Yankee Articles from YankeeMagazine.com

Decorating for the Holidays

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

New England's style genius, Matthew Mead, creates a sparkling new look for decorating for the holidays, from tabletops to mantels, to staircase.

Love of nature and a passion for colorful china and glassware are the essential ingredients in Matthew's elegant style.

Follow his tips to make this season one that friends and family will never forget.

Thanksgiving Leftovers Recipes

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

VIDEO: Annie Cooks Egg Nests

At our house, we do a pretty traditional Thanksgiving: turkey and all the trimmings. We watch the big parade and football games with snacks and cocktails; then comes the feast, followed by a walk; then cleanup, pie, and finally a classic movie. I love the meal, and it's always delicious, but truth be told, it's the leftovers that really get me excited.

For me, the meal is more about ritual and tradition, the people with whom I'm sharing it, and the connections we're making. My sister Sarah and I agree: The effort that goes into the cooking is all about the sandwich the next day--whole wheat bread (lightly toasted, thank you), sliced turkey meat, a bit of mayonnaise, some cranberry sauce, a little cheddar cheese, some lettuce, and a smear of stuffing, with some potato chips layered right into the sandwich. One year, a cousin (whose name I won't mention here) ate the leftover stuffing for breakfast. All of it. Frankly, the holiday weekend was all but ruined (and we spurned her company ...). We learned: We make extra stuffing, and we come up with alternatives for the leftovers.

The sandwich is a perennial favorite, as are turkey tetrazzini, turkey hash, turkey soup, and simple sliced turkey with warm gravy. Last year, though, we wanted to push the boundaries a bit, but with yummy foods that didn't feel like second thoughts or scraped together. We weren't exactly hankering for another day in the kitchen, either, so the suggestions presented here are pretty quick and easy. (Here's a timesaving tip: Include the ingredients you'll need for these leftover recipes when you do your big market run.) Use your own standard holiday-table dishes as the starting point, or check out the Turkey Day recipes on our Web site.

These recipes are all great for feeding crowds, by the way. If you don't have company, consider a "day after" dinner party for neighbors with full houses. Many of these ingredients and dishes--mashed potatoes, squash, creamed onions, and the potato bread, for instance--freeze well, so you can also save them that way and make these recipes another time.

RECIPES

Lowell, MA: Poet Paul Marion

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Mr. Alphonse Hudon, / wearing a blue parka and dress hat, / leans on his cane on Pawtucket Street, / checking the freshly tarred walk / and grove of short pines / along the Northern Canal. / "Looks good, doesn't it?" I ask. / And he says, "I liked it better the way it was," / which opens up a line of talk ...

The poem goes on to tell of the conversation the two men had that day: Mr. Hudon, the older man, telling the younger one--the poet--how he used to know his father, and his grandfather before him, and an old neighbor named Mr. Marquis, who, 60 years ago or so ("before the wrecking cranes pulled up"), owned a filling station near the spot where they're talking. The young man recalls a house he knew as a child, a block or two away, with a tree growing through its porch roof. "Oh yes," the old man remembers, "that was Mr. Marquis' house. / And there was a monkey there, too ..."

Mr. Hudon is probably gone by now. He was old already then, and those lines were written years ago. And the village he remembers has been gone now more than 40 years--its only memorial a bronze plaque on a granite slab squeezed onto a narrow spit of grass a block south of the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts, a minute's walk from where he and the poet had their talk: "On this site grew the heart of the Franco-American community. Hard-working French Canadians came to fill the mills of Lowell ..." The granite was cut "from one of the last blocks ... to be torn down." And around the plaque's sides, a border of street names, a fleur-de-lis at each corner, and two dates: 1875-1964.

It was the poet himself who first brought me here, on a summer day more than a year ago, to deliver on his promise to show me the city of his poems. He's been writing them now going on 35 years, since before he finished college: poems about bars and laundromats and textile mills--"cotton was king" here, but there were wool mills, too; about boxers and politicians, God, death, young lovers, work, baseball, the weather. Nine collections--Strong Place, What Is the City? and more--plus essays, co-authorships, and editing several titles, including Atop an Underwood, a popular collection of Jack Kerouac's early writings. And at the heart of nearly all of it is this city where he was born. It is both his muse and his dearest subject, and the cause around which he builds his working days. His devotion to it defines him. I may never have known anyone who loved any place more.

