl and mix together thoroughly with the romano, ricotta, salt and pepper to taste.

As your pasta is almost done cooking and the water has turned yellow from the starch leaching from the pasta, mix about 1/3 cup of the pasta water into the pesto to thin it slightly.

Toss the pasta in the creamy pesto and either serve immediately or at room temperature with ample grated cheese on the side.

The directions are virtually the same for the sun-dried tomato pesto except it usually takes about 3.5 to 4 cups of sun-drieds. To save a step, I usually use the ones that are packed in oil rather than reconstituting dried sun-dried tomatoes.

Neither of these recipes are difficult or that different from standard recipes you can find in other places. My rather simple innovation is the addition of the ricotta. With it's mild flavor, most people don't even realize it is there. But its smooth texture helps it bind more easily with the pasta and it slightly ups the dish's overall protein content (not to mention the fat content too). Both of these also work quite well as dips.

If you enjoy these recipes and you care about Vermont's environment--please consider making a generous donation to the Vermont League of Conservation voters by clicking here. And if you don't live in Vermont, consider supporting the national League of Conservation Voters by clicking here.

Where's the beef?: the story of Beefing Up '09

It started the day in six tidy cardboard boxes in Farmer Steve Twombly's basement chest freezer up the Oxbow Road in Roxbury, Vermont. The mixed hardwood forest visible just beyond the green grass pastures where our beef was grown epitomized peak foliage. Steve pointed out red maples with their crimson crowns, the bright orange of the sugar maples, and the smoky purple ash trees as we watched his dog chase one of the free-ranging chickens down the road. In his driveway, he explained that the cow we'd just purchased was a mixed breed Hereford, white-faced cows (read more about the breed and its history here) and Angus (and this breed here).

Photography and co-photo-editor: Clancy DeSmet (also the one who inspired this whole experiment in bovine volume purchasing--aka "Beefing Up 2009")

Earlier in the month, our Angus-Hereford mix traveled from Steve's Flint Brook Farm to the Royal Butcher in nearby Randolph, VT where it was slaughtered, hung for almost ten days, and then transformed into a variety of steaks, ribs, rounds, and grounds. And then back to Steve's where we retrieved it this morning.

With a trunk load of boxed beef plus one box of bones for the dogs owners and the shrink-wrapped-frozen tongue out loose, we made the roughly 30 minute drive back to 99 Barre St. where our fellow investors were converging to divide these cuts of beef among ourselves. The cow's hanging weight was 487 pounds; Steve estimated that you end up with about 2/3 of that in meat you can eat. What you see pictured above is only 1/5 share and the photo is deceptive because the freezer is packed several layers deep.

There are many reasons why you'd want to buy your beef this way if you could. It allows you to avoid contributing to the beef industrial complex that grows cows under inhumane conditions on factory farms where they are plied with anti-biotics, hormones, and heavily-fertilized corn--often corn that is genetically modified. It shrinks the carbon footprint of your meat eating by cutting down on transportation and all the fossil fuel that goes into feed production. These cows are solar-powered--the sun makes the grass grow and that's what the cow eats. (But we certainly have to give back some of our carbon credit because keeping all this meat frozen adds to the household energy use). It's also cheaper as compared to retail--especially for this quality of meat.

It wasn't all that long ago in America when buying beef from the farmer rather than the meat factory was not uncommon. Our decision to buy beef this way is our contribution to our area's food security. It's an act of hope that we can build a food economy that harkens back to the farmer-direct traditions that served us well in the past and can be improved on in the future.

Dividing this much beef equitably really took an excellent team effort. If you're going to try this at home, be sure you do it with reasonable and friendly people. We had folks unpacking boxes, dividing cuts up into groups, checking to see that packages were roughly equivalent weights, tracking how many we had of each cut and then announcing how many of each we should take. One example--each share was entitled to 35 1 lb. packages of ground beef. Not all cut categories broke down evenly, so we placed the remainder pieces in a box as we worked through ground beef, stew meat, sirloin tips and steaks, porterhouses, rib-eyes, eyes of round, tenderloin, flank and skirt steaks, short ribs, and a few others. To make this easier to divide, we went for ground beef in place of roasts.

When we finished the first phase, each of the contributing carnivores was staring at an enormous pile of frozen meat bulging from boxes and bags they'd brought to collect their share. And yet, the remainder box was also overflowing with cuts--some placed in there because they were much bigger than the rest, some because they just didn't divide equally in number the first time through.

How to divide these? My answer: take out the Farmer's per-pound price cut-sheet and calculate the value of each remainder piece based on the packaged weight (thank goodness for the ubiquity of cell-phone calculators). We added the retail value and divided by 5. From there on out we had a five-team beef draft. Each person picked their preferred cut through four rounds, then a quick calculation to make sure we were each at or near the 1/5 value of all that remained. The draft went for a total of seven rounds.

