Category: Food

Maine Moments: Fare for Body & Mind

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LOBSTER ROLLS

Last year we were disappointed in the lobster rolls we ordered, no one of them was outstanding.  Not only is the amount and type of lobster important, having the right kind of roll (split hot dog bun toasted) is key. On our quest this year for a great lobster roll, we are more pleased.

According to Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, “the lobster roll originated as a hot dish at a restaurant named Perry’s in Milford, Connecticut, as early as 1929. Its popularity then spread up and down the Connecticut coast, but not far beyond it. In Connecticut, the sandwich served warm is called a ‘lobster roll’; served cold, a ‘lobster salad roll.'”

Lobster rolls eventually spread beyond Connecticut and today are a New England favorite particularly associated with the state of Maine.  Anyone who cares about lobster has surely heard of the award-winning Red’s Eats in Wiscasset. Red’s has a great PR operation in addition to offering huge lobster rolls.  They started serving their lobster rolls as far back as 1970.  Drive by today and there is usually a line of eager eaters, often a long line, waiting to order.  A confession, I’ve never had a Red’s roll. 

We had very good cold lobster rolls at Coastal Prime last week and the other day at Harborside 1901.  We had intended to try Shannon’s Unshelled, an outdoor shack with picnic tables located near the Boothbay Harbor footbridge, but they were delayed in opening.  And it was very hot out.  We thought that the Tugboat Inn started lunch and lobster rolls around 11:00, but they didn’t open until 12.  Our last option, apart from waiting for Shannon’s to go live, was Harborside.  

Harborside lobster roll & cole slaw

We’d eaten there a few weeks ago but didn’t order lobster that time.  This was the day, and this lobster roll was probably the best all-around I’ve had this year!  Before we end our Maine time, however, we will try Shannon’s on a cooler day. After all, she advertises lobster from trap to table.

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

IMMIGRANT SCIENTIST

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Author Gyasi (penguinrandomhouse.com)

I was very taken with Gyasi’s first novel, Homegoing, even though it was a challenging read.  This novel about the immigrant experience is much more accessible and straightforward.  Gifty is a Ghanaian immigrant who moves to Huntsville, Alabama with her mother and brother.  Told in the first person, Gifty looks back on her early childhood in Ghana and then how she and her family stood out in the white South.  She is a Ph.D student in neuroscience at Stanford, obviously successful academically, but struggling to come to grips with her brother’s death from a drug overdose.  At the same time, her mother, deep in depression, is staying with Gifty.  

Gifty is a scientist, but she’s also a product of evangelical Christianity who puzzles over questions of faith.  She reflects on how the hymns and Bible stories taken literally as a child might become meaningful in a different way as an adult.  Her research with mice on reward-seeking behavior grows out of her strong desire to understand her brother and her mother.

In many ways, this is a quiet novel.  And although it’s Gifty’s voice the reader hears, she keeps herself at a bit of a remove as if she needs what appears as detachment to process her extreme grief.  Recommended! (~JWFarrington)

FRIENDS AND LOVERS IN ITALY

Lizzie & Dante by Mary Bly

Just as classical musicians sometimes transition to pop music, so authors of one genre take up a different genre, often with a pen name.  J. K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame wrote as Robert Galbraith when introducing a new detective series for adults.  So successful was the first Cormoran Strike mystery, The Cuckoo’s Calling,that she wrote four more.  I have just started this series but am reserving judgement until I finish the first book.

Mary Bly is a professor and Shakespeare scholar at Fordham University.  Some years ago, she began writing historical romances set in the Georgian era in England under the name, Eloisa James.  She purposely used a pseudonym to not intrude upon her academic reputation.  These books gained wide readership and after a while, she revealed her identity.  

This novel is set in the present and the first one published under her real name. Thirty-two-year-old Lizzie is a professor and cancer patient who travels to Italy with two male friends, a novelist and an actor, to assist with research for a film of Romeo and Juliet. There she quickly meets Italian chef Dante, who has a 12-year-old daughter.  

Lizzie and Dante are the center of this love story, but not the entire focus.  One element is Lizzie’s reflections on what approach to take to living her life. Other elements, which add to the novel’s richness, are the rounded depiction of the secondary characters, Grey, Rohan, Etta, and Ruby, and the role that singing and poetry play in their individual lives.  A quick read! (~JWFarrington)

Note: Lobster roll photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved).

Time, Crime & Tomatoes: Screen & Kitchen

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ON SCREEN

Time and Mortality

On Golden Pond  (Amazon Prime $)

Jennifer Finney Boylan is an occasional opinion writer for the New York Times and an English professor at Bard.  Years ago, I read her groundbreaking memoir, She’s Not There:  A Life in Two Genders, about her transition from male to female.  I find her columns thoughtful and insightful.  