His name is Paul Marion. We'd come that day from our offices at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where Paul wears a suit and tie and plans community outreach projects, and I write and teach part-time. For more than five years, we'd worked in the same office--although we didn't anymore--and I had come to value his warmth and wit, his vast knowledge of the city, and his love of the Red Sox.

And at least once every summer for the past eight years or more--because as much as he follows the Red Sox, he loves the Lowell Spinners more--we've sat together in the box he rents for the season at LeLacheur Park on Aiken Street, just three rows back from the field, and shared beer and kielbasa while the sun drops behind the scoreboard.

It was around that time last summer, a week or two before our Spinners outing, that I went with him to the little granite memorial. Our tour had begun several days earlier, when we'd met after work at his house. It's a grand house, in an un-grand part of the city, a mile or so south of the memorial: six bedrooms, Italianate, all brick and stone and high windows, built 150 years ago at the peak of Lowell's textile ascension, home to the agent of the old Appleton Mill, the city's largest at the time.

It's bifurcated today--with Paul, his wife, Rosemary, and their 13-year-old son, Joseph, in one half; the other half the home of his in-laws, who have lived there 50 years. Rosemary grew up in the house; her great-grandmother once worked there as a maid, before her son, Rosemary's grandfather, bought the place nearly 80 years ago. Joseph, both parents tell me proudly, is the fourth generation of their family to live there.

They explained all this to me over beer and peanuts in the oversized dining room, while Paul--who seems alternately proud and embarrassed by the grandeur of the home he's married into--came and went with family photos: of his grandfather the butcher, pictured in an apron in front of his market; his father the mill worker ("People always said he looked just like Sinatra"); Doris, his mother, who sold coats and dresses for 25 years in a women's department store downtown. He was in his element, and it showed: telling stories, shuffling photos, eyes alight, between what may be his two favorite subjects in the world, his family and the city of Lowell.

He talked about his father's job in the textile mill--the filth, the long hours, the years and years of daily drain. "I don't know how he stood it," he told me. "I got a job there one summer as a kid, cleaning the drains in the scouring plant--where they scour the dung out of raw fleeces with nothing but hot water and lye. The stink was unbelievable. I think I lasted two days." This took him to the subject of Lowell's mills in general--the wool uniforms for World War II soldiers, for the Union Army the century before--and from there to the immigrants who manned the spinning machines and the looms.

"The Irish were the first ones," Paul said. "Then the French, the Canadians--my great-grandfather, Joseph, in 1880, he was one of the early ones--and then the Greeks after that. But the Irish ran things for a pretty long time. The French were second. It wasn't till '36, I think, that we had our first French mayor ..."

The talk turned more personal later that evening, over dinner at an Irish pub downtown, where he shared with me, between interruptions (you can't sit down with Paul for long in many places in Lowell without someone calling his name), some of the quiet sadnesses his family had borne: his shopkeeper mother, Doris Roy Marion, who had never finished high school but who once boarded a silver railcar from Boston for a training program with Charles of the Ritz in New York, then caught the flu and came home ("I found the training manual years later cleaning out her dresser"); his father, a shy, quiet man who mapped out retirement trips to California and watched symphonies on TV ("kind of a closet intellectual without the education"), but gave his whole life to his mill job and died of cancer at 62.

"They were good people," he said to me. "Good working people. They dreamed dreams. But all they ever knew of life was work."

It was a side of Paul you rarely see, outside of his poetry. He's an affable man, very gentle in his ways, with wide brown eyes, a round face, and a story or clever remark about almost any subject you could name. There's a dreaminess about him, too, that comes across the first time you meet him--from his eyes, his slight smile--it's hard to know from where. You have to make the time, and do some digging--or hit just the right nerve--to get to where the poems come from.

