Does anyone still cook Sunday dinner? A kind of old-fashioned, main meal of the day with roast, potatoes, side vegetables and dessert that everyone sits down to around noon or 1:00 p.m.? Maybe you know that in the 1700 and 1800s most people ate their main meal around mid-day; easily done by farm families, […]
All you have to do to make this soup is boil the ingredients. Well, of course, some of them need chopping in advance, but once assembled and in the pot, they can just sit and bubble away for a few hours, then you can eat it. There are no thickeners so it is very low […]
There must be someone who doesn’t like carrots but I don’t know who they are. Particularly beloved of children, even vegetable-dubious ones, carrots seem like a low-risk vegetable for any occasion. Perfectly good raw for dipping, simply steamed, roasted in the oven, grated into salad, carrots are really flexible. Still, it is fun to have […]
The word oatmeal conjures up a bowl full of soft, sticky mush with sugar and milk on it, just the ticket for a cold winter’s breakfast. That image just won’t work if you envision mush in a pie crust. That is definitely not what oatmeal pie is about, although the first time Kay Staples sent […]
There is precious little that we can consider wholesome about this cheesy dip. Considering, however, that the football players we will watch on Sunday are risking skulls and limbs, dipping your chips or vegetables into this melted mess of calories probably won’t do yourself as much harm as either Patriots or Falcons are inflicting on […]
Some of you out there probably beat me to using farro, an ancient form of wheat that is very useful cooked whole the way anyone might use barley, for instance. I’ve been reading about it, and saw some at the store so picked it up thinking I’d give it a try. It sat around a […]
Just so you know, January is National Oatmeal Month. And next Tuesday is National Peanut Butter Day. To celebrate both, here is a very interesting recipe for big, wholesome cookies with both ingredients that have the added convenience of lacking gluten! Plus they come with an intriguing story. Alice Janet Bartlett Easton of Oakland died […]
This past growing year was a good one for butternut squashes and pumpkins. The yield was ample enough to make it possible–yea, necessary–to eat one a week for four months. Some of the squashes were big enough to suffice for two meals for two to three people, or more depending on how I prepared them. […]
The recipe called for pumpkin, pancetta, parmesan, and penne—charmingly alliterative—but what I had was some butternut squash to use up and apple wood smoked bacon. Of course, it worked just fine, and was so stupendously better the next day that I thought maybe I ought always to make it ahead. The butternut squash was a […]
What do you eat to promote luck in the New Year? I can’t think of anything that dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders serve up to ensure good fortune. I suspect that most of us think that is a silly superstition, and that we make our own luck as best we can by industry and thrift. So some […]
Sandy Oliver Sandy is a freelance food writer with the column Taste Buds appearing weekly since 2006 in the Bangor Daily News, and regular columns in Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors magazine and The Working Waterfront. Besides freelance food writing, she is a pioneering food historian beginning her work in 1971 at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she developed a fireplace cooking program in an 1830s house. After moving to Maine in 1988, Sandy wrote, Saltwater Foodways: New Englanders and Their Foods at Sea and Ashore in the 19th Century published in 1995. She is the author of The Food of Colonial and Federal America published in fall of 2005, and Giving Thanks: Thanksgiving History and Recipes from Pilgrims to Pumpkin Pie which she co-authored with Kathleen Curtin. She often speaks to historical organizations and food professional groups around the country, organizes historical dinners, and conducts classes and workshops in food history and in sustainable gardening and cooking. Sandy lives on Islesboro, an island in Penobscot where she gardens, preserves, cooks and teaches sustainable lifeways.