In her most recent piece, she reflected on age and time.  Boylan is now 63 and not as physically flexible as she would like.  Watching the film, On Golden Pond, with Fonda and Hepburn as Norman and Ethel, a retired couple of 80 and almost 70, prompted thoughts on life and what comes after.  Here’s a quote from this July 9 column, Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, and Me.

It is not just the thought of my now-grown children that causes me to come unstuck in time. My wife and I first came to Maine in our 20s; now, as Ethel says in the film, we are a couple of old poops.

We have changed so much and have been blessed — and battered — by time. But we are still in love. I am not ready to leave this pond or Maine or her. Still, I know that, in time, all of us leave the things that we have known and turn our eyes toward whatever it is that comes next.

At the end of “On Golden Pond,” Norman asks Ethel if she wants to say farewell to the pond. This time, as they stand by the water, he hears the sound that eluded him before. “Ethel, listen,” he says. “The loons. They’ve come around to say goodbye.”

Hepburn & Fonda (mubi.com)

Like Boylan, the Chief Penguin and I first saw On Golden Pond in 1981, the year it was released.  Then it was an engaging film about an older couple enjoying their cottage on the lake while working hard to entertain a 13-year-old soon to become their daughter’s stepson.  In 2021, it’s a poignant film that hits hard at the challenges and cruelties of getting old while simultaneously demonstrating the strength of a long marriage. 

 I have to say that these characters, Norman and Ethel, act older than many 70- and 80-year-olds do today.  Many of us are more active and in better health than folks were then. It’s noteworthy that this was Henry Fonda’s last film and Jane Fonda played his daughter Chelsea.  Their father-daughter relationship was better after the film. Although a bit dated, I still recommend On Golden Pond.

Complex Lives

Mare of Easttown (HBO via Apple TV $)

Winslet as Mare (tvline.com)

This seven-part crime series stars Kate Winslet as a small-town detective on hard times.  It’s set in a fictitious working-class town near Philadelphia.  Anyone who knows that area will recognize place names (Darby, Bryn Mawr) and a certain gritty quality in the streets of houses set cheek by jowl.  Detective Mare has a difficult home life.  Her aggrieved mother and her high school daughter live with her along with her young grandson Drew.  Drew’s father was Mare’s son Kevin, who committed suicide several years ago.  Several young women have gone missing or disappeared and another’s body is found in the woods.  Mare knows everyone in town and is alternately compassionate, brusque, and her own worst enemy.  

Initially, I was put off by the depressing quality of these townspeople’s lives.   I kept on and began to appreciate the depth and complexity of Mare, superbly played by Winslet.  In some ways, more than a crime series, this is a study of a community relationships and travails.  Recommended!

CULINARY CORNER

In the Bowl—Summer Soup

As part of reviewing our cookbook collection for recipes to scan, I came across a recipe for a tomato and berry gazpacho in Dorie Greenspan’s book, Everyday Dorie:  The Way I Cook.  I marked the page for scanning and then decided to serve it to friends.  I went online the next day to print out the recipe and it was not there!  Seems the Chief Penguin either missed it or made an executive decision.  In any case, I went ahead and made it and served it in small cups as a teaser with pre-dinner drinks.  I loved it, the guests liked it, and even the skeptic enjoyed it!

Greenspan uses cherry tomatoes and fresh strawberries and includes scallions, mint and basil leaves, chopped fresh ginger, lime juice, sherry vinegar, some olive oil, and either harissa powder or hot sauce to your taste.  I used some Tabasco in it and had it available for anyone who wanted more heat.  It was a luscious variation on traditional gazpacho with a hint of sweetness.

Dorie Greenspan’s recipe is not available online, but here’s a link to another strawberry-tomato version which has cucumber, jalapenos and honey.  Happy summertime!

Note: Header photo from On Golden Pond is from top100project.com

Tidy Tidbits: Of Roosevelts & Cookbooks

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HAPPY 4TH OF JULY!

(aarp.org)

On this year’s Independence Day, there is much to celebrate. With the waning of the pandemic, we can be out and about and gather safely with friends and family.  Particularly if we are fully vaccinated.  We have been through a bruising few years.  It is heartening to now have a president who is compassionate, committed, and balanced, qualities sadly lacking before.  

