Archive for October, 2009

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Last warm day

Friday, October 30th, 2009

It was 34 degrees when I got up this morning, and an October day that starts off above freezing is a treat. So I had a cup of tea, planted strawberries, talked to my neighbor RAT about taking down a stand of trees to make more gardening space and gave him some Pedialyte for his daughter who has the flu. Then I went to Bar Island to look for apples.

Bar Island is connected to the village of Bar Harbor by, well, a bar.  At low tide it is passable by car but is completely covered by water at high tide. Every summer some tourist miscalculates the window of opportunity and has to be rescued before their SUV is swept out to sea in an oil slick. (Or after, in which case there is a hefty fine.)

This is the bar toward Bar Island at dead low tide. There’s actually salt water to either side. Today it was crowded with seagulls and crows eating barnacles and small crabs, as well as tourists.

bar island 1

And here we are, halfway across, with the Crown Princess anchored just inside Sheep Porcupine Island. There are four Porcupines: Sheep, Burnt, Long and Bald. If you’re standing on the town pier and looking out across the harbor, they are “A Sheep Burnt is Long Bald”. Probably true, along with being a nice memnotic.

crown princess

Bar Harbor logged 97 cruise ships from May through October in 2009. The Crown Princess is actually on the petite side, no matter that she could easily be another island in Frenchman Bay. Tomorrow we have the Queen Mary II and that will be the end of them till mid-May 2010. Town will be filled with passengers all weekend, on foot and in tour buses, clutching shopping bags and cell phones, decked out in parkas and wool hats in the 40 degree sunshine. Not that I’m complaining all that much – they spend a great deal of money here and can’t bring their cars.

This is the view down the bar, back toward the village.

bar toward village

I didn’t take home any apples this trip. It was a beautiful day: I saw buffleheads and eiders, heard ravens talking in the woods and the calls of several species of woodpeckers, spoke with many foreign travelers (mostly about apples) and had a wonderful day. There was even enough light to work in the garden when I came home.

These are the only apples I saw on Bar Island today. Little orange crabs on a pale (but still living) tree, they were growing in an abandoned orchard mixed in with cherry, peach and plum trees, all gone to ruin.

crab tree

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Apple Brown Veronica

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Apple Brown Betty is a wonderful concoction that always involves bread crumbs; a deep-dish, homey dessert that involves bowls and spoons and oftimes a little vanilla ice cream. This weekend I wanted something more portable. I ended up with a hefty shortbread crust, a layer of very thin-sliced apples and the ubiquitous bread crumbs drizzled with butter – something that I could eat out of hand, wandering around the yard with a cup of tea. I explained to The Man that it was almost Apple Brown Betty, and he suggested that I name the new dessert after the other girl, hence, Veronica.

This is a wonderful recipe if you have a food processor. Put the ingredients in and process, one after another, and don’t bother to clean it between times. I love this recipe.

Apple Brown Veronica

  • 6 slices firm white sandwich bread (I use anything here – sesame baguettes, english muffins, dinner rolls, even cinnamon raisin bread.)

Shortbread

  • 1 1/2 sticks (3/4 cup) cold unsalted butter (Did I mention this is not a diet friendly recipe? Don’t skimp, and don’t substitute, or it won’t be Veronica.)
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

Apple filling

  • 1 stick unsalted butter
  • 2 lb tart apples (4 large, seven small-to-middlin)
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • Spices – go nuts. Allspice, cloves, lemon rind, anise, cinnamon and five-spice powder – whatever.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Grind bread to fine crumbs in a food processor (and don’t bother cleaning it). Spread in a shallow baking pan and toast in middle of oven, stirring once, until golden, about 5 minutes. Leave oven on.

Cut butter into 1/2-inch pieces, then pulse in a food processor with flour, brown sugar, and salt until it begins to form small lumps. Sprinkle base into a 13- by 9-inch baking pan and press evenly onto bottom. Bake in middle of oven until golden, about 20 minutes.

One of the things I love about this recipe is that it makes a good, thick layer – no desperately trying to push crumbs into the corners of the pan while the middle gets holes.

While the shortbread is baking melt butter and keep warm. Peel, quarter, and core apples and thinly slice with the slicer attachment in the food processor. Stir together sugar, spices and flour in a small bowl.

Sprinkle half of sugar mixture over hot shortbread, then top with apples and sprinkle with remaining sugar mixture. Top with bread crumbs and drizzle butter over them.

