A week ahead of Robert Burns Night, we had a Scotch Night at the Old Colony Club. Master Distiller Curtis McMillan (in the kilt) guided us through the intricacies of blended Scotch whiskey and single-malts from the lowlands, highlands, and the islands. It was a fascinating tour of these oft-misunderstood spirits. For sustenance of a less spiritual nature, Richmond and I provided a heart-stopping array of Scotch eggs, smoked salmon, whole-meal bread and cheddar, and of course a Haggis!

The lore was fascinating indeed, and McMillan's knowledge is encyclopedic. I promise to do a good write-up on Scotch whiskeys in the What's in my Glass section soon. In the end, Richmond still like his neat and I still like a couple of drops of water, but now we know why.  We tried a variety of whiskeys, and based on what I liked of them I asked Mr McMillan what he would recommend for me: he suggested Lagavulin, which has been my favorite for many years! 

I will also write up the recipes for the foods we served.

Well yesterday was about the dreariest day ever in the history of the world. Not the saddest day, of course. It was just an awesomely, perfectly crummy gray-white-misty day for a drive. We left the rain behind us along the south shore and ended up pushing through endless fog and drizzle for 400 miles out Route 2 to Deerfield, Sunderland, Montague, and Turner's Falls. Bleh.

We had a wonderful day! Somewhere on Route 2 between Orange and Erving we saw a juvenile Bald Eagle right across the highway, and that wasn't the last of our winged wonders. Our destination was the Magic Wings Butterfly Conservatory in Deerfield, MA - a huge greenhouse filled with tropical plants and swarming with butterflies. It's a sure-fire way to get a dose of summertime in the dead of winter.

We took the scenic route to Hartford, getting on US44 in Plymouth and following it all the way (with some inevitable missed turns) through Providence to Hartford.  There are faster ways to Hartford, but this was a great ride with winter scenery, the back streets of Providence and Hartford, and treasures along the way in Putnam and more.

Of course, US44 has been a major road for over a century, so any place that can be built up has been built up. It winds its way through Raynham and Taunton, Dighton and Rehoboth, Chepachet and Pomfret, and most of these towns have a certain homey charm if you are open to it. And of course, there's plenty of open country in Connecticut's NE corner.

One of my favorite finds was the old Yacht Club Soda factory in Providence. It's not retro - it's old. And it hasn't changed much in a hundred years. I got some of their tonic water in hopes it's less sweet than the big brands.

New Year's Eve day was beautiful, so we took our traditional year-end-review drive. We pick a direction and go as far as we can until dark, then we turn back. On the way out, we go over everything we can remember of the past year, and on the return we make plans for the coming year. It's amazing how much you can remember once you get started!

It makes a difference which direction we go. Not only is the scenery different, but sunset comes earlier in the east and later in the west. Sunset yeasterday in Milbridge was at 4:02pm. An equivalent drive to the west might have found us in Hamilton, NY with sunset over half an hour later at 4:38pm! That means we might have pressed on to Cazenovia or Syracuse... But then we would not have seen the lobstermen's Christmas Tree in Rockland.

It is New Year's Eve! Happy New Year everyone!

New Year's Eve is traditionally amateur night for drinkers. Christine and I like to find a happy home locally to get together with friends, cook good food, have a few drinks to celebrate the greatness of last year and happily bring in the hopes and dreams of the New Year.

I am making a dish that I cooked at a competition a year and a half ago. Even though it did not score that great with the judges, it is an amazing dish. Lime marinated scallops, wrapped in prosciutto on rosemary skewers.

As a competitor on the BBQ trail, I have had my fair share of highs, lows, and "Should Have Beens". While getting started in BBQ, some of the teams associated with NEBS (New England BBQ Society) will mentor rookies testing the waters. Originally, I was allowed to cook with Andy King and The Bastey Boys. I have become a Bastey Boy. I was fortunate enough to cook with Michelle Taft, Terry Sullivan, and Sully (no Gary Taft this time) of Lunchmeat at the 2011 Roc City Rib Fest in Rochester, NY.

As a mentoring BBQ cook, I cooked only one category. Being the coastal rat that I am, I selected scallops as my entry. Competition is tough in Rochester. Fifty BBQ teams converge on the shores of Lake Ontario for Memorial Day. These are not your run of the mill teams. The competition is some of the toughest around.