I remember the first time I saw this. It was four or five years ago; I was teaching a class in freshman composition and had assigned a Paul Marion poem, "Majestik Linen," about a worker in an industrial laundry somewhere in Lowell, seen through a window on a Sunday-morning walk: "She turns back to her work, what most of us won't see / unless we're in the Flats at the hour of the early Mass, / following the drone of automatic washers / to a sunrise service recognized worldwide ..." A student in the class, a boy of 18 or 19 who rarely if ever shared his thoughts, raised his hand to tell me, with what seemed like genuine wonderment, that he recognized in the poem--he was very sure of it, he said--his mother's place of employment.

I told Paul about it the next time I saw him. His delight was as plain as a child's. "That's wonderful," he said. "He saw through the poem to his mother. He saw that place as a subject of literature. That made it matter for him. That gave it dignity."

Around that same time, I moved to Lowell from a small town in New Hampshire about an hour away. I had worked at UMass Lowell nearly five years by then, and had a pretty good sense of the city's past and present: the mill girls and millionaires of the 19th-century boom years; the slow obsolescence; the bottoming out through the '60s and '70s; the wax-and-wane cycle that followed; the flood of Cambodians that followed the Khmer Rouge genocide.

I knew about the blight, the muggings, and the gang violence, but also about the galleries, the small museums, the repertory theatre, and the artists' lofts downtown. I knew the city had been down and up and down again enough times to develop a sense of tragedy. But I liked that you could sit in deep cushions in the Caffé Paradiso and eat Italian pastry at 11 o'clock at night, and that there were real-imitation gaslights on Palmer Street, and that you could go to a pro baseball game for eight dollars, and that some of the streets still had cobblestones.

I liked what the city was on its way to becoming: a place where people honor the past but don't cling to it, and where a future is unfolding as you watch. Half a mile from the cobblestones is the 6,500-seat Tsongas Arena, spanking-new, of brick and glass, which has hosted Bob Dylan, Liza Minelli, Van Morrison, and the Boston Pops, along with Serena Williams, the World Wrestling Federation, and the World Men's Curling Championships. The old mills and boardinghouses are today's condos and artists' lofts. Walk a mile along the river and you'll see everything from the ruins of 100-year-old coal sheds to the site of the UMass Lowell's new nanotechnology center. Something exciting is happening: a newness, a kind of hipness peeking out from under the drear, that makes you want to be a part of it.

Part of Lowell's appeal, too, was Paul and other people like him--other artists, because the city is full of them. I was hoping that I might find some of the same gritty, life-grounding energy he was always talking and writing about. I did find the energy, but in the end it wasn't enough to hold me--other things came along--and I left after only two years. I've sometimes wondered since, though, whether I gave it enough of a chance.

It's several days after our pub dinner. We're standing now on the little grass island, deciphering the memorial, talking about the city's immigrant past. On one side is a company parking lot, mostly vacant now; on the other, the rear wall of the university's glass-and-concrete recreation center. It's late afternoon, warm and nearly cloudless, but even now the sidewalks around us are empty. It seems an unlikely place, I tell Paul, to memorialize anything. "Yes," he answers, "but here is where it all was."

This starts him on the stories. He's so full of stories, and of their connections to one another and the lessons he sees in them, that when he goes to tell you one, it will start out clear and linear, like anyone's family story, but then branch out and loop back and link up with others, until what you thought was a simple piece of cloth is suddenly a tapestry.

The monument, he tells me now, was placed here by the priests of St. Jean-Baptiste parish, "to mark the passing of Little Canada," their name for the neighborhood. The church, he says--now standing empty--is on Merrimack Street, one street over from Moody, where his grandfather's butcher shop was ("His store is a parking lot today"). On every street in the neighborhood--Aiken, Cabot, Cheever, Coolidge, and the others, all the streets named on the monument--"the tenements were as dense as Hell's Kitchen in New York." They were so dirty and low-class, he goes on, that his mother, from the Centralville neighborhood on the other side of the river, "wouldn't be caught dead here as a girl"--but still somehow wound up with his father, who grew up on Cheever Street. This starts him on his father, and the work he did grading wools: "a rare skill," he says to me now as his thoughts near the end of their looping--and there's something like pride in his tone--"to be able to grade the wool, one fleece from another, based only on its look and feel ..."

