Happy Turkey Day!

As chief cook and bottle washer today, I know what I'll be nippin' between prepared dishes...

Enjoy your day, hopefully, with family, friends and loved ones.   

Singing For Your Breakfast...

This is one of my best friends. She lives in the Keys and works for the best breakfast places down there, Harriette's. She is as cheerful as she looks and sounds; always has a smile for everyone, never a cross word. When my husband and I visit, we stay at her place and it's always a treat. She has the biggest heart in the world; she spent 12 years working with severely physically and mentally handicapped children in Dolphin Human Therapy. It was a very successful procedure until the man who owned the business lost his lease and shut it down. She and her co-worker tried to buy the business but couldn't get the funding. So, back to waitressing she went.

This is a cute little ad she did for the restaurant owner. If you're down there, stop in, make sure she's your waitress and order a big meal. Tell her "California Girl in New Hampshire sent me". She's a California girl too!

Farm to Table Fundraiser

Out in the fields

My environmental committee, locally known as the Green Team, recently hosted the only local farm to table event in our bucolic corner of the White Mountains.






Village Trolley takes visitors from farm to farm.

This annual event, our second, was designed to highlight the importance of eating locally grown food, a concept originally championed on the West Coast by Alice Waters. Per person tickets were $125 including an optional four farm tour, pre-dinner cocktails made with locally distilled Cold River Vodka, a four course menu prepared exclusively with locally produced vegetables, fruit, farm raised meat, poultry and dairy products. Local wines were served with each course; after dinner local cheeses and port completed the meal.

The family farm tours were of great interest. Each family highlighted their special crops, their particular sustainable farming methods, rotational planting, water saving methods, animal husbandry, etc. People could buy product, play with animals, view sheep dogs at worki, get up close and personal with animals, learn more about how food can be grown in a healthy, sustainable and chemically free manner and why it's important to buy local.




We hosted 100 happy diners in a huge tented dining area out on the farm fields enhanced by music, dancing and great food prepared by four local chefs.





Individually designed adirondack chairs were auctioned off for charity in our "Art A Ron Dack" auction. Chairs were purchased by sponsors and designs were done by local artists who donated their talent.












Three of the forty artistically designed Adirondacks

The jolly wait staff made everything special

Good Friends

Last March, my girlfriend & husband threw a party. The weather outside was frightful but about 60 people drove to her home in the Maine countryside to enjoy a lively and "informal Tex Mex" banquet. She comes from a restaurant family and is a very good cook. She prepared empanadas made with slow roasted pulled pork, refried beans, hot hot chili, corn bread, several kinds of salads, fresh fruit & cheese, enchiladas, guacamole, roasted asparagus, taquitos; it was grand. I prepared a double layered lemon cheesecake with lemon curd topping. Someone else made a Mexican chocolate & cinnamon cake with milk frosting. There was a slushy machine churning out margaritas. You could just walk up, pull the lever and "that frozen concoction" came pouring out.

These photos are from the party. Left is the party giver and artist, Joelle. In the middle is our Swiss friend, Ladina, an amazing skier and athlete. I'm on the right. We girls met when our sons were in third grade. Between the baseball, football, soccer and more, we found ourselves car pooling, cooking for team dinners, planning picnics and time for the families to share with one another. We incorporated our husbands which forever cemented our relationships. Over the past twelve years we have exercised, partied, cooked, played, cried, clung to one another and laughed our asses off over anything we can. In the photo above, we are discussing the benefits vs the defects of high heels while holding Joelle's 4" heels which she has now taken off because her feet hurt.

I'm now 57. Ladina is 51, I think. Joelle is 40. Our friendship is based on a mutual love of the same things and the enjoyment and respect we have for one another. Raising our kids has been easier because we share our frustrations and fear, give good advice when we're asked and sympathise with one another. Our parenting skills are in synch. One night, Joelle and I ferreted out the location of an illegal kid drinking party, drove there, walked in the front door, big as life, pointed to a group of sullen looking boys and said,

"You, You, You...GET IN THE CAR!"

Out came our three boys. I think they were freshmen in high school. Boy, were they embarrassed. My son said it took two years to live that down, heh heh.

Every time we share a meal, we touch glasses and say,

"Here's to us! Here's to good friends."

Recipe for a Happy 4th (or any summer meal)!

For me, all holidays revolve around food. I don't know what you all are making for dinner or the picnic, concert or fireworks show you'll attend but I'm bbqing spare ribs. I'm slathering baby backs with a home made rub courtesy of a Bobby Flay recipe, letting them absorb that overnight and then basting them with a grilling sauce over a very low flame on the grill three shelves up for several hours. I'm making home made potato salad, cole slaw and probably some kind of corn bread. All recipes are old and tried and true.

