Working Waterfront

Making food in the time of AI

AI isn’t going to peel your carrots for you. It’ll explain how and why to do it or not, or, most appealing to modern people, what’s the fastest way. In fact, here is what AI advises: “The fastest way to peel carrots is to use a swivel peeler to make… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

My best kitchen utensils

Periodically, some august publication sets forth a prescription for The Best Kitchen Utensils. Sometimes I even agree with them, though their emphasis is usually on new single gadgets while my list contains splendid vintage items and multitaskers. Here is my current list. Good knives: a large chef’s knife, two fine… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

All that is old is new again

Writing for the New York Times, Kim Severson annually digs deeply into food trend predictions and comes up with what we ought to expect to see in the coming year. For islanders, the good news seems to be that with a little tweaking, we can participate this year. Or, actually,… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Why serve baked beans in summer?

Some people doubted anyone would want to eat baked beans in the middle of summer. On Islesboro the Masons do a ham-and-beans supper on the fourth Tuesdays of September through May. There’s mac and cheese, coleslaw, tossed salad, rolls, sometimes hot dogs, desserts including cupcakes, cookies and sometimes chocolate or… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Food advice: It’s always something

Remember when we thought eggs were bad for us, high in cholesterol, eat one a week, think of them as a food equivalent of a hand grenade? Remember Egg Beaters? Eggs are now OK again. Remember the Fear of Fat era, when a package of watercress I bought had the… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Cake and catastrophe

Hot muggy weather is hell on buttercream. Still, a lot of island-destination weddings and other grand events are planned for summer. Special cakes to mark nuptials, anniversaries, and birthdays, carefully constructed, decorated and set out to be admired before being carved up for consumption, are so vulnerable this time of… SEE MORE

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Estela and the pears

Sometime close to Christmas 2024, Estela Rodriguez packed a dozen truly wonderful pears in a carefully padded box which were ordered as a Christmas gift sent to me from Harry and David’s in Medford, Oregon by my dear friend Nan. The pears flew (I assume) across the continent to an… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Seasonal eating as an extreme sport

As an experiment one year, I vowed not to buy, cook, or eat any out-of-season vegetables. No eggplant in December. No asparagus in January. No broccoli in March. Sort of eating by pre-Civil War era standards. (You’d be surprised how quickly fresh produce found its way north after the hostilities… SEE MORE

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The recipe is just part of the story

It’s a terrible job writing recipes. I know this because during the past 40 or so years, I’ve written around 1,400 of the little stinkers. The biggest chunk of those were recruited from friends, neighbors, and readers which I tried out, reworked a little, and published for a weekly column… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Digging deep into Maine’s recipe pantry

Both books feature Oliver’s homespun stories about recipes, contributors, and history, and offer real insight into authentic Downeast cooking, from both the past and the present. And you don’t need to feel you’ve embarked on scholarly research while perusing recipes here SEE MORE