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Okay, it's been a while, so here's something about last weekend, because it's almost like live-blogging at my pace...
Friday: Brother Jim was out from Wisconsin, to see Dad, whose lymphoma has reared up again, and who isn't doing nearly as well as the last 3? 4? times. More on that in a second. We found out about the visit last minute, and the only day we could come out to Northampton was on Friday. For convenience(?), brother Neal arranged for us to go out to dinner at Sakura, a Chinese buffet on the site of the Mr. Steak restaurant I worked at 34 years ago. The green beans were quite good. The hot & sour soup was passable. Everything else (and really I mean everything) was really, truly, irredeemably wretched. Worst Chinese food (and sushi) ever.
But we weren't there for the food, we were there to see family. It was the first time we've all been together for quite a while (two of the brothers are local to Hamp, I live two hours away, and Jim is in Cheese-ville). When we saw Dad in August, he seemed confused and worried about minutiae. This time, he wasn't outwardly as bad, but he did ask us several times to program the thermostat for him, despite the fact that Jim had done it earlier in the day. Mostly he didn't say much at all, so I wonder if he may be trying to cover up his level of confusion? Anyway, it's worrying.
On the way out of town, we stopped at the First Church, where Krishna Das was performing. It was late enough that they weren't taking tickets, and passers-by were wandering in and out. It was late enough that I only stayed for half a chant (about 10 minutes). If we didn't have to get home, if we hadn't been out to visit family, if everything was completely different, I would have gone out there for the whole kirtan and nothing but the kirtan. Welly-oh.
Saturday: Was our 28th wedding anniversary. White Gates Farm, which does our meat CSA, does a monthly farm-to-table dinner, and this was the last one of the year. The original plan was to go up for the dinner on Saturday, then spend Sunday kayaking on Lake Winnepesaukie, but the weather forecast was for rain on Sunday, so we moved the kayaking up to Saturday afternoon. Except that the rental place had just shifted to Fall hours, and we had to have the boats back by 3pm, so not a lot of time. And we spent a chunk of that time poking around an abandoned cottage on One Mile Island. But it was all good fun, and we saw loons, cormorants, and mergansers - the usual diving birds.
The farm isn't licensed as a restaurant, so technically we were paying for a farm tour, and staying afterwards for a home-cooked dinner with our friend, Farmer Hank. Of course, it was home-cooked by a local catering chef and a couple of interns from North Carolina(?), who were interested in setting up their own farm-to-table operation, so were working on the farm for the summer.
The farm tour was basically a pitch for how to do organic farming in the 21st century. There's a lot about crop rotations and soil management and other old-timey stuff. There's also the Raised Bed Maker, which scoops a row of soil into a continuous raised bed, lays down a double row of drip irrigation tubing, and covers the whole thing with black plastic. There's also the winter greenhouse, which he heats with excess heat from his cow manure compost pile (via a mile of pex tubing coiled through the pile, going to a radiant floor in the greenhouse). We also got to see the chickens (layers and broilers) in their mobile housing, the cattle (Blonde d'Aquitaine) in their new pasture, and the pigs in their 3½ acre forest. Free range, baby.
But you really want to know about the food, right? All of the meat and veggies were produced on the farm, and the rest was from within a few miles (Sandwich Creamery cheese, New Hampshire Mushroom Company). Hank gave the chefs free rein, so even he didn't know what was going to appear before us. (He ended up sitting across from us, so we got to talk with him a lot.)
The cake was a bonus dessert, and the only thing not prepared on site, because another woman was celebrating her 40th birthday, and her boyfriend arranged for the cake from a local bakery.
Sunday: We stayed at the Sutton House B&B, so breakfast was the usual lovely B&B thing - in this case, bacon basil silver-dollar quiches, and apple crumb muffins in ramekins. The B&B really was quite nice, just not as remarkable as everything else that weekend.
As said, the plan was to kayak on Sunday, which is a large part of why we stayed in Center Harbor. But that moved to Saturday, and Farmer Hank turned us on to a couple reasons why we had to go back up to Tamworth on Sunday.