The stories go on, sometimes sideways, just as often backward in time: about his father, a machine gunner with the Fourth Infantry Division, who marched across Germany, then came home to grade fleeces in Lowell; his father's father, Wilfrid the butcher; Wilfrid's father, the carpenter Doda, who married Rosalba, a weaver on a textile loom; and before Doda, Joseph, also a carpenter, who came south in the 1880s from Quebec. He can trace it back all the way to a merchant named Nicholas, from Normandy, who came with his bride to New France--Quebec--and settled there and raised a family, around 1665.

They're all gone now. His father's mill is gone--all the mills are gone--along with the butcher shop, St. Jean-Baptiste parish, the department store. Little Canada was bulldozed in the '60s--a late victim of urban renewal, which had already taken the Greek Acre and other neighborhoods--to make way for public housing. The downtown emptied: the stores, the Strand Theatre, the sidewalk markets, all shuttered or moved to the malls. Buildings, whole blocks, were burned or flattened; parking lots replaced businesses; the population fell by a quarter; unemployment reached 12 percent. "Somebody ought to drop a bomb on this place," a high school history teacher told Paul's brother's 10th-grade class in the mid-1960s. It was the city's darkest time.

"They were here, and then they were gone," Paul is saying now. It's early evening. We've been driving, for the past 30 minutes, the little grid of streets just east and west of the Aiken Street (Ouellette) Bridge, the neighborhoods' old dividing point, and have come full circle back to the monument's little grass island. I've had the full tour, both sides of the river: the parking lot where Wilfrid's market once stood; the shuttered old neighborhood church; a blighted, prewar building complex, North Common Village, where men in undershirts sit in clusters on front stoops; the four-story red-brick fortress, St. Louis School, now in its 103th year, where, Paul once told me, his mother and Jack Kerouac, both Centralville natives, were schoolmates nearly 80 years ago; Paul's birthplace on Orleans Street, still a tidy two-family.

"We can't have those tens of thousands of lives just erased," he says. He's standing a foot or two back from the monument as he says this, sweeping an arm, almost angrily, right to left across his chest to take in the little island, the street and the land behind it, and the river, a block away to the north. He's been talking, for the last several minutes, about the mills that used to line the shore here: "the armies of workers who tramped through them--Irish, Greek, French Canadian, Swedish, any country you could name," and how their lives and stories, their comings and goings from this place, were what made him, in the end, want to write his poems.

"People were here," he says to me now, stabbing a finger first at the granite slab, then at the air and sky beyond it. "There are people inside that piece of stone. Lives were lived here. That had richness. That had value. That deserves to be counted."

All that history and geography / in a supersaturated marker, /
tucked between evergreens on Aiken Street ... / You stuck an arm out the window /
to touch the next tenement. / You heard one tongue for blocks ...

In a short essay at the end of his latest collection of poems, Paul quotes from Joan Didion, describing the relationship between another writer--James Jones--and the place and time he wrote about: "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image ..."

I'm sure I've never known a writer who has claimed any place harder, devoted himself more obsessively to its literary incarnation--and reincarnation--than Paul has Lowell. The difference is that whereas most artists (Jones, Twain, Faulkner, Whitman, Kennedy, Banks) seek to render a place, however lovingly, as a canvas on which to play out some larger truths, for Paul the place itself--and its people--seems the highest truth of all.

"It's a sort of alternative kind of preservation," he once said of his poetry to a reporter. "The whole world is in Lowell. It's so various. Every drama you can imagine, every human condition, is here." And so he captures and freezes them. Two hundred years of ghosts, like layers of old-growth timber: the wool grader; the Little Canada butcher; the laundry worker; Mr. Hudon out on his remembrance walk through the vanished neighborhood. It's not nostalgia he's after; he's a preservationist. He walks the city on Sunday mornings--it's an old habit, he says--as though it were a boneyard, in search of sightings, fragments, to fuse together somehow and recast. The bones become his poems, his verse documentaries, his version of the granite marker but more alive by far.

