24 Hours in BTV

What does it mean when the car’s Check Engine light comes on? One of our cars is an aging Subaru, so this is a commonly asked question in our house. Even the skilled mechanics at our garage seem uncertain about the cause. “It could be about 300 different things,” they tell me as they hook up their diagnostics. After running the car through their scanner, sometimes they still can’t identify the cause. If nothing shows up as a problem, they simply turn off the light. Maybe it will stay off for a while, but there’s also a chance that it’ll come back on before I pull into our driveway.

The 14th Dessert

There’s no place I’d rather be for the holidays than at our home in Vermont. Even though some winters it’s so cold outside that your eyelashes almost freeze shut, Christmas in Vermont is storybook beautiful. If we’re lucky enough to have snow (and we usually do), stepping inside from a winter wonderland to the coziness of a wood stove fire and the smell of holiday baking and cooking is, to me, the essence of home.

Comfort Me with Apples...and Fettuccine Alfredo

Poor, gray November. For a lot of people, it’s their least favorite month of the year. Gone are the brilliant leaves and blue skies of October, at least here in the Northeast, and instead a bleak chill settles in over the bare landscape.

Brooklyn North

Hipster music venues, check. Burgeoning art gallery scene, check. Diverse demographic (relative to Vermont), check. Dynamic restaurant row, double check. The Brooklyn of Vermont is none other than a place called Winooski, the Abenaki word for “onion.” It even has a bridge (albeit understated) connecting it to Burlington across the river.

On Bristol Pond

Change is in the air in Vermont. Hot, hazy days of summer have given way to crystalline skies and breezes that feel like cool silk on your skin. The color palette in the meadows and mountains has started to shift from vibrant greens to deeper, muted tones. In my extended family, a lot of change has happened recently as well: a wedding, a funeral, and my oldest daughter Isabel headed off to college for the first time.

If I Could Change One Thing About Vermont

Much as we Vermonters are fortunate to be surrounded by healthful, creative, and delicious foods that are grown and produced right in our proverbial, and literal, backyards, there is one thing that we’re missing: fish and seafood fresh from the ocean. Yes, we have Lake Champlain running along our western coast, with its spectacular sunsets over the Adirondacks and myriad opportunities for water fun, but I have yet to eat anything that lives in that body of fresh, not salt, water. We have some quality fish vendors like Costello’s in Middlebury, and Ray’s—who graciously park their seafood truck at the intersection just outside of Bristol every Wednesday—and excellent restaurants that turn out an array of freshly flown in fish and seafood dishes. But they just can’t compare with getting it right off the boat. For that, we need to pack up the car and head to the ocean.

Dinner Under the Pergola

To me, the finest summer meal celebrates our garden, which is just coming into its own right about now.  Since it’s on the small side, I usually need to supplement with the produce of other local growers and producers, so the meal becomes a local foods fête in the best sense of the word. When the weather cooperates, I like to eat under our pergola, which feels like an airy room framed on one side by the garden, and on the other by a row of raspberry bushes, with grape vines, wisteria, and weeping larch entwining overhead. If asked to visualize a happy place, I would put dinner under our pergola at the top of my list.