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Food Road Trip; Portland, Maine in Summer
To mark my 58th birthday, Elisa and I hit the road early and set our sights on Portland, Maine. Portland, for a city of its size, has an amazing food scene, and we like food. It seemed like a match made in heaven. When we left Rindge in the morning it was raining, but the forecast for Portland was for a dry, but overcast day. It rained for most of the two and a half hour drive, but as we got within twenty miles of the city the rain stopped and that was the last we’d see of it. The Standard Baking Company Some time ago, we had watched a pair…
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Fathers’ Day, Bistecca alla Fiorentina
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Fathers’ Day, Bistecca alla Fiorentina
I don’t have a formal bucket list, but if I did, at the top would be a visit to Panzano, so I could experience eating the beef of Dario Cecchini, arguably the world’s greatest butcher. I first read about Dario in the Bill Buford book Heat, and later saw segments of a couple of different cooking shows (Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, and David Rocco’s Dolce Vita) that featured his butcher shop and restaurant. Traditionally, Bistecca alla Fiorentina is a thick, bone-in porterhouse made from an Italian cattle breed, the Chianina, which is the largest breed of cattle in the world. Due to a lack of supply of Chianina beef in Italy,…
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Food Road Trip; Portland, Maine in Summer
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Maple Syrup Season in New Hampshire
It’s maple syrup season here in New England, and for the past few weeks, sugarhouses have been busy, boiling down maple sap to create maple syrup. You really don’t see sap buckets on the trees like the ones shown in the photograph on the left anymore. About the only place you can find those are in antique shops. That’s because the process of collecting sap has been streamlined over the years. Look carefully into the woods and the evidence is unmistakable: plastic tubing snaking from tree to tree, terminating in large, sealed plastic containers that can hold many gallons of sap. It takes about forty gallons of sap to make one…
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Sunday Morning Bread Baking
This morning, as I occasionally do on Sunday mornings, I baked up this nice loaf of crusty, rustic European bread. This particular loaf is destined for Elisa’s Ribollita recipe, but I’m also baking a second one, just to have around for the next few days. One of life’s pleasures, which I first experienced when I was in the army and stationed in Italy, is a nice slice of a good, rustic, European loaf of bread. I still remember fondly a particular bread known as Pane di Lucca that I had in a trattoria called In Pelleria, which is located inside the ancient walled hill town of Lucca, in Tuscany. But that…
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The Hunt for Better Chicken
Over the past thirty years or so there has been a steady decline in the quality of the chicken that can be purchased at the supermarket. The flesh has no firmness because the chicken industry primarily raises chickens crammed together so that they don’t have room to walk, and they often have difficulty standing when not being propped up by other chickens. That issue aside, the chickens we buy just don’t seem all that … fresh. They were likely slaughtered and then flash-frozen for transport, although your grocer will probably deny it. The flesh has often been injected with water, so that you’ll hopefully fall victim to the illusion that the…
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Apple Picking at DeMeritt Hill Farm
This past Saturday we met up with our oldest son, his wife, and his wife’s sister in Lee New Hampshire to do some apple picking at DeMeritt Hill Farm. Elisa and I arrived a bit early, so we spent a little time watching children interact with the goats, chickens, miniature horses and alpacas that form a cute little barnyard petting zoo. Once we were all together we purchased our apple picking bags from the farm store and waiting for the ride to the orchard–a hay wagon with seating that was pulled by a farm tractor. Once among the trees we picked up some apple picking poles (haven’t seen those before) and…
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Supporting Local Farms
New England has a surprising number of small and medium-sized farms scattered throughout the region. Unlike the government subsidized socialized factory farms that dominate in America’s farm belt, the comparatively small, often family-run farms in New England are much more accessible to consumers, presenting us with a variety of ways to get our weekly fix of fresh, local produce. Now that summer has arrived, it’s a perfect time to take advantage of everything that local agriculture has to offer. Farm Stands It’s almost impossible not to encounter a farm stand on any leisurely drive in New England. While many farm stands ship in produce from far away during the months that…
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The Northern Tip of America’s Pizza Belt
Living in New England places me squarely at the northern tip of America’s pizza belt, a region defined by New York food critic and Iron Chef windbag Jeffrey Steingarten as stretching from Philadelphia in the south to Boston in the north, roughly spread out along the Interstate 95 corridor. Major stops along the Pizza Belt include Phildaelphia, Trenton, New York, New Haven, Providence, and Boston, with each exacting their own regional influence on what is arguably America’s favorite ethnic fast food. Steingarten describes the predominant style of pizza along the pizza belt as Neopolitan-American, and credits the existence of the pizza belt to the influx of southern Italian immigrants into this…
