Thought for the day

If one is walking by a co-worker's open office door and hears the words "cervix" and "pitocin," one should probably just keep walking.

Shave and a haircut

Wilson the agoraphobic goldendoodle got clipped this week. 

This is always stressful for him because 1) it involves leaving the house and 2) his fur is his habitat, and a trim leaves him feeling a bit naked and exposed.  For a few days he turns into the neediest, most annoyingly clingy animal you can possibly imagine.  I mean, even more so than normal, which is sayin' somethin'.

The Spare has taken it upon herself to provide gentle encouragement and reassuring ear rubs.

He'd be curled up inside her cardigan if he could possibly fit.

First day of spring

Thought we were through with this nonsense.

Shameless Plug: The Carolina Chocolate Drops

If you haven’t heard of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, please stop reading right now and order this album.

If you have heard of them, you will know why, when I found out they would be performing at The Strand, I went straight to the computer and ordered up four tickets.

(My darling children put up a mighty howl that their presence was mandated at a concert – a concert – on a Friday at 8 p.m. after a long week when they would just as soon be home watching “Airwolf” on demand and arguing about whose turn it is to fill the kindling bucket.  I bribed them with dinner in an actual restaurant, so they came more or less willingly and had good time in spite of themselves.)

To say that the Carolina Chocolate Drops specialize in the black string- and jug-band music of the Carolina Piedmont region would be true, but a dangerous oversimplification of their niche.  Yes, they play fiddles and claw hammer banjos and guitars (and bones and harmonicas and kazoos and jugs) in that distinctive style, but their repertoire ranges from the ultra-traditional to the brilliantly recast modern. 

The band comprises four musicians (whose arrival in town effectively doubled the midcoast’s African-American population), two of whom are fairly new to the group, filling in for one of the three original members who is not on this tour. 

The more startling of these additions was the large and rather placid-looking young man on the left who unenthusiastically tapped a tambourine for the first couple of numbers and then suddenly stood and opened his mouth to reveal, to our noisy delight, an entire percussion section, two brass instruments and a string bass.

(Apparently one can make one’s living as a human beat box.  Who knew.)

The CCD’s last album, Grammy-worthy though it was, doesn’t hold a candle to experiencing this group in person.  (The live version of “Hit’em Up Style” was far more vivid and terrifying than any studio recording could capture.)  Theirs is community music; it’s physical and athletic, and even an audience of straight-laced, mostly retired white people finds it impossible not to whoop and stomp – and sometimes sing – right along with them. 

We need more of that sort of thing here.  I hope they come back soon. 

Shameless Plug: Community Supported Agriculture

I just sent in payment for this year’s CSA share. 

Our place in northwest Pennsylvania had a fairly extensive garden, and we grew vegetables by the bushel.  Every late summer weekend was devoted to canning, pickling, freezing, fermenting and otherwise preserving the bounty. 

It was a lot of work (in addition to both of us working full time and running a business, chasing two little kids, caring for the sheep and chickens and donkeys, plus the church job and free-lance writing I was shoe-horning in on the side) and I didn’t particularly care for it, but that’s what one gets for marrying a Midwestern farm boy.

When we moved to Maine we put in a nice big garden, plonked a bunch of seeds and six dozen tomato plants in the ground, and…

…nothing. 

We grew not much of anything at all. 

Acidic soil, maybe, or how we’re situated between Spruce and Ragged Mountains.  Some combination of factors throws things out of whack.  Tomatoes don’t ripen.  Peppers don’t set fruit.  Potatoes blight.  Eggplants mildew.  We can’t even grow zucchini, for chrissake. 

After a few years of various and sundry crop failures – including the Great Cannibalistic Tomato Hornworm Invasion of 2006 – we quit trying.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that the end of our gardening career coincided with the purchase of a sailboat.  Purely coincidental.  Really.)

Last summer my friend and colleague M and I went in together on a CSA share and it was a fantastic experience.  More than 70 types of produce over the course of the season (not counting all the different varieties of lettuce and kale), in manageable amounts, and exquisitely fresh and delicious.  We barely entered the produce section of the grocery store for twenty wonderful weeks.

So my guilt and feelings of failure at not being able to grow my own vegetables are offset by knowing we’re supporting local agriculture, eating the best organic produce, and not consuming food miles.   For what we get, the cost is more than reasonable. 

Hope’s Edge Farm, run by Tom Griffin.  I will be rhapsodizing about Farmer Tom and his vegetables all summer, so I shall say no more about it at this time except please check it out. 

(He has no idea this blog exists and even if he did, I would refuse any compensation for promoting his farm other than perhaps an extra heirloom tomato or two.  Preferably those ugly splotchy sweet ones.)

Whoopie Pies



A serious debate is underway among the citizens and elected representatives of this great state.  Factions have been formed; opinions are firmly entrenched; the rhetoric is heated and, at times, ugly.

It’s not the budget shortfall; it’s not MaineCare or the chronically high unemployment rate or the devastation of the Mars Hill ridgeline or the collapse of groundfish populations or school consolidation or the fact that our new governor is shaping up to be the worst natural disaster this state has faced since Hurricane Edna.

No.  It’s blueberry pie vs. whoopie pie for the coveted title of Maine’s Official Dessert. 