And as they're read or heard--or assigned in classrooms by teacher-advocates like me--they achieve the goal of all good documentaries: "People have to care about a place. That's where you begin, by getting them to care, by talking about heritage and shared purpose--a common past--by taking the story of Lowell's people, its folkways, out into the neighborhoods ... That's been the constant for me, always: using culture as a social glue."

This hunk of rock on Earth /
states its case for the record, / like the metal message
boards / shipped out with satellites, /
telling somebody out there who we are.

Make a Perfect Pie Crust

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Pies are such an important part of this holiday season -- especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas -- and everyone has a favorite. In my family, we could go back and forth well until the football games are over before deciding on just one.

For Dad, it has to be mincemeat; for Aunt Ginny, it's apple with sharp Vermont cheddar on the side; for me, it's pastry chef Erika Bruce's maple-pumpkin.

We make three or four pies for our family feast, and by sunrise on the fourth Friday in November or the day after Noel, there's nary a one to be found.

Whatever the filling, we do agree that a flaky yet sturdy pie crust is the key to pie happiness. But as much as I love pies, I confess that baking them doesn't come naturally to me, and just thinking about it has led me to ruin a perfectly good manicure. The "ringer" ingredient used to be shortening, but with all the bad health news about hydrogenated fats, we don't go near it anymore.

What's a pie lover to do? I'm happy to report that after a lot of trial and error, I've finally cracked the pie-dough code. With some help from Ken Haedrich, author of Pie (Harvard Common Press, 2004; $27.95), and the good folks at King Arthur Flour in Norwich, Vermont (800-827-6836; kingarthurflour.com), I figured out that it's really all about just three key steps:

1. Keep your ingredients well chilled. It'll help prevent the butter from mixing uniformly with the flour, so that pockets can form among the flour particles. Translation: flaky crust.

2. Use a combination of pastry flour and all-purpose flour. Different flours have different amounts of protein (a.k.a. gluten), which forms strands, which form layers, which form...you guessed it...flakes.

3. The third trick is in the mixing. Once the butter gets down to pea-sized pieces, use the heel of your hand to smear them into streaks as you mix the dough. Try that, and you'll turn out delicious, flaky pies every time.

Read more: Comfort of a Pie, with seven pie recipes at the end

What's your favorite pie? Submit your comments below.

RECIPES

No-Fuss Thanksgiving Dinner

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Thanksgiving Timeline for this Menu

To determine what a traditional Thanksgiving feast ought to include, I took an informal and unscientific poll among friends and colleagues.

Just about everyone agreed on a juicy turkey with crisp brown skin and stuffing, of course (although one friend claimed that a tough, dry bird was part of his holiday since childhood, so he purposely overcooks his).

With the exception of mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce, though, the "must haves" for side dishes varied, from green-bean casserole to candied yams with marshmallows.

Of course, everyone wanted a delicious and special feast, but not a back-breaker -- they wanted time to spend with family and friends. So I pulled out some of my own family's favorite dishes and looked at some seasonal classics and made them all a little less fussy -- but still gratifying.

As for the bird itself, my years of turkey cooking have proven to me what we all know: The white breast meat tends to cook first and dry out, while the thighs take a bit longer. Try these remedies to keep the meat moist:

If you're cooking for a crowd, use smaller birds -- two 14-pounders, say -- and roast one the day before. The next day, take the preroasted bird out of the refrigerator an hour before you put it in the oven, and then heat it at 250 degrees for an hour.

Cover the breast with foil or cheesecloth soaked in chicken or turkey stock. (Remove it during the last 45 minutes of cooking so the skin browns nicely.)

Basting helps, too. I doubt the juices penetrate the skin or add to moistness, but the liquid will evaporate off the skin and cool things down a bit as the bird cooks away.

Brine your bird, or buy a kosher turkey. I rely on brining -- I think it delivers a consistently juicy and delicious roast every time.

