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.

Good Times Café

Back in the late 80s, Chris and I used to have a favorite pizza place in Burlington called Filomena’s. It was little dive on the side of a busy road, but they had the best pizza around and served cheap Rolling Rock. The summer we discovered it, we were both on break from teaching positions. I had come up from Boston, supposedly to take a few classes but mainly so Chris and I could spend the summer together while he finished up his dissertation.

The Frosting On the Cake

My daughter Isabel graduated from high school this past weekend— a milestone that warrants all the buildup and fanfare and celebration that accompany it. Not only does it mark the end of thirteen-plus years of school, but also the end of her childhood. My feelings about this, of course, are mixed: joy at seeing her arrive shining at this threshold and sadness to be saying goodbye.

We threw a small party for Isabel, for which Chris and I made a slide show of her growing up over the years. As I was sorting through old photos, the memories came flooding back:

her baby sweetness,

Falling In Love Over Gazpacho

It’s rare for a place to exceed my expectations. Usually when I travel, I’ve spent the previous few months reading about and planning for my visit, so that when I arrive at my destination it already feels familiar, and sometimes slightly disappointing. Every now and then, though, I come upon a place that blows me away. It’s kind of like falling in love. Granada was like this.

Flavors of Portugal

I’ve been on the road for the past few weeks, or actually mostly on a river, the Douro specifically, in Portugal. My mom and I took a trip together in celebration of her 75^th birthday, and then I traveled down to Granada for five days to visit some friends who are living there on sabbatical (a Granada post will follow this one). While the trip was primarily a vacation, I was also happily doing “research” for a few articles I’ll be writing for Whisk on the food and wine of the region. Not bad work, I have to admit.