Yet, we are a deeply polarized nation—witness the thousands of people who showed up at a Trump rally last night here in the neighboring town of Sarasota.  I would like to be optimistic that the ideals on which the United States is based, freedom and equal opportunity, will prevail, but fear that we will live through more contentious times until civility returns.  Nonetheless, I remain hopeful for the future.  Let’s celebrate today and cherish what is good in our society!

ER–COMPLEX AND COURAGEOUS WOMAN

Young Eleanor (nps.gov)

I am currently immersed in David Michaelis’s new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt entitled simply, Eleanor.  I am old enough to recall some of the news coverage when Eleanor Roosevelt died in 1962.  Over the years, I’ve read a number of books about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, including one by Joseph Lash, as well as Blanche Wiesen Cook’s massive three volume biography of Eleanor.  I read good reviews of the Michaelis biography but did wonder how much new information it might contain.  A lot.  

With a decade’s research and access to new source materials, Michaelis presents an even fuller picture of Eleanor than Cook did.  Eleanor’s mother died when she was eight. Two years later her father, whom she idolized, also died.  Orphaned, she was raised by her grandmother, but always felt like an unwanted outsider and lacked self-esteem.  Belittled and berated by relatives for her height, her lack of beauty, and her stilted adult demeanor, it was several decades before Eleanor came into her own as a person of worth.  Early on she learned not to show any emotion, and this hindered how she dealt with Franklin and their five children.

Franklin and Eleanor were distant cousins, but a mismatched pair as husband and wife.  Both were needy in their own way; he always desirous of being the center of attention and more aligned with his mother Sara than his spouse.  Eleanor wanted to do something worthwhile and was frustrated by the strictures put upon her actions by her social class and the place of women in society overall.  She felt unacknowledged and unappreciated by Franklin and was devastated by the discovery of his affair with Lucy Mercer during WWI.

It is fascinating to learn how Eleanor came out of her shell, engaged with the wider world, found love, and ignored public opinion on the proper role of a First Lady. She jaunted around the country giving speeches and wrote a daily newspaper column.  She became an activist force and an ally to FDR when polio limited his mobility.

David Michaelis met Eleanor Roosevelt briefly when he was four years old, a meeting that made an indelible impression on him.  His book is engaging, candid about both ER’s and FDR’s flaws, and written in a lively, almost sprightly style.  Highly recommended!

COOKBOOK CULLING

An unexpected treasure!

The Chief Penguin and I own more than a hundred cookbooks.  They are titles we bought or gifts with the oldest ones from the early 1970’s (think Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking) through the 1980’s (Silver Palate) and 90’s to more recent publications.  We have several compendiums including multiple editions of Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking; Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything; The Gourmet Cookbook and Gourmet Today; the French Bible of home cooking, I Know How to Cook; the Italian equivalent, The Silver Spoon; and one of my all-time favorites, Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan.  Plus, there are celebrity cookbooks by Daniel Boulud, Jacques Pepin, Nigella Lawson, Gordon Hamersley, Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame, Patricia Wells, Georges Perrier of Philadelphia’s Le Bec Fin, and Ottolenghi.  

Also, books dedicated to a particular cuisine such as Vietnamese or Chinese or a particular region of a country. We have a bunch of regional Italian cookbooks and several that focus on recipes from Paris bistros and cafes.  And last, but not least, a trove of baking books—breads, pastries, and cookies, the province of C.P.  A wealth of recipes.  What’s fun about this review is discovering notes on dishes I’ve made in the past, a trip down culinary lane.

Some years ago, Philadelphia hosted an annual Book and the Cook festival.  Chefs from restaurants around the U.S. were invited to the city and paired with a local chef.  Meals were jointly prepared by the two chefs.  It was a chance for elegant dining or casual fare with always a meet and greet with the guest chef.  You could bring or buy the featured cookbook and have it autographed.  We usually signed up for 2 or 3 events each year and often with our good friends Ellen and Bob.  

Two occasions stand out.  We four have fond memories of being warmly greeted at the dining room entrance by the statuesque Julia Child.  She later made the rounds of all the guests and inscribed her book for anyone who asked.  Although I like and make many of her recipes, Marcella Hazan was not a gracious guest chef.  She was brusque and did little in the way of schmoozing with the diners.  But these events were both notable for the food!

So, what has prompted this review of our cookbooks?  We have too many to be able to keep all of them when we ultimately move to a smaller place.  Consequently, starting with the older less used books, we are reviewing each one, marking recipes we’ve made or ones we like, and then scanning them.  