RECIPES

Crafts: Scented Pillows

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

I love hosting family and friends in my home. When I have overnight visitors, I like to make them feel welcomed. Leaving a scented pillow on a guest's bed is one of my favorite greetings--and what's best is that it's also his or her gift to take home as a fragrant memory of a warm visit. Always a fan of the gift within a gift, I like to embellish each pillow with a vintage scarf and brooch (or for gentlemen, a tie and tie clip). All of these components look beautiful together, but may be enjoyed individually as well.

1. First, assemble your materials. At your local fabric store, ask for cotton drill (a durable twill weave). It's usually priced at about $5 to $10 per yard; one yard can make six pillows.

2. Find a quantity of loose New England balsam, either from local craft sources or for about $3 per pound from Kelco Industries (kelcomaine.com). Other sources include Maine Goodies (mainegoodies.com) and Vermont Balsam (vtbalsam.com). Lavender, sage, rose petals, and rosemary are other fragrant filling options.

3. Scour local flea markets for scarves and brooches. One of my favorite spots is Todd Farm in Rowley, Massachusetts, on the North Shore (toddfarm.com).

4. Now it's time to put it all together. For each pillow, sew a portion of fabric, wrong side out, into a 10-inch square, leaving 1 inch open for the balsam filling.

5. Turn the pillow right side out. Using a kitchen funnel, fill the pillow 90 percent with balsam.

6. Sew the 1-inch gap closed.

7. Wrap the pillow with a scarf and tie a bow.

8. Fasten with a brooch, and voila--a surprise gift for your happy guest!

Best 5: Eco Shops

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Yankee contributor Christie Matheson, author of Green Chic: Saving the Earth in Style (Sourcebooks, 2008; $12.95), goes shopping for great "green" goods at these eco shops.

THE CLEAN BEDROOM
Kittery, ME
For the room where we spend the most time--and benefit most from a pure environment--find organic mattresses, sheets, and pillows, plus nontoxic bedroom furniture and air filters.
Dan's Crossing, 5 Shapleigh Road, Kittery, ME. 866-380-5892; thecleanbedroom.com

THE GREEN EGG
Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA
Every goodie in this friendly shop, with stuff for tykes, women, and home, is seriously stylish (no easy feat in the world of sustainable products), thanks to owner Tracey Davidow's fabulous taste.
19 Central St., Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. 978-525-3445; thegreeneggshop.com

GREENWARD
Cambridge, MA
Everything here, from safe and snazzy reusable water bottles and bamboo bowls to sleek composters and killer bike accessories, encourages customers to think green at home and on the go.
1764 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA. 617-395-1338; greenwardshop.com

THE CENTER FOR GREEN BUILDING
Bridgeport, CT
Even eco-skeptics can appreciate pragmatic green home products--air purifiers, caulk, slate roofing, energy-efficient lighting--and the local events this award-winning store sponsors.
3380 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport, CT. 203-382-0774; centerforgreenbuilding.com

YOUR HOME YOUR WORLD
Concord, NH
It's easy being green when there's a home and design resource like this for well-priced, environmentally sound paints, countertops, flooring, cabinets, rugs, and recycled glass tiles.
138 North Main St., Concord, NH. 603-223-9867; yourhomeyourworld.com

New England Scallops

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Scallops are a true New England treat--their very shape is an iconic reminder of beachside fun and shell-hunting summer afternoons. Their real gift, however, is delivered when our waters begin to chill down, for what lies snugly between those grooved, hinged shells is a faintly sweet, buttery nugget with a mild tree-nut flavor.

Perhaps the crowning jewel in this molluscan dynasty is the beloved bay scallop, specifically those from Nantucket. Even raw, they taste like briny pieces of candy. The meat of the bay scallop is about the size of a dime (by contrast, their sea scallop cousins may grow to three inches across), and they cook in two minutes.

The commercial season for Nantucket bays begins November 1 and runs through March. Many fine restaurants feature them on their menus while they're available--but why not pick up a pound of these ocean wonders and do it yourself?