We were in Worcester for breakfast for reasons I do not recall right now. I got it in my head that I wanted something I have only seen at the Broadway Diner, on Water Street near Kelley Square: the Matzoh and Eggs with black coffee.

It's not a photogenic dish, but it's a hearty breakfast on a cold December morning, especially with their corned beef hash.

The Broadway is at one end of a long block off Kelley Square that is known for its great collection of Jewish deli-style food. From the cheese blintzes and the matzoh-and-eggs at the Broadway Diner to Widoff's Bakery and Weintraub's Deli, I suddenly knew I needed something more.

Like Coney Island Hot Dogs nearby, Weintraub's has been around for a long time, and Weintraub's really looks it. The inside appears to be unchanged from about 1940. A menu from that year adorns one wall, shilling house specials like pickled herring, frankforts and eggs, and Pickwick Ale. Sandwiches included Roumanian pastrami, tongue, mixed meat, and sardine, perhaps to be washed down with a glass of Tokay.

A few years ago we celebrated Richmond's 65th Birthday Dinner with a feast that might have been served at Boston's legendary Locke-Ober Restaurant on the day of his birth.

Annette has always been more partial to the restaurant at the glamorous Ritz-Carlton Hotel, so for her birthday Richmond and I created a dinner from The Ritz-Carlton Cookbook.

Here's how we did it:

We opened with a Winnemere cheese from Vermont's Jasper Hill. Winnemere is a Vacherin-style  washed-rind cheese wrapped in spruce bark. It is full of rich, earthy flavors and it was at peak ripeness. The cheese course was accompanied by a fine Pauillac Bordeaux from the Talbot cellar. It had been brought back from a trip to France some years earlier.

Next we had a delicious Scallop and Saffron Bisque.

Our friends the Halls came to dinner in early December. I had worked with Jim for years, and he has heard a lot of our adventures, so I made a special Best of New England dinner for them. I ended up including fine food and drink from five New England states, and I only missed Rhode Island because we hadn't been there recently.

Here's what we enjoyed:

• We opened in the living room with a Van Vleet Cocktail made with lemon juice, New Hampshire maple syrup and 8 Bells Rum from Portland's New England Distilling. This was a fitting accompaniment to a wonderfully rich and complex, perfectly ripe bark-wrapped Harbison cheese from Vermont's Jasper Hill Farm.

We spent a day prowling along the upper Cape from Bourne to Orleans and back seeking goodies for a feast the next day.

It was a long and productive trip, and at the end we drove home along Route 6a and saw the Giants of Sandwich - big light displays of people and things relating to the businesses that host them. We like to visit the giants every December, and every December there seem to be more of them. The mastermind is a local glassblower named Michael Magyar. You can read more about the giants in this article from the Cape Cod Times. 

 A fancy feast requires a fancy dessert, and nothing dresses up the intended Buche de Noel like fine candies. When it comes to fine candies, I like to go to Stage Stop Candy on Route 28 in Dennisport. There are other confectioners on the Cape (none like the weird and utterly brilliant Chef Paul's Truffles!), but I always seem to find something that exactly suits my needs at Stage Stop.

Our usual Saturday adventure was almost entirely displaced today by the very important matter of replacing our backup conveyance. After 13 years of Chevy Malibus, your earnest and hard-working Pilgrims will be exploring New England in a Chevy Impala. Friends and relations of your ever-lovin' Pilgrim know how terribly conservative we are, but time marches on and there was no Malibu to meet our needs. This week's Saturday will be on Sunday, in the Impala!

The Search function works again, but it will be a little while (a few hours) before the site is completely re-indexed. Until that happens, you might search for something and miss a result that has not yet been indexed. By tomorrow morning the search should be working and reliable. Thank you for your patience!

I had to disable Search because it was broken. A behind-the-scenes software change in a module at the hosting site caused the Search function to break. I have an upgrade to fix it, and hope to get to it by the end of this week or on Sunday. I apologize for not having this valuable function!

I haven't finished this big project yet, but I have made a lot of progress and it's ready to show.