Bake, pressing down on filling with a metal spatula halfway through baking, until apples are very tender and bread crumbs are golden, 50 minutes to 1 hour total. Cool 20 minutes in pan on a rack. It’s important to reach in the oven and press the mixture down – the bread crumbs and butter become one with the apple mixture and don’t flake off when you’re eating one outside, over the winter turnips.

apple brown veronica

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There’s a certain Slant of light

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

On Winter Afternoons —

That oppresses,like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes —

Emily Dickenson, #258

Winter is on the way- no matter that I worked outside in the 50 °  sunshine yesterday, with midges floating around my head. I brought in firewood, cut down the elecampne stalks to use as kindling and put boots on all the trees.

Tree boots are a necessity here, where the snow cover is often in place for months at a time and rodents of all sorts tunnel in close to the trunk and damage the soft bark. I use fiberglass window screening – cheap and easily available – and hemp twine that degrades over the course of the winter, softening enough that the tree’s growth will not be impeded if the gardener is tardy with removing it.

I’m habitually behind on my garden work, but this year I found myself with a beautiful day and all the materials to hand. I dug out the bag of screening and found, at the bottom, pieces that I had cut to fit and labeled for future use some years ago. It was funny to hold the screening up to the trunk of say, the Seckel pear, and find it too small by half. I’ve added younger trees to the collection since then so nothing went to waste, but trees – like children- do grow up before you notice.

So I managed all this work in one day instead of having to come inside because my hands are frozen, trying to get it done ahead of the first December snow. In doing so I realized that I have a lot of fruit trees. More than I would have thought and I had no idea I was being casual about the numbers. In an effort to be honest about the extent of my plant fixation, and perhaps stave off buying any more from this year’s Fedco Tree catalogue, here are three tree boots portraits for Winter 2009.

I actually have pictures of all my trees but seriously, overkill. I can list them off though: Red Baron Peach, Belle of George Peach, Clapp Pear, Seckel Pear, Stanley Plum, Blue Permain Apple, 2 Beta Cherries, Russian Crabapple, Westfield-Seek-No-Further Apple, Sargeant Crab, Montmorcery Cherry, un-named apple seedling from Acadia National Park, Black and Pink Crab, Liberty Apple, and a Minnesota 477 apple.

stanley plum 1

Stanley Plum - one of my oldest trees

clapp pear 2

Clapp Pear - yellow, conical fruit

blue permain apple 4

Blue Permain apple, very old variety, hasn't cropped yet

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Appling

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

appling 1One of the great joys of autumn up North is the apple harvest. The “King of the Orchard” is a staple crop here, and the only orchard fruit to bear regularly and abundantly despite spring freezes and cold summer rain. Yesterday my friend Liz and I went to an abandoned homestead on the Douglas Highway on our lunch hour and picked grocery bags of apples: Baldwin, Yellow Transparent, Olive Crab, Winter Greening and a few others that I can’t identify even using “Apples in Maine“. I was picking with the intent of making applesauce so I tried to stay mostly with varieties I could identify. New England was planted all over with cider apples, and they have too much tannin to make a good sauce. Taste the fruit if you’re unfamiliar with the tree – people describe cider apples as “floury” or “dense and dry”. They may not even be particularly sour – it’s the texture that  leads to applesauce with the consistency of library paste. My particular rule of thumb is to only pick from trees within 60 feet of a house. The best “dessert apples”  were  planted where they could be tended and picked with a minimum of effort.

It was probably our last good picking day for a while – 50 degrees and bright sun with hatches of midges and late mosquitoes swirling around our heads. Then I went home and made applesauce. For this recipe you’ll need a food mill. I have a Villaware and I love it.

appling 2Wash your apples if you need to. None of these have been sprayed, and they grow at least a quarter mile from any road so a light rinse will do. Halve them and cut out the stem and blossom ends. I halve them only to check for rot or insect damage.

Leave the skins and seeds for color and flavor. Pile the trimmed fruit into a large pot. Now add the secret ingredient -  2 C of sugar. Adding the sugar now allows it to blend with the finished sauce and, I think, improves the flavor and texture over adding sugar to the finished product. It also increases the liquid content, allowing you to add less water. Then add about 1 C of water mixed with 2 Tbs. lemon juice. Stir to coat the apples. I don’t add any spices at this point, preferring to spice the individual batches as I use them. Put a close fitting lid on the pot and cook at medium high for about 20 minutes, checking periodically to see if you need to add more water.

appling 4The apples are ready when they’ve “exploded”. Turn off the heat and allow the juices to soak in for about half an hour with the pot still covered.

appling 5Dump the apple mixture into your food mill in batches. It would be nice to wait long enough for the apples to cool to room temperature, but by this time it’s always 10:30 p.m. and I have to get on with it. By all means wait till you can comfortably handle the fruit if you have that luxury – it won’t do it any harm and you’ll avoid spatter burns. Crank the mixture through the mill. The Villaware produces a nice smooth sauce, ruddy and thick with the processed apple skins, and only about a cup of waste from a whole pot of apples.

appling 6

Dish yourself a sample of sauce and congratulate yourself on an efficient use of resources. You can put up the rest by canning, but applesauce is a fairly low acid food and prone to contamination. Consult your Blue Book for details or get yourself some real produce freezer bags from the Agway  and  freeze the sauce in meal size packets.

appling 7According to Liz, this is pretty good stuff.

