Our band of itinerant eaters stopped for a night on the border of Maine and New Hampshire to visit Marlene’s cousin Anne and her family. Their small town home is surrounded by creeks and canals that feed the estuaries around Portsmouth. In their neighborhood remains well preserved textile mills from the 19th century and an old countinghouse that monitored commerce on the ancient canals.

Anne, Zach, McGill and Grace keep hens that provide their eggs. We fried them sunnyside up for breakfast in a bit of butter. I’d never had eggs this fresh before, and was shocked at how rich the yolks tasted compared to commercial eggs. Perhaps it’s the diet of kitchen scraps their hens eat, but fresh backyard eggs are definitely superior.

Green eggs from Araucana hens, the small one on left is from a bantam hen

In this place of strong traditions and historical continuity, people still fish the salt creeks for shad in the spring and pick wild summer berries in the woods as countless generations before them have done. Vainly dodging bloodthirsty horseflies, deerflies and mosquitoes is another timeworn woodland tradition we didn’t care for, so we opted out of that wild blueberry adventure and instead crossed the state line to Saltbox Farms to fill up on the domesticated variety.

Diaphanous dragonfly

Red and golden raspberries

Domesticated blueberries

Saltbox Farms
321 Portsmouth Ave
Stratham, NH
603-436-7978

We chose Saltbox Farms in part because a county fair was open right down the street. Unlike my local (suburban) Orange County Fair, which features vendors hawking hot tubs and home mortgages as soon as you enter the grounds, the folks in Stratham County take their animal husbandry very seriously. In the rabbit pavilion, they held a bunny hurdling contest, where handlers nudge their leashed rabbits to hop over a series of wooden obstacles that increase in height with each round. For reals - I’m not making this up. Think I’ll find this sport at this month’s Los Angeles County Fair?

Shady carny rides and French fries

Happy potato chip eating goat

After a long afternoon of driving, we arrived at Matt’s childhood home outside of Albany, NY, where his retired parents have a beautiful 18th century farmhouse. His dad Richard is a beekeeper, and mom Marianne keeps the garden beautifully well tended. We picked red currants from her bushes, and she made us raspberry and currant jam to take home: flavors and memories of our summer vacation to savor months from now.

Homegrown currants

Richard harvests honey seasonally from different flowers in bloom at the time. His early summer honey tastes lighter than the dusky, late summer variety. Fantastic honeys with great character. A more complete post about his honey coming at some point.

Have I punished you enough with vacation pictures? DiFara’s pizza and chocolates from Jacques Torres in Brooklyn coming next!

The distant helicopter camera shots of the devastation in New Orleans color them with a distant, surreal quality that makes the city look like a parallel universe filled with alien beings.

I then recall the really nice people I met during a handful of visits, and the devastation becomes more real for me. I wonder if they heeded the warnings to get out before the storm, and how their stores, homes and families fared.

Earlier this year, Anthony and Gail Uglesich retired after 50 years of running their legendary family restaurant and closed up shop, with much ado from its fans around the globe. The Uglesich family had operated their humble restaurant in that location since 1849. Located in the shadow of the Superdome in one of the poorer parts of the city, their menu was priced too high for most of their neighbors to eat there on a regular basis. This is where I learned how good fried green tomatoes with remoulade can be, and where my standard for an oyster po’ boy was set.

As soon as you entered the front door, you’d notice a man of impressive stature standing behind a counter, shucking oysters like the champion he was. Michael Rogers loomed over his station and effortlessly opened a dozen oysters using nothing else except an oyster knife, a U shaped anvil of soft metal to steady the oyster and his powerful, well practiced hands. I’d stand in front of him and watch his technique. He’d chatter while he worked, his mouth running as fast and steady as his hands while he’d charm the customers waiting for their food. A plaque on the wall behind him hailed his oyster shucking feats, and he’d gladly relate the finer points of how he’d won these contests.

