All posts tagged maine

Once a staple in lunch boxes of blue-collar workers, sardine cans now collect dust in pantries and cupboards — the last resort in a power outage, perhaps.

Nation’s Last Sardine Cannery Closing

Sandwiches

1. Rye or pumpernickel bread, red onion, slices of hard-boiled egg, sardines, mustard and/or mayonnaise to taste.

2. White or whole-wheat bread, sardines, mustard, a couple drops of hot sauce if you have it. (This is the simplest, and also my favorite. If you are out of bread you can apply the mustard directly to the sardines and eat with a fork.)

3. White or whole-wheat or anadama bread, sardines, a fancy spread: spicy chutney or a good red pepper jam.

4. Baguette slices, sardines, drop of olive oil, drizzle of lemon, chopped parsley.

5. I’ve never tried this one myself but someone told me sardines and mashed avocado with a squeeze of lemon juice, on sourdough or other sturdy bread, is delicious.

Pasta

1. Thinly slice and roast one fennel bulb. Saute an onion in some olive oil, then add a large jar of crushed tomatoes or your favorite jarred pasta sauce. Stir in the roasted fennel and a can or two of sardines (remove bones and flake). Toss with cooked rotini or other twisty shape. Garnish with chopped fennel fronds and black pepper.

2. Stir a can of de-boned, mashed sardines into a bowl of leftover plain pasta, any shape. Squeeze of lemon. Lots of pepper. Eat.

2a. Variation: Stir a can of de-boned, mashed sardines into a bowl of leftover plain pasta, any shape. Squeeze of lemon. Some leftover cooked cannellini beans and/or a few handfuls of strong-tasting greens, like arugula. Asparagus or fiddleheads would work too. Pepper. Eat.

Etc.

1. Sardine dip: Put 2 cans of sardines, a block of cream cheese, the juice of half a lemon, a tablespoon or two of minced onion or scallion, and a tablespoon of minced parsley in a blender or food processor.

2. Fried sardines: Pat dry. Dredge in flour, roll in seasoned crumbs, fry. Careful, they fall apart.

3. Sardine pie: Use sardines instead of canned salmon in your friend’s Canadian grandfather’s famous salmon pie recipe (sorry, I can’t give you any more details than that).

• A piece of maple taffy (recipe: get a trough of snow and a large metal pot. Boil some fresh maple syrup in the metal pot, then ladle it in long thin streams across the trough of snow. Let it cool for a moment, then whack it into pieces using whatever implement is handiest.)
• Two pieces of maple sugar candy (recipe: boil some fresh maple syrup until it reaches some special candy-like temperature, pour into molds, cool, serve in frilly red or white paper cups)
• Maple-covered Chex mix from a tiny paper cup
• Maple baked beans with salt pork
• Hot black coffee from a medium-sized paper cup
• A tiny paper cup of maple soda (recipe: mix a shot of fresh Grade B syrup with seltzer to taste)
• An even tinier plastic shot-sized cup of fresh Grade B syrup, plain and unadorned (this was the best thing I ate yesterday, out of all the things I ate yesterday in various shacks in the woods)

Take one bunch of knobbly golden beets and that sweet potato that’s been languishing. Scrub, pare root ends and slice off the eerie alien hair-growths. Reserve the beet greens for soup tomorrow. Cut the beets and potato into cubes and toss with some olive oil. Spread on a baking sheet and roast at 400 for about 30 minutes, until the vegetables start to caramelize around the edges.

You may decide to skip the salt for once.

Eat hot, while it’s snowing.

Map for reference.

Lunch #1: A granola bar and an apple in the car, because I was running late.

Note #1: If you’re packing an apple from home, always wrap it in a napkin and tuck it in a plastic baggie — that way you can wipe your fingers and dispose of the core without making a mess. My mother taught me this when I was very small.

Supper #1 after a long day of travel and research: Perfect baked haddock (slab of fish, coat of Ritz crumbs) served in a cream-colored oval gratin dish alongside a blistering hot baked potato, the whole plate a study in beige except for the lemon wedge; a slab of homemade bumbleberry pie and a couple mugs of hot black coffee.