The Chief Penguin is the architect and executor of this project.  We both review the recipes, then he takes a photo on his iPhone via Scannable, and it gets sent to Evernote.  On Evernote, he’s created a folder for each cookbook with the cover image and then the recipes get filed with the book.  The beauty of this is that they are all searchable by ingredient, author/chef, and so forth.  This makes them available anywhere we have access to Evernote and will enable us to give away some of the cookbooks.  I’d love to find a local college or public library that would like them; failing that they may end up at Goodwill, my last resort.  

Tidy Tidbits: Medicine, Crime, Food

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READING—FEMALE DOCTORS

The Doctors Blackwell by Janice P. Nimura

The book’s subtitle:  How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women and Women to Medicine, aptly captures the mission of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell.  Born in Bristol, England, into a large family, Elizabeth and Emily emigrated to Cincinnati when they were just eleven and six.  Although not wealthy, their parents prized education and, Elizabeth from an early age thought herself destined for greatness of some sort.  She believed herself superior to most everyone and especially to other women.  

(hhnmag.com)

Rejected by several medical schools, she ultimately was the lone female student at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York.  In 1849, she became the first woman in the U.S. to become an M.D.  Elizabeth put in her time observing and treating patients in Edinburgh and Paris, but she much preferred writing and teaching.  Later she founded and directed the first clinic and hospital in New York solely for women and children.  This was long before the germ theory of disease was put forth. 

Elizabeth was forceful, and she prevailed on Emily to pursue her medical degree and then join her.  For years, Emily followed in Elizabeth’s wake in a subordinate position until finally she tired of it.  These women doctors were dedicated to medicine in their separate ways and yet remained supportive of each other’s efforts.  Of the two, Emily was the more compassionate and caring practicing doctor.  

A fascinating account of the obstacles they overcame in their intertwined careers, it’s also a detailed study of complex sibling relationships.  Neither woman ever married.  

ON THE SCREEN

Historical Crime Series

Vienna Blood (PBS Masterpiece)

Max & Oskar (bbc.co.uk.)

Set in the early 1900’s, this 6-part Austrian crime series pairs Detective Oskar Rheinhardt with Max Liebermann, a young doctor in training.  Oskar was happiest working alone and less than enthusiastic when Dr. Liebermann came along to observe a case.  Max is studying to be a psychiatrist.  An admirer of Freud and his methods, Max thinks about the criminal mind and what motivates a murder.  As Max becomes more involved, Oskar begins to appreciate his insights and the two form an unlikely team.  

The murder scenes are gruesome ones, graphic and appropriately bloody, and “viewer discretion is advised.”  I found the first episode grim and dark but got more engaged as Oskar and Max become partners.  Along the way, we get to know Max’s family and his fiancée and learn a bit more about Oskar’s personal life.  There are plans for a second season and we’ll be there!

Mouthwatering Fare

Stanley Tucci:  Searching for Italy (CNN)

Sampling pasta (cnn.com)

I thought Stanley Tucci was marvelous in the film, Julie and Julia, as Paul Child alongside Meryl Streep.  That was at least ten years ago, and Tucci is still charming and sexy with a lovely deep voice.  Here he brings his passion for food to the fore introducing viewers to the tastes, smells, and sights of culinary Italy.  There are six episodes in this first season, and you don’t need to watch them in order.  

We began with Campania (think Naples and pizza) and then moved on to Tuscany (steak Florentine and panzanella).  The other evening it was on to Bologna, source of delectable prosciutto, nutty Parmesan, and delicate tortellini.  Stanley is a warm and relaxed guide who provides snippets of history and then meets up with professors, farmers, producers, and chefs.  Everywhere he goes, he tastes and exclaims and tastes some more.  

If you are an Italianophile, you’ll appreciate anew the variety and richness of the country’s cuisine and its passionate citizens.  If you are a foodie, it’s essential viewing!  Just be sure you eat before you watch.

CULINARY CORNER

Cottonmouth Southern Soul Kitchen

(heraldtribune.com)

Located in Bradenton’s Village of the Arts, this newish restaurant has a spacious back patio and boasts tasty southern cuisine.  We went with friends mid-week and were the only outside diners for most of our meal.  Our waitress was friendly and helpful as we decided on our orders.  

The fried green tomatoes were perfect.  The fried calamari Thai style was an interesting attempt but a bit lacking.  The ribs and the meatloaf burger (adorned with tater tots) were very good very large portions.  The crab cake and shrimp and cheese grits entrées also got high marks.  A selection of wines by the glass and beers including original Pabst Blue Ribbon rounded out the meal.  If you like live music, Tuesday and Saturday are the nights, and on Sundays they offer a hillbilly/ gospel brunch.  We might try the latter—just for the experience!

Note: Photo of a gallery in Village of the Arts courtesy of 83degreesmedia.com.