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Social Capital Owl

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

punkin head 001

Have you read “Bowling Alone”? I’ve had to. And for all the precious white-man’s-nostalgia that fills hundreds of pages of that book and many others, social capital has never been a positive aspect of society for me. The people who yearn for the days when everyone in town knew their middle name were never teenagers in that town. They never had their first boy or their first drunk obsessively reviewed and painstakingly remembered by the entire populace.  None of those people (I’m looking at you, Dr. Putnam) ever question why their ancestors, neck deep in social capital, gave it some distance as soon as they could move West. And they also leave out the fun stuff.

Five years ago I took down a few young spruce out by the road and left a tall stump, stripped of branches, to put up a birdhouse. Before I could get to that step someone came by and nailed a plastic owl – the kind you use to scare off pigeons from your gingerbread – to the top of the stump. Ever since anonymous owl-lovers have decorated the plastic statue for every holiday. Bunny ears are followed by patriotic bunting, then plastic harvest flowers from WalMart, a Halloween costume (the pirate get-up with miniature parrot was a nice touch) and finally a wreath, Santa hat and red glass ornaments that generally last until the bunny ears come round again. He wore a tiny mortarboard for our son’s high school graduation and occasionally dons sunglasses at the height of summer.

Last night I came home to find the owl wearing a pumpkin head, and tonight I went out and added the wig. If the VeggieTales made horror movies (and they should) this would be The Bride of Punkinhead.

When you have real social capital, you can collectively and anonymously make a joke. That’s probably the real test of the concept – can you decorate the local lawn art and not be charged with vandalism? If your neighbor came on your property for the express purpose of putting sunglasses on your owl, would you call it trespassing? If not, you’ve probably got a nice little block party in store. Load up on cider and call everybody  over – it’s a good thing.

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Our Hardy Ancestors, Part III

Sunday, October 18th, 2009

birthday 2007

OHA is a series of posts about how my family ate and behaved around the turn of the last century. They (mostly) survived to great age, and I expect some would have past the 120 year mark if any of them had eaten vegetables. Herewith a “skeleton menu”, copied out by my great, great grandmother and pasted into the cover of The Institute Cookbook for her reference.

A Full Course Dinner

Shellfish – on ice with lemon – light oyster crackers, then Clear Soup – in soup plates, half full – thick slices of bread or roll folded in the napkin. Followed by Hors D’Oeurvres – olives, celery, radishes, etc. to be passed after soup is served, then Fish – with appropriate sauce, potato balls and cucumbers if possible. Then the Entree – patties, timable of chicken, or creamed dishes in paper cases (bread passed), then Meat – with appropriate sauce, jelly, potatoes, one vegetable and fruit punch. Then Game – small birds, whole; other in halves or slices with varying accompaniments then Salad – served with the game – Brie, Roquefort orcream cheese and crackers. Then Hot Pudding with lemon sauce; Glace – ice, ice cream or frozen dessert – with sweet wafers, followed by Dessert – nts, fruits, bonbons, crackers, cheese and finally Coffee – black, served with sugar alone.

The painting is “Jacob’s Birthday”, from 2006. And to think, we only had three courses.

Bon apetite!

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Views I’m never going to paint

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

hydranga sept

This beautiful Hydranga grows in front of the office of a hotel on Rte. 3, about two feet from the busy highway on one side and the same distance from the roundabout on the other. All winter the plow trucks brush it by and dump sand and salt all over the little plot of grass it sits on. It never seems to be watered or cared for in the summer; they just mow the lawn around it and let it be.  No one prunes it or takes off the dead flower heads in the fall. Evidently hydrangaes love neglect.

I’ve admired this shrub for years and tried to draw it once or twice but I’ve failed miserably to bring across the sheer abundance of the blossoms, the fade from dark to bright on the individual flower heads as well as en masse and the strength of the branches underneath that carpet of foliage. It is now firmly in the category of “things I’m never going to paint”.