He’d place an oyster in a dull grey metal block that looked alarmingly like lead, and put the point of the knife in the hinge of the oyster. With a precise push and twist, the oyster would open. He’d slice the meat away from the flat top shell in a flash and serve the critter in its bowl shaped lower shell.

“I never cut into the oyster - knife marks lose you points in competition,” teaching me something I never thought to look for on a plate of raw oysters. Most restaurants hire shuckers to work the raw bar and buy buckets of preshucked “cookers” for use in the kitchen. Uggie’s relied on Michael to open every oyster they’d use because freshness and quality mattered. That counter was his stage where thousands appreciated his easy manner and performer’s charm.

I see the devastated Superdome on TV and know that a half mile away, the flood probably reclaimed the formerly cheery Uglesich building into an otherwise undistinguished and ignominious neighborhood: hip deep in filthy water, and possibly housing catfish that once would have been served there. I think of Michael’s magnetic charm, and hope that he can somehow manage that charming smile in the midst of the devastation. Know sir, that you are loved and remembered by a world far bigger than you can possibly imagine, and our thoughts are with you and your family.

# # #

On a more local note, my friend Brian fowarded a press release from a Thai-Chinese restaurant in Anaheim Hills called Spice Delight that’s raising money for the flood victims. Brian and his wife took us there for a mind blowing dinner, and I’d say it’s easily the best restaurant in the otherwise glum restaurant scene of Anaheim Hills. It compares favorably to Thai Nakorn, a widely praised Thai restaurant in Orange County, minus their focus on the Northern regional dishes of Isaan.

I’ve been holding off on a writeup of Spice Delight until I’ve had a couple more visits, and this fundraising effort seems a good time to do it. John Sangsiri is a 20 year veteran of running Thai restaurants in Florida and Southern California, and has friends and family that lived through the Asian tsunami of 2004.

He’s giving 10% of the daily receipts to charity from September 18 to September 24. They’re open 7 days a week from 11am to 10pm and also offer free delivery within 5 miles on orders over $20.

Spice Delight
124 South Fairmont Blvd.
Anaheim Hills, CA 92808
714-921-8710

Start with great local ingredients. Prepare them simply and don’t get in their way.

5:30am. Bar Harbor, ME. After our so-called “epic sunrise” fiasco, we headed to the water and looked around for a fishermen’s diner where grizzled old salts fill their dented steel thermoses with thin, nasty coffee and head out for a day of drowning bait. Where the crusty old fishermen go, so goes some worthwhile chow at a good price. What docks in Bar Harbor aren’t fishing boats, but billionaires’ yachts and the barf barges that take landlubbing tourists to see whales and puffins. We therefore ate very nicely in a diner where $10 breakfast items were served. Prices felt like we were in Beverly Hills, not way-the-hell-far-from-anywhere rural Maine.

Robin Leach would be impressed

We found the working boats a short drive away in Seal Harbor.


This lobsterman brought ashore the morning’s catch and I got to ask a few questions.

Me: “Do you have to throw back the females?”
Him: “No, they just have to be big enough.”
Me: “How do you sex a lobster?”
Him: “Dinner and dancing, then ask nicely.”

How it’s really done is by flipping the beastie on its back and looking at the small pair of swimmerets just behind the last set of legs. Females will have a soft, fin-like pair, while the males have hard, pointed “pistols.” The male is on the left of the photo below. Now you know what to look for if you want a female lobster filled with red “coral!”

Lobsters molt in late Spring, so their shells are still thin and easily cracked when caught during the summer. The meat inside hasn’t yet filled out their new carapace, so some will argue that it’s not as firm, or sweet tasting, as the same critter harvested in the winter. I can’t vouch for one argument or the other, but I do know they’re still delicious when served on a buttered and toasted roll.

Here’s another variation of the lobster roll, from Beal’s Lobster Pier. This one has a wan crunch of iceberg lettuce and smallish chunks of cold lobster meat dressed with mayo. Although it’s a fine sandwich, I much prefer the caveman style hunks of unadorned meat at Red’s Eats.