Breakfast #1 in preparation for a long day at a sled dog race: Fried egg over very hard (on purpose), three strips of blistering-hot bacon (I’d ordered Canadian, but it was fine), a homemade blueberry muffin split in half and grilled, multiple cups of hot black coffee.

Lunch #2 in Kokadjo after the mushers had taken off and before they returned: A hot, greasy, pink-in-the-middle hamburger and some hot, salty french fries, both doused in ketchup; several styrofoam cups of hot black coffee from a pot in the adjacent general store.

Note #2: The temperature of foods becomes very important when it’s -2 before the windchill.

Supper #2: After the long day at the dog sled race all I wanted was a hot bath; after taking a hot bath the last thing I wanted to do was to put on pants and go out again, so I was lazy and had another granola bar and some almonds and an apple while I lounged in bed with my books and notebooks and actually it was quite lovely.

Breakfast #2: Because I was traveling on a budget I’d stashed a yogurt I’d brought in the motel fridge, but when I opened it I realized it was frozen solid, much like the landscape outside the window. Solution: do not get annoyed about having to eat a  container of icy yogurt for breakfast — get excited about eating ice cream for breakfast! (Copious amounts of hot coffee followed.)

It is almost Christmas and that means it is time to make tourtière, the French-Canadian meat pie that’s served at réveillon or any time thereabouts. Apparently the proper pronunciation is “tou’-tYARE,” with the rolly R, but in my homeland of central Maine we say “toochay.” I’ve heard that there are $30 tourtières for sale in my former/adopted homeland of New York this Christmas, courtesy of a Montreal restaurant called Au Pied de Chochon. These tourtières are made with Heritage Foods meats, including guinea hen and brisket! They come with a side of cranberry ketchup! I’ll bet they are delicious. But if I told a local French-Canadian grandma (mem-AYRE/memmay) that the toochay cost $30, mémère would roll her yeux and laugh.

All you need to make a toochay is 3/4 lb. ground pork, whatever’s cheap at your nearest store, and 3/4 lb. ground beef, ditto — not too lean but not too fatty either, maybe the stuff labeled 85%. If the 80% is cheaper, though, go for it. Then you need one finely-chopped onion, two small yellow potatoes, some salt and pepper, allspice, an egg, and a double pie crust. The Pillsbury kind in the red box is fine if your memmay never taught you how to make crust.

(Note: You may not have allspice in your cupboard, unless you’ve been making gingerbread cookies, but it is absolutely not optional here. Go buy some allspice. You can substitute cloves, which are equally traditional, but if you are the sort of person who has ground cloves on hand I feel like you’d also be the sort of person who has allspice on hand.)

To prepare the filling, put the ground meats and the chopped onion in a large pot with half a cup of water, bring it to a boil, then stir well and lower the heat. It will look disgusting. Put a cover on it and let it simmer on very low heat for two hours. Yes, ground meat cooks quickly. No, this isn’t a pot roast. I don’t know. You cook it for two hours.

When the meat has about half an hour left to go, get the rest of the filling ready. It’s the opposite of complicated! Boil the peeled, diced potatoes in salted water, then drain them and mash them. Do not think about using a mixer or a food processor for this task. Use a potato masher. The French-Canadians traveled down the Kennebec-Chaudière corridor in carts containing all their worldly possessions; you are lucky to even have a potato masher.

After the potato is mashed and the meat is almost done, preheat the oven to 325 and line a pie plate with half the crust. Has it been two hours? Yes? Then skim any visible fat and excess liquid from the cooked meat and mix the meat into the potato, or vice versa, if your pot is bigger than your bowl (inadvertent stoner reference!). Use the potato masher to smush the filling around, then add a teaspoon of salt, a half-teaspoon of allspice, and several grinds of black pepper. The mixture will still look disgusting, unless the thought of mashed meatloaf appeals to you, but at this point it will smell intoxicating.

Scoop the filling into the pie pan and apply the top crust. Crimp the edges and cut a vent in the middle — a couple of slashes is customary, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t carve your initials or a patriotic fleur-de-lis. Remember the egg? Get it out of the fridge, break it into a small cup, beat with a fork, brush over the crust.