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New Work – The Midway

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

smokeys greater shows early morning

Smokey’s Greater Shows, Walmart parking lot, Ellsworth Maine

From the Fryeburg Fair Chronicles:

Bud Gilmore, the show’s owner, explained that when Bud was four or five, his father Ronald had the “largest mare in the world” named Gene which weighed 3200 pounds. They lived on a farm in Bolyston, Massachusetts and showed the mare around rural New England and into Canada.

“Then shortly thereafter we built a hotdog and hamburger stand, and we traveled with that quite a few years. We had an old truck, and we carried the stand in that. We’d set it up, then my mother and father slept in the truck, and my brother and I slept on the ground. We did that until school started. Then we’d get boarded out, and they’d finish up fair season. Somewhere in the 1950s we built a french-fry stand to go with it, a couple of games, and bingo later on.”

About 1965 the Gilmores loaned some money to a fellow with a fair route, and when he couldn’t pay it back, they took over the route. They didn’t own any rides at the time; they took care of the bookings, sold tickets, and collected the rents. Then they started buying rides. Their first one in 1965 was a tilt-a-whirl; a brand new one; which cost $22,000. “Now a tilt-a-whirl; of course they’ve improved somewhat, basically the same ride, just a little easier to set up; is around $250,000,” he said. “My father died in 1970 when I was finishing college. We had seven rides then, and I just went out and started running the show and buying more and more rides. Until now I’m at the point I’ve got too many rides. Don’t need them all, but we’ve got about 50 rides now I guess.” What was it like being a young boy working the fair circuit? Gilmore made it sound like an adventure with story after story, but he worked hard, too. He helped in the family’s hotdog stand, hustled soda or popcorn in the grandstand, helped with his father’s games, and found other moneymaking jobs for neighboring concessionaires.

And on a rainy summer morning I found them all laid out and idle in the Walmart parking lot at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. I wandered around for a while, trying to make little sketches and samples of the amazing chemical colors, but I gave up and moved to a vantage point farther away. It was just too private down amongst the machinery.  Campers and RVs were scattered around and people were wandering half dressed, brushing their teeth or drinking coffee – I felt as intrusive as I would have been in a stranger’s living room, and moved off to make my observations from a nearby hill.

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Time is but the stream I go fishing in,

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains. Henry David Thoreau.

My mother moved from a 21 room farmhouse to a four room apartment in 1985. It was in her mother’s house, and she was happy enough to leave her historic, but drafty, house behind but it did mean there was a table, chair, shelf and footstool crammed into every corner. There were corner shelves with little shelves on top of them and piles of candlesticks and tablecloths on every horizontal surface. She managed to disperse some of the treasure and eventually moved to Florida, then to Connecticut and then to Maine. Her home now is a one-bedroom condo. There is no cellar, no attic, no roomy pantry for the thick-walled canning jars that now belong to me. Mine too are the ceramic jugs plugged with rolls of cork and ancient tool-steel knives with antler handles, but surprisingly few table linens. Maybe she thought I had too many of those of my own.

Yesterday she gifted me with two antique fabric bags, made by her father’s stepmother, also Harriet, but with two “t”s. They are quite beautiful. One is a mourning bag, with an elegant polished cotton finish, very plain except for her initial. The other is a sewing bag with a covered needle case that still contains two steel and one bone needle.

antique bags 1

A close-up of the morning bag, and the initial done in outline stitch and French knots. I can never make mine that regular. I took the picture on what my family calls “the red hutch”, between the fruit salver and the green milk-glass candlestick. No wonder I paint still life.

antique bag 2

And here is a close up of the sewing pouch. The wool has been damaged by insects – it is very soft and fine and probably delicious, but the blanket stitch has held up well.

antique bags 3

So my question is, where does she keep this stuff? Are there bags of weird and beautiful women’s-work hidden under the sink? Ancient poetry books under the sofa? (Actually I know there are some of those.) I can’t wait to visit again. Maybe that’s the point.

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Garden retrospective

Friday, October 9th, 2009

I’m moving files to our new media server tonight and sampling folders from every season – every incidental piece of subject matter. There are houses, rural roads, weird trees, thousands of plants, frogs, fungi, and boats of all types, whatever caught my eye. What a difference a digital camera makes – I was never this spendthrift with film.

So we start in February. 2009 saw tremendous snow accumulations, especially for this area, normally too close to the ocean for 5′ of base.

incidental garden 3

Eventually the snow melts and the alpine garden blooms, low and sturdy, in a multitude of textures and variations of the color green.

incidental garden 1

Eventually July comes around and digitalis and Maltese Cross grow tall in the garden by the boat building.

indicental garden 2

Tonight it’s 50 degrees and raining as we head toward the huge local holiday observance of All Hallows Eve, but I have documented evidence that the garden was once lovely, soft and green.

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