The creamy broth of their lobster chowder slicked with red lobster fat tasted great and left a rich lobster slick in my mouth, but the chunks of meat in it were overcooked and tough. As with any fish chowder, presenting piping hot broth and just-barely-cooked-through seafood is a tough trick to pull off.

Fried strips of clam, not whole bellies

Fried clams strips are from a different animal than the whole belly clams I’d written about previously, and not nearly as clamtastic. Hard shell clams are called littlenecks or cherrystones while they’re small, and their little bellies and firm muscle are delicious eaten raw on the half shell. As they grow larger, they’re called surf, skimmer, or sea clams and they grow a rotund beer gut that’s usually set aside for fish bait and no longer delish for humans. The firm muscle also grows thick, and is cut into chewable, bite sized slices. These fried and battered strips you see above are the result. While they bring back memories of the Howard Johnson’s clams strips I loved in my youth, they’re an anticlamactic experience compared to the more tender, more flavorful whole belly clams.

Beal’s Lobster Pier
182 Clark Point Rd.
Southwest Harbor, ME
207-244-3202

Even in Maine, where sun burnished fishermen deliver lobsters caught that morning , inattentive cooks can mistreat ingredients that demand the utmost attention and respect. Though Beal’s has all the elements of a working dockside fish market & restaurant, it lacked the care practiced in the kitchen at Red’s and Scales. I suppose comparing lobster rolls in Maine is like comparing sushi bars in Los Angeles (read: splitting hairs). Life is short; why not do both? Travel widely and eat well, dear reader.

We’d arrived rather late at a motel near Acadia National Park when I mentioned that the park was known for epic sunrises, and perhaps it might be worth waking before daycrack to take some unforgettable photos. The irony of such words leaving my mouth was not lost on these very close friends of nearly two decades.

Them: “Um, aren’t you the vampire who works nights and wakes up at the crack of noon? Crack being the operative word there. Please put down the pipe before you burn your lip.”

Me: “Ha fucking ha. How many times in your life are you going to be in Acadia to see this?”

We rose after precious few hours of sleep and drove toward the highest peak of Mount Desert Isle. As we neared, an ominous fog rolled across our windshield. By the time we climbed Cadillac Mountain, the fog didn’t roll so much as barrel through us like rain clouds caught in a blustery sea squall. Our clothing got soaked just standing against a 40 mph wind. Next “winter” if I bitch about the “freezing” 45 degree weather we have in Southern California, please reference this photo and ask me what that Maine wind would feel like in February.

Isn’t the sunrise breathtaking?

Soon after the aborted sunrise recon mission, we retreated to a diner in Bar Harbor and realized that Mainers are a fun lot with a particular code of humor known only to each other. So a few questions for you Maine readers out there:

1) How many days a year can you see this alleged epic sunrise? Is this a local gag to clear out the motels early so’s Housekeeping can get home in time to watch Oprah?

2) If you’re going to name a far-from-deserted island Mount Desert Isle, shouldn’t its highest peak be called Mt. Desert and not Cadillac Mountain? If the National Park Service is selling off corporate naming rights, may I suggest the very obvious Golden Arches National Park?

3) The stereotyped “cahn’t get there from he-ah” Downeaster spirit is very much alive and persistent with nearly everyone we asked for directions. For future reference, instructions like “we’re right next to the Coast Guard station” are not useful to us tourists arriving by land and therefore bereft of nautical charts that might guide us to the Coast Guard station that you’re looking at through your window. When I asked for directions, perhaps I neglected to mention we were driving. Y’know, in a car. My bad.

I loved visiting Maine, the great folks we met, and the food they made for us with love and pride. Next time I’ll bring a GPS and we won’t have these directional miscues distracting us from the important things like lobster boats, you-pick berry farms and county fairs. To be continued…