Personally, I don’t care.  Both have their merits.  (I’m a Libra; it’s how I roll.)  For what it’s worth, the wild blueberry is exclusive to Maine, while lots of other regions and cultures claim the whoopie pie as their own.  (The Pennsylvania legislature, in fact, is currently engaged in a mad scramble to designate the whoopie pie as the official Commonwealth Snack before Maine stakes its claim.)

Nevertheless, Mainer Amy Bouchard and Isamax have packaged and mass-marketed it the whoopie pie, thus institutionalizing Maine’s claim to provenance.

My version is based on Amy’s recipe, though I use buttermilk in place of clabbered, and I find Dutch process cocoa gives the shells a distinctive deep-dark color.  Parchment paper helps the shells hold their shape during baking.  

Whoopie Pies

For the shells:

4 cups flour

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup shortening

2 cups sugar

2 eggs                       

1 teaspoon real vanilla extract

1 cup buttermilk

1 cup Dutch-process cocoa (from King Arthur Flour)

1 cup hot water

Preheat oven to 350. 

Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda and set aside.  In mixer bowl, cream shortening and butter.  Blend in sugar, eggs and vanilla, then add milk, cocoa and hot water.  Slowly stir in the dry ingredients.  

Scoop batter, a scant ¼ cup for each shell, into rounded mounds at least 2" apart onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet. Bake 10 minutes.  Cool on wire racks.

For the filling:

6 tablespoons marshmallow fluff

4 tablespoons (yes, tablespoons) real vanilla extract

4 tablespoons flour

4 tablespoons milk

4 cups confectioners sugar

1 1/2 cups shortening

Beat all ingredients until smooth.

To assemble:  Place a scoop of filling between two shells.  (I lay out half the shells, divide the filling among them, and top with the remaining shells.  It’s an OCD thing.) 

Yield:  about 20 pies

Changing seasons

Winter is wonderful.  Spring is spectacular.   In between, not so much.

The last two weeks have brought warmer temperatures and a great deal of rain (often torrential).  This, combined with the obscene amount of snow on the ground, has resulted in some pretty impressive washouts, collosal frost heaves, nasty potholes, filthy collapsing snowbanks and the general malaise that accompanies soggy, foggy days.

And, in this household, the ritual unveiling of five months of dog shit in the back yard.

  Nice, huh? 

One of our family activities each spring is going around with a wheelbarrow and shovels and picking it all up. 

And they say the American family is in decline....  ha.

The seasons are lovely.  It's the change of them that drives one to drink.

Fondue Night!

Great wintertime supper, this.  The cheese fondue recipe is adapted from the Betty Crocker International Cookbook ca. 1980, a gift from my saintly grandmother when I was but a small child and the thing is so well-used at this point that very few of the pages are still in the binding. 

Fondue Supper

2 cups shredded Swiss (8 oz)
2 cups shredded Gruyere (8 oz)
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon lemon juice
3 tablespoons dry sherry
1/2 teaspoon salt
A few turns black pepper

Toss the shredded cheeses with the cornstarch until coated.  Heat garlic and wine in a fondue pot on the stovetop over low heat, just until bubbles rise to the surface.  Do not boil.  Stir in lemon juice.

Gradually add cheeses, a handful at a time, stirring constantly over low heat until cheeses are melted and blended.  Stir in sherry, salt and pepper.  Remove fondue pot to holder and keep the cheese warm over a low flame.  (Stir in additional heated wine if fondue becomes too thick.)

Dippers:

Bratwurst
French bread, cut in 1" cubes
Roasted red potatoes

Additional accompaniments (I love how the bite of vinegary things cuts the richness of the cheese...):

Gherkins
Pickled onions
Salad of mixed greens with roasted beets, red onion, walnuts, goat cheese and red wine vinaigrette

Snow fun

For an end-of-February treat, Himself took the kids off to western Maine for a few days of downhill and cross-country.  (Yeah, I'm only just now getting around to posting the pics... there's a lot of competition for computer time in this house.)

They stayed in a little off-the-grid cabin - no road, no car; just snowshoes and packs.

The kids spent two days burning up the trails at Sunday River.  Day Three was XC with Dad.

While they were gone, back here on the coast we got more than a foot of snow in a matter of hours and the plow boy (whom I used to babysit, curse him, though now he's got babies of his own) did not come and I got royally stuck in the driveway coming home from work that Friday.

My plow bill last month was $285. 

I think I'm ready for spring.

Winter visitors, wearing out their welcome

I swear, they wait in the woods and listen for the bird feeders to be filled up.  I don't like to think about how many dollars in black oil sunflower seeds are going down the collective gullet of this flock of turkeys; they're showing up three or four times a day, much to the dismay of our resident chickadees and nuthatches.

A couple of weeks ago, my tightwad side got the better of me and I decided to leave the feeders empty until the turkeys reached back into the dim, dark recesses of their pea-sized turkey brains and regained a passing familiarity with whatever mechanisms had enabled the species to survive for thousands of years before misguided, soft-hearted liberals started throwing tons of commercially cultivated seed at them.

That lasted about half a day.  The turkeys came and stood in the yard for three hours, heads and tails drooping, gazing forlornly at the empty feeders.

I know when I'm beat.

It's much better to keep the turkeys happy.  

These two are very happy.

"Mom, the turkeys are fighting!"

The remaining pictures in this series are CENSORED