Because I shared in the task of retrieving the meat from the farm, I was able to get the tongue--it was in a separate box and farmer Steve didn't know if we wanted it. I spoke up for it. When I was a kid, my dad always used to talk about eating tongue. We never did back then, but I figure it might be worth a try now. I guess some of you are gagging right now, but it's very much in keeping with the Italian culinary tradition of ensuring that no part of the animal who gives its life to feed us goes to waste. Same goes for the "Ox tail," which the group kindly bestowed on me for my services in devising the meat draft system.

Staytuned for lots of posts about beef dishes from here on out...

Joslyn & Julia

My wife Joslyn founded a cooking club for women in the Montpelier, VT area. They call themselves "The Gourmands" cooking club. The rules of admission are no "wieners, wankers, or winers"--no dogs, no men, and no babies. Technically, a man is allowed to participate if his wife, girlfriend, or roommate is hosting at his shared place of residence, but he must dress in drag (not sure if that's happened yet, but I can tell you I kept my pants on and ate out on the evening Joslyn hosted at our place). Once a month they choose a theme and assemble at a club member's home to eat dishes befitting the theme. Each person then says a little something about the recipe. I love "Gourmands" evenings because Joslyn usually comes home with great recipes and leftovers too.


When the movie "Julie & Julia" hit the big screen, they organized a group outing to see it. They liked the Julia Child part so much that the next club meeting was based on recipes from Julia's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." So we went to the bookstore and added the attractive hard-cover volume to our library. Joslyn was so excited, she actually started reading beginning to end like a book.


When the evening of the Julia-themed meeting arrived, a dehumidifier malfunction in our newly-carpeted basement nearly foiled her Joslyn's plan to make "Haricots verts gratines, a la mornay" (green beans gratineed with cheese sauce). She lost a lot of time cleaning up the basement mess. When she finally turned to making the dish, she became flustered by Julia's somewhat confusing description of a technique for "blanching" beans for 10 to 15 minutes. Needless to say, after 10 minutes in boiling water the beans were lifeless. And apparently the mornay sauce was no better; one of the other Gourmands described it as "glop." Fortunately, many other Gourmands had better luck with dishes that literally shined (thanks in large part to all the butter Julia uses in everything). Joslyn came home re-energized and dying to make one dish that she especially enjoyed: leek quiche.
I'm pleased to report that her second attempt to master the art of French cooking was much more successful than the first. As you can see from the photo above, she's got a ways to go when it comes to mastering the art of pie-crust for presentation. Despite doggedly following all of Julia's directions (trimming the excess crust with a rolling pan, pre-baking the unfilled shell with pie weights, etc.), her crust contracted quite a bit in the baking process. Nonetheless, owing somewhat to the shear amount of butter that goes into and on top of the quiche and its crust (if you look closely at the photo above, you can actually see pools of butter in the center), it came out splendidly.

Having served as Joslyn's sous chef on this one, I must say that Julia's seminal cookbook does take some getting used to. It's stepwise formatting is very orderly--ingredients on the left, instructions related to those ingredients on the right. But some of her instructions can throw you off because she is so economical in the amount of explanation she provides (this is probably the result of the editing process depicted in the film--the first draft of the book was so long it was actually many books--a volume each for the major meats, one dedicated just to sauces, etc). With fresh memories of her "blanching" disaster, the instruction to "boil" 3 cups of leeks for the quiche filling in 1/2 cup of water for approximately 20-30 minutes almost sent Joslyn into a panic. Usually, when you think of boiling something you think that whatever you're cooking will be fully submerged in water; so to Joslyn the called-for ratio of food to boiling liquid made no sense--especially when you consider that 1/2 cup of water probably couldn't boil for that long without totally evaporating.

I stepped in and decided to just plow ahead, bringing the water to boil over low heat with the leeks--the latter were not even close to being covered by water--and of course with some butter thrown in too for good measure. I figured Julia probably didn't make a mistake on something as fundamental as the amount of water needed for boiling. I also reckoned that the leeks themselves would give off moisture as they steamed adding liquid to help the cooking process (like when a person sweats in a hot tub). Turned out I was right--well actually Julia was right. The result was a silky pile of tender leeks that was a perfect textural match for the cream and egg quiche filling. With panic averted, I watched Jos work out the aforementioned pie crust with great aplomb (at least until the upper crust contracted).

Lesson learned here is that using this cookbook requires some trust and a lot of trial and error. The results are well worth it though. As Julia would say, "Bon appetit."

Non-stick Wild Sockeye

To a voracious-but-principled piscivore like me, there are few things in this world more beautiful than a piece of wild Alaskan salmon.

For many reasons, I stopped eating the farmed variety years ago even though that means I eat much less Salmon overall. My Alaskan friend Clancy gave me a great Ray Troll T-shirt with a ludicrous image of a farmer plowing a field of row crops, but instead of corn or wheat stalks fish tails were sprouting from the ground. The Caption: "Fish are not for Farming."

