The Happy Taco is pulling its weight making Gloucester a secret foodie “It” city. Parked on Gloucester’s waterfront, looking a bit like a huge tennis ball that rolled down Rogers St. and got lodged on the curb, The Happy Taco is a food trailer – not quite a truck. Food trucks are cool, particularly ones with great recipes and organic ingredients. The Happy Taco has all that, and its fish tacos are made with cod hauled ashore thirty feet away.
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If Thomas Jefferson visited Vermont today, he would admire The Stone Soup Restaurant in Strafford, a pristine white clapboard building with a fertile garden happily brimming from its imposed geometry of hand-built stone walls and grassy paths, set on the edge of one of America’s most beautiful town greens.
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Not Thailand, Essex.
At Alprilla Farm, farmer Noah Kellerman has a hothouse full of ginger, the roots of which he’s now selling at the Gloucester Farmers’ Market on Thursday afternoons.
Puffballs, Langermannia gigantea, those comical orbs so satisfying to stomp on and send up in a smoke of spores, are prepared like eggplant at the restaurant A La Table des Jardins Sauvages. Daisy buds are pickled. Elderberry flowers marinated, and clover made into a crumble.
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The results are old news now: Adrian chose octopus; Christian chose veal, and Jen was left with mushrooms in the Fox Masterchef cook-off among the final three contestants. Local hero, Christian, walked away, defeated by a dull veal chop. Jen won, and we hated her for being so full of herself, so blond, so former beauty pageant, so current real estate agent, for defeating our boy. Except for her pasta. No one could hate her pasta.
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My “Eat, Pray, Love” moment came long ago and all at once on the shores of Lake Como.
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The photographs of Alex MacLean are currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Clark Gallery in Lincoln, MA through October 2. For information please visit www.clarkgallery.com
Supposedly, one benefit of having a personal chef prepare a dinner party is to allow hosts time to circulate with guests, but in my case last weekend the fun at the stove rivaled the fun at the cocktail hour.
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Sponsored by the Gloucester Fisherman’s Wives Association, a new season for Cape Ann Fresh Catch, community supported fisheries – meaning you give a fisherman money to go fishing and receive a regular supply of the freshest fish available – begins tomorrow.
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Cynthia Greig toys with the “concept of photographic truth and its correspondence to perceived reality.”
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Everyone cooked in my family, even my brothers. We subscribed to Gourmet Magazine and hungrily read the articles about what people in little French villages were having for supper, and then my mother and I tried to recreate them ourselves.
My academic background is in painting and writing, but I waitressed at Jasper’s and Hammersly’s Bistro in the 1980’s, when dining in Boston was just becoming exciting, and the people in it - waitstaff and kitchen staff - were like a small university of students and faculty. Everyone knew each other, ate in each other’s restaurants, and were aware that dining in Boston had just turned a corner, inspired by youth, global awareness - these were chefs who had traveled to Europe - and new respect for American ingredients. It was a wonderful community of people who cared about all sorts of good food and wines. Because they cared about these arts, they also cared about growing food, preserving space for it to grow, preserving the lifestyles of people who grow it. We were all beginning to understand that caring about what was served on a plate was to care about the bigger picture.
Married, the mother of two daughters, I now live in Rockport, Ma. My daughters cook. Everyone in our house welcomes a new cookbook for the dinner and dessert possibilities it might offer, which really means the possibility of changing our lives just a little, pretending we live in a little French village for a night. Isn’t that what food does, too - a little bit of theater every single day? “What are we having for dinner tonight?” is really the question of “What is the performance tonight? Where are we traveling? Who will we be?”
I write a column called “Food for Thought” for The Gloucester Daily Times. In it and on this blog, I’m always looking for the possibility food offers for transformation and I’m looking for those wonderful communities of all kinds who care about preparing a great dish, setting a beautiful table, drinking a good glass of wine, and then having a great conversation.
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