Scallop Sources

As with all seafood, buy your scallops from a trusted supplier, whether local or online; note that larger sea scallops are sometimes cut to look like bays, or aren't handled with the care that these sensitive jewels require. We rely on these folks for pristine quality and excellent service, in person or by mail:
Browne Trading Company
Portland, ME
800-944-7848
brownetrading.com

Captain Marden's Seafoods
Wellesley, MA
800-666-0860
captainmardens.com

RECIPE

Weekend: Providence, RI

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

After your outstanding dinner, spend those calories on great Providence walks and places to visit along the way.

Providence has always had great food -- the city teems with citizens hailing from Italy, Portugal, France, and all parts of Asia, and it's home to one of the nation's top culinary schools. Discovering a bounty of classic dishes here is one of the best ways to connect with the heritage of this 370-year-old waterside community. Now more than ever, great food is front and center in "the Renaissance City," so we put on our walking shoes and set out to sample some of the best of its many gems.

Arriving Friday Evening, we headed straight to Federal Hill, home of Italian cuisine in Providence. We poked into Venda Ravioli and were glad we packed a cooler -- the best way to bring home those handmade pasta pillows stuffed with basil, ricotta, and aromatic Gorgonzola cheese.

But much to our surprise, it was Chinese food that caught our eye for dinner here -- at MuMu Cuisine, smack-dab on Atwells Avenue. A friend had given us a good tip: Ask for the Mongolian hot pot (it's not on the menu). We also indulged in tea-smoked duck and whole steamed sea bass -- but even the most pedestrian of Chinese food standards (scallion pancakes, Peking ravioli, and General Gao's chicken) are carefully prepared here from fresh, vibrant ingredients.

After that -- in the interest of international goodwill, mind you -- we couldn't help but cross the street for a dessert of torrone (almond-studded nougats) and chewy cherry-and-almond macaroons from Scialo Bros Bakery. Sweet dreams ...

Saturday morning, and our first decision of the day -- what to sample to start off right? I first tasted Olga Bravo's morning treats more than a decade ago, when she set up shop next to Walker's Roadside Stand in Little Compton. Now Olga's Cup and Saucer is in Providence's Davol Square neighborhood, and her baked goods are better than ever. Breakfast flatbreads (topped with tomatoes and fresh herbs) and out-of-this-world muffins, fruit pies, and scones launched our first morning in Providence. It was hard not to return for lunch, but we forged onward.

Walking along Thayer Street took a bite out of our budget. We could barely carry all the bags crammed with clothing, books, and trinkets we apparently really needed (but had managed to live thus far without). Lunch would have to be easy so that we could return to ogling still more treasures we couldn't afford. Farmstead was a golden selection. More than 100 cheeses (mostly domestic) are on display, along with house-made patés and terrines, honeys, olive oils, and crusty breads. We chose a perfectly ripe slice of Constant Bliss (a cow's-milk cheese from Vermont's Jasper Hill Farm) and a batard of bread. Owners Matt and Kate Jennings offer dinner at their sit-down restaurant, La Laiterie, next door -- yet another reason to return to Little Rhody.

We'd like to report that we walked for the next few hours, but truth be told, we were knackered, and a long, delicious nap was how Saturday afternoon unfolded. When we awoke, hunger beckoned again, and we answered the call with a meal at Gracie's. Chef Joe Hafner makes simple, ingredient-driven meals, with a strong focus on locally caught seafood. His menu follows the seasons, but if you're really lucky, you may be able to get some of his pickled vegetables, too.

Sunday morning ... Already our last day, and it was clear there would be no way to visit all the restaurants and markets on our long list. We knew we couldn't leave without sampling the fine fare at Aspire Restaraunt (at Hotel Providence), though, so we opted for breakfast. We ordered a big variety, but did our best to take small bites from decadent platefuls of Belgian waffles, omelets, and fresh muffins.

We ate hot dogs for lunch -- but don't laugh, because these were no ordinary wieners. At Spike's Junkyard Dogs we learned a thing or two about teaching an old frank new tricks. The signature "Junkyard Dog" is topped with pickles, spicy peppers, house-made mustard, and scallions -- not for the faint of heart. Sauerkraut, teriyaki sauce, and buffalo-wing sauce and blue cheese are also on the menu. Or, for the purists among you, try one au naturel for a fresh taste of one of these smoky, spicy, 100 percent beef (no fillers, no sweeteners) wonders.