My top two reasons for preferring wild salmon:

1. Color--there's no comparison between the ruby red hue of a wild-born salmon and the pathetic pink pigmentation of the cheaper farmed variety that gluts the seafood case at the supermarket. Even if you put aside the controversy over whether aquaculture operations manipulate the fish food to make the farmed fish pink, I think the wild fish wins hands down for aesthetic reasons alone.
2. Taste--It's hard to describe why, but I am sure that I would choose the wild fish in ten out of ten blind taste tests. A piece of wild salmon simply tastes more like...well...salmon. It's flavor has a strength earned in the wild that cannot be matched by the meat of those poor, former inmates of the fish prisons known in aquaculture as "pens" (photo here)

Because I will gladly pay the premium to get the better-looking, better-tasting fish, I also take great care not to overcook it, dress it up with any fancy glazes, or mangle its delicate flesh in preparation. All you need on a nice piece of wild salmon is salt, pepper, and olive oil or butter. And thanks to a recipe in Cook's Illustrated, I picked up a few tips on how to grill salmon without having it fall apart as a result of sticking to the grill!

I'll try my best to summarize their suggestions succinctly, but you'll have to go back to the source for a full description:

1. Super-heat the grill by covering it with aluminum foil. Do this for about 5-7 minutes. CAUTION--if you have a gas grill, you'll probably only want to cover part of it and you SHOULD NOT LEAVE THE GRILL UNATTENDED b/c I've had some sketchy grill fires with this technique. Any food scraps in the grill tend to spontaneously combust.
2. Create a teflon effect by brushing the grill with numerous coats of vegetable oil. After the foil comes off, turn the heat to medium and let cool a bit. Dip but don't douse a folded up paper towel into vegetable oil (don't use olive oil--its smoking point is too low and its quality too good for this job). Lightly brush the grill with the soaked towel. Let rest and then apply five or six successive coats until the grill surface really starts to shine--when it does, you're ready to put the fish on without fear of its skin sticking to the grill.

"Summer-time, and the livin' is easy"

Yes, for award-winning eaters who love fresh, local foods, the livin' is easy in the summertime. I have taken on an almost militant defense of summer against those who consider Labor Day its official end. I pedantically point to the calendar and note that it marks September 21 as the last day of summer--the day before the autumnal equinox.

But I felt summer slipping away yesterday as we pulled away from Seabrook Beach, NH--our familial summer stomping grounds for three generations.

Perhaps it was because the night before, my father, Joslyn, and I, had combined our last major tomato harvest of the season into a sauce experience. Cooked on the grill in a cast-iron skillet, the sungolds simmered into pure sweetness that suffused the meaty foundation provided by our san marzanos and the fruits of my father's potted vines. Tossed with lightly-fried garlic, grill-roasted corn shaved from the cob, and garnished with shredded fresh basil leaves, this sauce was one of the best things that ever happened to fettucine on a late summer evening. But its very sweetness is the taste of summer ending; the long hours of hot sun that ripened the tomatoes that gave this sauce its character are fewer with each passing day.

Although we took no photos of the fettucine with three-tomato sauce, I thought I would take an opportunity to savor a few more of the summer's good-eating memories.

It was the summer of shrimp at Seabrook. Not a big deal for most families, but for ours a bit of a breakthrough. As a child, I grew up loving seafood. I loved it all: fish, crustaceans, bivalves. You name it, I ate it. My parents never discouraged this--they took me to many restaurants where I ate great seafood meals and fishsticks were in regular rotation on the dinner circuit. But because they weren't big into seafood, we just didn't cook it at home. The arrival of Eastman's Fish Market this summer (read my post about it here), opened some space on the grill for seafood mainly because my parents really like to support new, local small businesses (especially when they sell food). Above you can see how we lathered some of these wild-caught Gulf shrimp with a butter-tobasco blend (top) and a lemon, oil, and fresh oregano marinade (bottom).

Summer is a time for fresh herbs galore. To top these grilled white pizzas, I cut up chives, dill, oregano, rosemary, and basil, and tossed them in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper. After we prepped each dough with a layer of goat cheese, feta cheese, ricotta cheese, or cheddar ( or some combination thereof depending on the whim of each pizzaiuolo), we sprinkled on liberal amounts of this herb melange.

Ever the theme-appropriate baker, my godmother displayed her patriotism with these red, white, and blueberry garnished cupcakes for the 4th. The vanilla-almond variety was to die for. I ate at least 4 and a half that weekend.

I am running out of steam as I write this (it's after midnight). I am trying to hang on to summer in any way I can--staying up late to write this blog post is one manifestation of this quixotic struggle. It's not over yet, but it will be soon. Savor it while we still can.