Into the oven! It only takes 20 minutes to bake, which is nice considering how long the meat has to simmer. The hard part is letting the toochay stand until it’s cool enough to slice. Like meatloaf the taste and texture get better with time, so if you can leave it alone for a few hours that’s the way to go. In my opinion toochay is best the day after it’s made, reheated or not, with plain old tomato ketchup from a squeeze bottle or your memmay’s Ball jar.

Bon appaTEE/Enjoy.

Bonus: A heated tourtière “debate” from 1991, via the CBC digital archives.

Things volunteers, donors, friends and families brought to No on 1 headquarters in the final week of the campaign:

• A basket of oranges
• A couple bags of local Maine apples
• A couple bunches of bananas
• Homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, individually wrapped
• A separate tub of Skippy peanut butter and a plastic knife
• A jar of homemade raspberry preserves
• A few extra loaves of bread
• Jumbo boxes of Emergen-C
• Rafts of bottled water
• Bottomless buckets of Halloween candy
• Tortilla chips
• Pretzels
• Chocolate Chex mix
• Dozens of pizzas every night
• Mini tuna salad rolls
• M&M cookies
• A crockpot of chili
• A tub of roasted peanuts
• Generic granola bars
• Boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and doughnuts
• Bakery muffins
• Delicious mini pumpkin-cranberry muffins
• A few precious platters of raw fruit and vegetables
• Cough drops, several bags

Saturday

• Peanut granola bar from Hudson News at Port Authority, consumed on the downtown A platform as I was running to catch the train, an hour late because of the stupid bus, which had gotten in late, and I had been on the bus all day, and my only snacks there were a vegan green foods bar and a large Fuji apple — oh, and a bunch of Gin-Gins ultra strength candies
• Whiskey ginger at the Delancey
• Another whiskey ginger at the Delancey
• Cheeseless veggie pizza slice from the place around the corner from the Delancey, inhaled between sets, wondering what idiot replaced the Gray’s Papaya on the corner with an eyeglass store
• Another whiskey ginger at the Delancey
• A bunch of water
• 1.5 fish tacos at the place that used to be Dash Dogs (thanks for sharing, Sean!)
• More water, more water. By the time I got near a bed (thanks, Erin’s roommate!) I’d been awake for almost 23 hours exactly.

Sunday

• Huge, delicious brunch from Brooklyn Label: roasted veggie hash with potatoes and baked tofu (I’d wanted the version with eggs, but whatever, the place was packed and it was still delicious); toast; approx. 5 cups of Stumptown coffee which was fine but really nothing special.
• I’d thought about going to Chinatown later in the day but I was so stuffed after brunch, for hours.
• Cheap generic deli chocolate-chip cookie, impulse-bought and eaten while watching handball players in a park
• Gala apple from a deli, ditto
• Shortly thereafter I happened to pass a Red Mango, and having read so much about this Korean chain’s yogurt prowess, I decided to try the limited-time-only pumpkin flavor. It was good, but not overly pumpkin-y, though it did have nice tang and a hint of cinnamon. At $4 a cup I wouldn’t do it again. (And then I was too full to eat anything else but I was desperate for something salty or umami after all that sweet — I hate when this happens.)
• Right before boarding the A train to JFK I wandered down Christopher Street and decided to drop in the Stonewall Inn for a drink, a sentimental good-luck toast of sorts for Maine. Perfectly serviceable house Merlot and an extremely generous pour for $7.
• Ended up starving at the airport a couple hours later and eating a Clif bar I had in my bag.

A thing I quite like about visiting New York now, as a former resident, is that I feel no particular pressure to eat landmark foods or visit must-try restaurants. I have lots of memories; I don’t need to scramble about for more. I just need to indulge my whims and fuel my wandering.

Remember this?

It’s been a month. I tasted the fig brandy with a spoon and found it good; a glug of pure Maine maple syrup (extra dark amber) and another 24 hours in the fridge made it even better.

But that’s where my fig brandy story ends, because the following evening was my friend A.’s 30th birthday party so I decided to be that person who strolls into the party bearing a gift of fig brandy. It would have been the best gift of the night had someone not arranged for a visit by an ersatz (and possibly tipsy) Slugger.