New Hampshire Mushroom Company is the largest supplier of organic specialty mushrooms in New England, and has plans to be the largest east of the Mississippi. And they have free tours on Sunday. The guide was one of the founders, and explained in great detail how every part of the growing medium (hardwood sawdust, grain, limestone, and water) had to be sourced and certified organic. e.g. Apparently ash from power plant smokestack scrubbers can be sold as limestone, so they had to find a source (ideally small family operation) that would certify that they dug the limestone out of the ground. Naturally, the tour ended with a buying opportunity, so we came away with a handful each of chestnut and shiitake mushrooms. All I can say is, if you've never had really fresh shiitakes, you're missing out.
Tamworth Distilling is a boutique distillery that makes some really nice standard spirits, along with some whack-tastic stuff like Beet Vodka and Sweet Potato Vodka (both with produce from White Gates Farm) and Black Trumpet Blueberry Cordial (with produce from NH Mushroom). $5 gets you a tasting of 5 spirits (maybe ½ oz apiece, so quite a lot of liquor for the middle of the day), plus a coupon for free coffee at their sister store.
We took the Sunday drive through Ossipee and Wolfeborough to Laconia, where we arrived a) hungry and b) well after closing time at the local diners (both the one near the Misti-Con hotel and the one that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bex77 mentioned recently). So I asked my friend Yelp for suggestions, and we ended up at Local Eatery, "the Lakes Region's exclusive farm-to-table restaurant." Oddly for a place that plays up its local sourcing, the menu didn't mention where the ingredients were from, or even that it was a farm-to-table restaurant; I would have expected a paragraph for each item on the menu, but it was extraordinarily terse. Anyway, we got:
Friday: Brother Jim was out from Wisconsin, to see Dad, whose lymphoma has reared up again, and who isn't doing nearly as well as the last 3? 4? times. More on that in a second. We found out about the visit last minute, and the only day we could come out to Northampton was on Friday. For convenience(?), brother Neal arranged for us to go out to dinner at Sakura, a Chinese buffet on the site of the Mr. Steak restaurant I worked at 34 years ago. The green beans were quite good. The hot & sour soup was passable. Everything else (and really I mean everything) was really, truly, irredeemably wretched. Worst Chinese food (and sushi) ever.
But we weren't there for the food, we were there to see family. It was the first time we've all been together for quite a while (two of the brothers are local to Hamp, I live two hours away, and Jim is in Cheese-ville). When we saw Dad in August, he seemed confused and worried about minutiae. This time, he wasn't outwardly as bad, but he did ask us several times to program the thermostat for him, despite the fact that Jim had done it earlier in the day. Mostly he didn't say much at all, so I wonder if he may be trying to cover up his level of confusion? Anyway, it's worrying.
On the way out of town, we stopped at the First Church, where Krishna Das was performing. It was late enough that they weren't taking tickets, and passers-by were wandering in and out. It was late enough that I only stayed for half a chant (about 10 minutes). If we didn't have to get home, if we hadn't been out to visit family, if everything was completely different, I would have gone out there for the whole kirtan and nothing but the kirtan. Welly-oh.
Saturday: Was our 28th wedding anniversary. White Gates Farm, which does our meat CSA, does a monthly farm-to-table dinner, and this was the last one of the year. The original plan was to go up for the dinner on Saturday, then spend Sunday kayaking on Lake Winnepesaukie, but the weather forecast was for rain on Sunday, so we moved the kayaking up to Saturday afternoon. Except that the rental place had just shifted to Fall hours, and we had to have the boats back by 3pm, so not a lot of time. And we spent a chunk of that time poking around an abandoned cottage on One Mile Island. But it was all good fun, and we saw loons, cormorants, and mergansers - the usual diving birds.
The farm isn't licensed as a restaurant, so technically we were paying for a farm tour, and staying afterwards for a home-cooked dinner with our friend, Farmer Hank. Of course, it was home-cooked by a local catering chef and a couple of interns from North Carolina(?), who were interested in setting up their own farm-to-table operation, so were working on the farm for the summer.