We used to attend a fireworks show and take a picnic basket of food. Every July 5th we would pack a big lunch and take out our ski boat and spend the day on a lake. It has been a tradition for years. This year, however, the incessant rain has interrupted those plans. Instead, my husband and I celebrated the beginning of the long weekend last night by attending an outdoor concert with Diana Krall.

We went with two friends, driving to Meredith, NH on Lake Winnepesaukee where we had dinner at a wonderful restaurant called The Lake House at Church Landing. After an incredible meal that included appetizers of mussels in a cream saffron sauce, crab cakes, and the house salad made with Gorgonzola cheese, we had entrees of swordfish, hangar steak with grilled peaches, and a perfectly done medium rare slab of prime rib. We were stuffed so we rolled ourselves out of there and drove on to the concert venue, Meadowbrook Outdoor Pavilion.

It was, after a month of rain, a perfect night with the moon out, some clouds, mostly stars, warm breeze. We enjoyed fresh squeezed margaritas during the performance and the acoustics were fantastic. I never realized what a great musician she is until I watched her play. Great backup group consisting of an electric guitarist who looks like Clapton but plays like Wes Montgomery, drummer/percussionist and bass player. It was like being in a large club. Very intimate.

I'm currently reading a biography of Julia Child, a Penguin Lives series, by Laura Shapiro. It is FASCINATING and makes me feel a whole lot less embarrassed about my love of food and my own cooking! Can't wait to read her autobiography now.

Anyone looking for a good rub? Here's the Bobby Flay recipe from "Grilling for Life":

Espresso Rub

1/4 finely ground espresso beans
1/4 C ancho chile powder
2T Spanish paprika (sweet paprika)
2T dark brown sugar
1T dry mustard
2 tsp kosher salt
1T ground cumin
1T fresh ground black pepper
1T dried oregano
2 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp cayenne

Keeps in a jar in a cupboard up to one month although I've kept mine a lot longer.

Loving Autumn

I have always thought Autumn to be the best time to decorate. There is such an abundance of choice: pumpkins, gourds, hay bales, corn stalks, scarecrows, chrysanthemums, Halloween creatures and such.

People in New England love to decorate with corn stalks, scarecrows and hay bales. You see a great many homes taking this last stab at color before the winter descends and turns everything grey and white. I have been planting chrysanthemums. I'm also buying the small colorful gourds and miniature hay bales to create a centerpiece for the table. We have a party every Fall and we're getting ready for it in advance.

Halloween is just around the corner and that is fun no matter where you live. Everybody gets into the act.

We once lived in an historic part of Richmond, Virginia, popularly known as The Fan. The Fan is a Georgetown-style neighborhood of brick town homes and row houses with tiny front yards and sidewalks. Every Halloween, one block up, was the most popular Halloween trick-or-treat street in the city. This particular block went all out to decorate. Ghosts, goblins and witches were strung across the street from one upper story to another, flying back and forth. Tombstones with every conceivable inscription were laid out in front yard squares, some with hands trying to dig their way out of the graves. Little white ghosts, made with Styrofoam balls wrapped in tiny white cloths that tightened and trailed beneath hung from the trees. My mother-in-law said these were "gumps" an old fashioned term for the decoration. Many neighbors filled lunch-sized brown paper bags with sand, inserting lit candles for a shadowy effect. Elaborately carved pumpkins decorated every porch, stoop and window. People dressed as witches, ghouls or dead people hid in bushes by their front doors to scare the be-Jesus out of visitors. One guy had an old fashioned cheap coffin in his yard, narrow at the foot and broad at the top. He was dressed as Dracula and would slowly raise the lid and sit up as people approached his front steps. I've never seen anything like it before or since.

Corn mazes seem to be the popular attraction now. Many farmers have their corn fields plowed into elaborate configurations and charge people money to find their way in and out. From the sky these mazes are quite beautiful. Great money maker for the farmer and alot of fun for the participant.

Here's to crisp apples, changing leaves, hot cider, cool nights, thick soups and crackling fires.

En Vino Veritas

I am a wino. No two ways about it. I like my wine and, like a Lay's potato chip, I bet I can't drink just one glass.

I notice many of my female friends, girlfriends, women friends, women my age have the same addiction. They like their wine and they are emphatic about it! One very good friend of mine went on an intense Weight Watcher's diet plan for a year. She was religious about following the point structure and what did she save her extra points for? Her wine! Another friend, the mother of six beautiful raucous daughters who all like to party, will give up her food and will diet but she says she'll never give up her wine.

I think someone should do a scientific study of menopausal women and wine. I really think that's when the addiction sets in. Men don't seem to have it. Maybe it's the sugar, maybe it's something else, like a beer or scotch fetish, but I just don't notice this affection for wine in men. Start looking around at your mothers or co-workers or older sisters friends and colleagues and see what you think.