Rosemont

Outdoor/Indoor Dining: Gilding the Lilly–the Blue Spoon Is In Full Bloom!

October 12, 2020 / / Restaurants

It’s time to review restaurants again.  To step inside and sit down at a table if the coming winter chill is too daunting to sit outside without wearing socks, high boots, shrugs and overcoats.

I always thought that the Lilliputian confines of the old Blue Spoon were OK but not enough to warrant the trek from my various West End residence to the far reaches of Munjoy Hill.  That was then.  But now that I live on the Hill, this  has become my neighborhood restaurant. And after enjoying a wonderful al fresco meal there last week it  indeed qualifies as my neighborhood haunt–outside for now but inside soon.

Blue Spoon outside patio and indoor dining room

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Where to Shop Now–At Supermarkets and Other Local Food Stores Amidst an Inventory of Errors and Omissions

May 23, 2019 / / Discoveries

My favorite potato, available during the winter at farmers’ market, has been the pinto potato–red-skinned with blushes of beige and golden flesh within.  It bakes, boils, sautés well yielding an ultra-creamy texture.  Alas they’ve disappeared as a storage potato early last month at farmers’ markets.  Locally Goranson and Dandelion farms sold the potatoes until their winter stash was depleted.  They’ll be back in the markets by mid-summer.

By the end of May winter storage crops like potatoes, onions and carrots are truly getting long in the tooth.  The famous spring dug parsnip moreover is still not available at farmers’ markets. Farmers say that the ground is still too tough to dig them up.

“New” (?) potatoes from Hannaford

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For corned beef, cook it low and slow and serve with the flakiest biscuits

March 16, 2016 / / Baking & Desserts, Mains, Recipes

There’s no secret formula to preparing corned beef except this one caveat: buy the best.  Unless you’re going to cure your own slab of brisket into a “corned” beef, buy from the expert butchers who do it up every year.

I could have gone to any one of the purveyors who brine their own beef like Pat’s Meat Market, Rosemont, The Farm Stand and Bisson’s ( 116 Meadow Rd., Topsham, 207-725-7215).  Whole Foods also has several brands of commercial grade corned beef, and if you’re bent on paying up for it you might as well get it there at a few dollars more per pound.  The cured brisket from Bisson’s was $6.99 per pound.

Since this is a work in progress, here is the corned beef (from Bisson's) that I will make tomorrow

Since this is a work in progress, here is the uncooked corned beef (from Bisson’s) that I will make tomorrow

Since I was at Bisson’s last Saturday I picked up my cured beef there, which comes straight from their brining barrels.  It’s available throughout the year well wrapped and ready in their meat case next to the bacon, hams and other smoked cuts of meat.

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As American as the classic beef stew

February 10, 2016 / / Uncategorized

If you choose wisely, there’s a wealth of information on the internet for the home cook searching for recipes or ideas.  I refer to it all the time.  Several of my favorite sites include Food 52, Chef Steps and Serious Eats.  Their recipes are fully tested to be virtually foolproof, and at Chef Steps they offer instructional videos that are extremely helpful.

One that caught my attention recently was the recipe for beef stew from Serious Eats. It turned out to be the essence of heartiness, a perfect beef stew.   Several components, however, of the dish are unusual—certainly different from the typical methods used for this simple preparation.

All-American Beef Stew adapted from Serious Eats

All-American Beef Stew adapted from Serious Eats

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Pork Cheeks, bourbon, ham and veal stock: navigating the territory of new cuts of meat made into a glorious dish

December 16, 2015 / / Baking & Desserts, Mains, Recipes

Pork cheeks are one of those cuts of meats gaining popularity with the growth of nose-to-tail butchery.  We have some excellent sources locally at such butcher shops as Rosemont, The Farm Stand, Maine MEat and Bleecker and Flam who get in whole animals that are carved onsite.

You’ll find recipes for these novel cuts in the new crop of cookbooks being written mostly by innovative restaurant chefs who either slaughter the animals for use in their kitchens or rely on local farms and producers who offer these esoteric finds.

For a Saturday night dinner party at home last weekend I labored through a fairly complicated menu that revolved around my stash of pork cheeks based on recipes from John Currence in his book “Pickles, Pigs and Whisky.”  He’s a James Beard award winner and has a group of restaurants in Oxford, Mississippi (see review).

Braised pork cheeks in bourbon veal and ham stock reduction over Anson Mills grits bourbon

Braised pork cheeks in bourbon, veal and ham stock reduction over Anson Mills grits

I say “stash” because they’re not in plentiful supply at the shops because a pig, after all, has only two cheeks.  And unless the butcher is cutting up several animals in the same week you need to order in advance.  For 6 people I needed 12 checks (about two pounds), which meant that the butcher needed to work on 6 carcasses.

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Where to shop now in Portland: What’s new at Hannaford, Shaw’s, Whole Foods, Portland Food Co-op, etcetera?

December 14, 2015 / / Discoveries

I wouldn’t give up your holiday dinner reservations at Fore Street, Back Bay Grill or any of our other great Portland restaurants.  Nor should you cancel your holiday catering orders from Aurora Provisions.  But for perfectly good basic prepared food,  take a look at the new Hannaford Kitchen at the Forest Avenue store where everything from full dinners, sandwiches, pizzas, pastries, sushi, stir fry and more are cooked onsite.

The various food stations at Forest Avenue Hannaford

The various food stations at Forest Avenue Hannaford

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The infinite pleasures of classic meatloaf, a comfort-food favorite

December 9, 2015 / / Recipes

In the great wide world of comfort food, classic meatloaf is most everyone’s favorite dish.  Of course one’s idea of what constitutes the perfect recipe is open to interpretation.  I’m always on the lookout for tasty if not different takes on the dish. My mother, who was rarely inspired in the kitchen, was determined to make great meatloaf.  She dried every kind that came along.  One misguided attempt was made with bread soaked in milk and added to the beef mixture; the loaf was baked in an early version of a tabletop rotisserie.  It was awful! As a family we went out to eat often.

Classic meatloaf in tomato glaze

Classic meatloaf in tomato glaze

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Loving LFK: Lunch, Dinner and Sunday Brunch are well served at Portland’s most original watering hole

October 23, 2015 / / Restaurants

Portland leads the pack for chefs and restaurateurs to strut like superstars, waving their tickets to birth and background in frothy good will. That leaves a place like LFK  in precarious limelight, its firmament aflicker in irreverent ways. Like the naughty boy acting out, it defies convention in so doing what it does so well: hosting a nightly asylum of imbibing foodies in nocturnal repose–a smattering of bohemians in the midst of high gastronomy all around it.

It's blessed with a bird's eye view across Longfellow Square; diners at the bar

It’s blessed with a bird’s eye view across Longfellow Square; diners at the bar

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Where’s the beef? The glorious cuts for the perfect roast beef and the master butchers who make the cut

October 7, 2015 / / Mains, Recipes

Nowadays the new popularity of the classic neighborhood butcher shop offers a vital methodology of quality that can include locally farm-raised meats.  And such catchall phrases as natural, grass-fed, pastured, organic, sustainably raised farm meats are part of the vocabulary.

The sirloin roast from Bisson's

The sirloin roast from Bisson’s

Throughout Maine the tradition of butcher shops has remained fairly constant abetted by the strength of Maine’s farmers’ markets where farmers go to sell their bounty of farm-raised beef, lamb, poultry and pork.

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