The farm tour was basically a pitch for how to do organic farming in the 21st century. There's a lot about crop rotations and soil management and other old-timey stuff. There's also the Raised Bed Maker, which scoops a row of soil into a continuous raised bed, lays down a double row of drip irrigation tubing, and covers the whole thing with black plastic. There's also the winter greenhouse, which he heats with excess heat from his cow manure compost pile (via a mile of pex tubing coiled through the pile, going to a radiant floor in the greenhouse). We also got to see the chickens (layers and broilers) in their mobile housing, the cattle (Blonde d'Aquitaine) in their new pasture, and the pigs in their 3½ acre forest. Free range, baby.
But you really want to know about the food, right? All of the meat and veggies were produced on the farm, and the rest was from within a few miles (Sandwich Creamery cheese, New Hampshire Mushroom Company). Hank gave the chefs free rein, so even he didn't know what was going to appear before us. (He ended up sitting across from us, so we got to talk with him a lot.)
- cheese & crackers
- french onion soup
- greens with roast beets and soft goat cheese
- truffled egg salad on melba toast, garnished with sunflower sprouts
- sausage-stuffed chicken, with risotto and purple carrots
- steak tips, with sweet potatoes and some sauce I don't recall the details of
- "apple blossom" (diced apple baked in phyllo) with creme anglaise and chocolate brandy sauce
- chocolate peanut butter cake
The cake was a bonus dessert, and the only thing not prepared on site, because another woman was celebrating her 40th birthday, and her boyfriend arranged for the cake from a local bakery.
Sunday: We stayed at the Sutton House B&B, so breakfast was the usual lovely B&B thing - in this case, bacon basil silver-dollar quiches, and apple crumb muffins in ramekins. The B&B really was quite nice, just not as remarkable as everything else that weekend.
As said, the plan was to kayak on Sunday, which is a large part of why we stayed in Center Harbor. But that moved to Saturday, and Farmer Hank turned us on to a couple reasons why we had to go back up to Tamworth on Sunday.
New Hampshire Mushroom Company is the largest supplier of organic specialty mushrooms in New England, and has plans to be the largest east of the Mississippi. And they have free tours on Sunday. The guide was one of the founders, and explained in great detail how every part of the growing medium (hardwood sawdust, grain, limestone, and water) had to be sourced and certified organic. e.g. Apparently ash from power plant smokestack scrubbers can be sold as limestone, so they had to find a source (ideally small family operation) that would certify that they dug the limestone out of the ground. Naturally, the tour ended with a buying opportunity, so we came away with a handful each of chestnut and shiitake mushrooms. All I can say is, if you've never had really fresh shiitakes, you're missing out.
Tamworth Distilling is a boutique distillery that makes some really nice standard spirits, along with some whack-tastic stuff like Beet Vodka and Sweet Potato Vodka (both with produce from White Gates Farm) and Black Trumpet Blueberry Cordial (with produce from NH Mushroom). $5 gets you a tasting of 5 spirits (maybe ½ oz apiece, so quite a lot of liquor for the middle of the day), plus a coupon for free coffee at their sister store.
We took the Sunday drive through Ossipee and Wolfeborough to Laconia, where we arrived a) hungry and b) well after closing time at the local diners (both the one near the Misti-Con hotel and the one that
bex77 mentioned recently). So I asked my friend Yelp for suggestions, and we ended up at Local Eatery, "the Lakes Region's exclusive farm-to-table restaurant." Oddly for a place that plays up its local sourcing, the menu didn't mention where the ingredients were from, or even that it was a farm-to-table restaurant; I would have expected a paragraph for each item on the menu, but it was extraordinarily terse. Anyway, we got:- crispy eggplant fries with roasted red pepper almond sauce and asiago aioli dip
- filet with maple glazed brussels sprouts and BEST MASHED POTATOES EVER
- tonight's special burger - topped with homemade kimchi and sriracha hard-boiled egg slices, served with a nice local beer. Way up my alley.
