Working Waterfront

Recipes made immortal in vintage cookbook

Sometime in the 1930s, the members of the Islesboro Women’s Club spent hours typing out recipes they collected from their membership and neighbors and assembled it into a cookbook that they covered with canvas. Embroidered on the front were the words “Cook Book” and a figure of what appears to… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Summer afternoon’s splendors and labors

Henry James famously wrote “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” Summer afternoon. Out in the garden, the peach trees laden with ripe fruit, about to fall off, or turn into a blob of mold. Yes, you can grow… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

From Aunt Annie’s point of view

The house I live in was Adrianna Bunker’s home from roughly 1869 until the mid-1920s. For about 20 years she cooked in a small kitchen in the back half of what is now my living room. In 1889, her husband Emery modernized the house by connecting it with an ell… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

It all depends… and repeat

One summer from June into September, I baked two cheese cakes every seven to ten days. It was one of two or three dessert choices on the dinner menu of the bed and breakfast inn where I worked. I learned a lot about cheesecake that summer, though not as much… SEE MORE

Grindle Point Lighthouse with the Camden Hills to the west.

Working Waterfront

When Chebeague came to Islesboro

We all started out in our respective island kitchens on the morning of May 2, assembling lunches—sandwiches, salads, goodies to go—eight women from Chebeague and about a dozen on Islesboro, when the Chebeague Methodist Church Ladies Aid came for a visit to Islesboro’s Sewing Circle. Initiated by Jane Frizzel, leader… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

My old kitchen stuff: practical, not vintage hip

The best place to get kitchen utensils is a flea market, collectibles shop or antique mall. Or your grandmother. In my case, it was my mom and grandma, at least for the basic collection. Every once in a while it does occur to me that I have a fine collection… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Egged on by good health news

It’s OK to eat eggs again. Thank goodness. In fact, it is even fashionable. About 20 years or so ago, eggs were put on the Bad For You list. Cholesterol, of which eggs have quite a bit, was the culprit, apparently. Predictably, egg alternatives showed up in the marketplace because… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

‘Drops,’ the freewill offering of apple trees

In my childhood Octobers, my dad and mom tossed my sister and me plus several bushel baskets into the back of the Studebaker station and we drove to an apple orchard that let its customers pick up apples—drops—that had fallen to the ground. It was a great outing, and the… SEE MORE

Looking north from the western shore of Islesboro

Working Waterfront

Yes, it is ‘so much work’

"You make your own bread? That's so much work!" "Look at your garden. That takes a lot of work." "Cooking a meal takes a lot of work." And so it goes. As if making an effort was not entirely worthwhile. As if we each were somehow entitled to ease and… SEE MORE

A WWOOFer at a farm in Connecticut poses with the bok choy she grew.

Working Waterfront

The world came to me this summer, via WWOOFers

A weeder’s dream vacation is going to a Maine island and staying in someone’s house, getting three squares a day, and all the fresh air you can breathe in exchange for weeding, mulching, planting, thinning, building compost piles, watering and weeding some more. This summer, I discovered that there are… SEE MORE