With the car packed, our last meal was at newcomer Temple Downtown, just steps from the Rhode Island state house. A curved, candlelit entrance winds into an elegant dining room, serving a menu created with locally sourced ingredients. Traditional stuffed clams get along well with tempura-battered, deep-fried broccoli rabe and thin, crispy steak frites. Were it not for the long ride ahead, we would have delved more deeply into the extensive wine and cocktail list, as well. Divine Providence indeed ...

Energy Efficient: Vermont Five-Star Home

rss@ypi.com (Yankee Publishing Inc.) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:00:00 +0100

This brand-new house in Vermont has everything -- a spacious kitchen with soapstone counters, a great room with mountain views, an attached three-story barn, and a basement gym.

Frieda Wimmelman and her husband, Alan Binnick, have built a dream house, but much of what makes this home stand out is actually hidden from the eye.

Materials like foam insulation and argon gas in the windows, ductwork placement, and a balanced ventilation system are "invisible" unique features. And they're the ones that helped win this house a five-star rating from the federal government's Energy Star program, which identifies energy-efficient products and systems for new and existing structures.

The home, a contemporary farmhouse design, fits the landscape. Dormers and varying rooflines resonate with the hills that surround the property. Atop the barn, a red cupola faces Haystack Mountain. In the dining room, large windows look out on Frieda's favorite view-- Mount Snow. In winter, she trains their telescope on the ski trails there. She is so delighted with the view that she and a friend once prearranged a time when he would wave his ski poles from the mountain so she could spot him through the scope.

Frieda's connection to this land runs deep. She and Alan built on the site of the farmhouse where she and her brother were raised. "It was a hard decision to take down the old house," says Frieda, "but we lived with drafts, poor insulation, and constant upkeep, and I felt I could never leave in the winter for fear the whole place would seize up." Ironically, Frieda is so happy with her new hilltop haven, she seldom leaves the property. In summer, she tends a huge garden with hardy varieties of celery, eggplant, asparagus, tomatoes, and dozens of other vegetables. She saved extensive flowerbeds from the original house during excavation. In winter, she and Alan snowshoe and cross-country ski on trails that lace their property.

Before they built, Frieda says, she had a bad case of house envy. She clipped a photo of a beautiful home from a local real estate ad and tracked down the contractor. She and builder Art Carlucci worked with architect Dave Shaughnessy to design a building that uses state-of-the-art energy technology and captures the soul of her childhood home. They salvaged old beams, wide pine floorboards, cabinetry, and graceful wrought-iron balusters, adding to the "settled-in" feeling of this new home.

The process of going for an energy rating started with Art's submitting the blueprints to Vermont Energy Star Homes, which made recommendations (at no charge) for windows, the heating system, insulation, and lighting. The house has Marvin windows with an aluminum-clad exterior and wood on the interior, a wood-fired boiler with a hot-water storage system made by HS Tarm, many fluorescent fixtures, and Energy Star-rated appliances. Throughout construction, a certified home-energy rater evaluated (at a $300 charge) everything from duct leakage and R-factors of ceilings, walls, and floors to the efficiency of lights and appliances and air infiltration from the outside (requiring a blower door test). The home-energy rating came in at 89.6; for five stars, a house must score 86 or above.

Having an energy-efficient house does more than help save the planet's resources. In addition to the money homeowners save on utilities, there are federal tax credits and state energy partner rebates available for participating in the program. Art received a $2,000 rebate, and Frieda, $1,025.

Frieda, like many Vermonters, is practical and independent. Frieda and Alan have just had a test tower for a wind turbine installed. "There's no reason not to build for energy efficiency," she says. "I saw this house as my only chance to do it right."

Turn Your House Into an Energy Star

1. Effective Insulation

[What you can do]

Reduce heat loss through the roof by making sure you have 10-14 inches of insulation (fiberglass, rigid foam, or cellulose) in your attic. Distribute insulation evenly so there are no low spots along the eaves and floor joists are covered.