All year I have been pairing New England Craft Beers with complementary foods. I have posted 80 pairings so far, representing 60 or more Craft Brewers of New England.  You can see the images in a photo gallery on this site, and there are bigger versions of most of them on the Foodie Pilgrim boards at Pinterest.

While I was doing this, I used a couple of tactics. At restaurants I just picked an interesting beer and selected something from the menu to complement it.

We both had the Friday after Thanksgiving off. We're not what you'd call "Black Friday shoppers", so we went to a couple of small towns with thriving downtown shopping districts; Keene, NH and Northampton, MA.

Keene, in the Mount Monadnock region of NH, really celebrates local and quality food. The community is unabashedly locavore, home to many fine restaurants markets like the wonderful Hannah Grimes Marketplace as well as the rapidly-approaching Monadnock Food Coop. We had an excellent lunch at Lucas Mediterranean Cafe just off the circle at the end of downtown. Keene is between Peterborough and Brattleboro, two more fine foodie shopping areas.

Between Keene and Northampton you can take I-91, but it wasn't a highway kind of day, so we took Route 10 through Northfield to Miller's Falls, then Route 63 and Route 47 to Northampton.

Miller's Falls is home to Element Brewing, one of the many Microbrewers of the Pioneer Valley and winner of the Best of Show for this expedition.

There's a lot brewing in Portland, ME, in every sense of the word! We spent a day exploring that fine city, which is fairly well bursting with foodie goodness. Regular readers of this blog know that we love Portland, whether as a destination or just passing through en route up the coast.  

There are, at my last count, eight brewers in Portland, plus a meadmaker, a distiller, coffee roasters, the fish markets, locavore dining and drinking, and more. Shown here is Pizza Pie on the Fly. Ryan tows that brick oven around and makes incredible handmade pizzas while you watch. I tried the butternut squash with dates for a fall treat, and really enjoyed it.

The Jews, the schools, and the auto companies all have the right idea.  The year begins in the fall.  The cooling of the weather puts you in the mood to restart your life.  Naturally I'm making resolutions.  One is that I'll keep the freezer and refrigerator full of material for good homemade soups.

I made a batch of chicken broth.  Old cooks say that you can't make chicken soup properly without the feet so when I'm near a Chinese market I buy a pound of them to keep on hand, but my supply was a little outdated, and a freezer burned chicken foot is not a pretty thing.  I omitted them in this latest batch. I got two family packs of drumsticks on sale and put them in a tall pot with parsley, celery, onion (including the skin for color) carrot, and peppercorns.  I added no salt; it can be put in later if needed.

We have explored every corner of the Green Mountain State, up and down both sides and across the middle on most major roads, but somehow we always managed to bypass the farm country below the western slopes of Ascutney Mountain. This is the area north of Chester as far as I-89 at Bethel. There's no reason to avoid the area, but it's not on the way to anywhere, and it has no specific attractions that aren't more easily reached via I-91, I-89, and Route 4. It is very pretty, with rolling hills and mountains, open fields and plenty of livestock. Along the way we saw sheep, horses, cattle, goats, and alpacas.  

Chester is a fine starting or ending point for this short trip; it has B&Bs, dining, and antiques. 

Woodstock is in the middle on Route 4, offering easy access (and speed traps!) to Killington/Rutland to the west and Quechee Gorge/I-89 to the east. Woodstock is a prosperous tourist center with plenty of attractions. The surrounding countryside is horse country.

At the northern end Bethel is right on I-89 so you have easy access to the rest of the world. You take Route 106 for the drive south of Woodstock, and Route 12 for the northern part.

I had a free day, so I decided to travel around the world.

I'm not a slow driver, but a day was rather too little to cicumnavigate the globe, so I went to Worcester instead. In Worcester I could travel the culinary world, starting with the very modern American craft beer renaissance before exploring Middle-Eastern, Italian, African, Swedish, Southeast-Asian, Polish, and Jewish-American markets and delis, finishing up with good old-fashioned US of A hot dog, 1918-style at George's Coney Island Lunch.

As regular readers of these pages know, craft beer is enjoying an incredible renaissance in New England, with over 100 brewers already in operation. Worcester is represented by the Wormtown Brewery, and it also boasts a number of restaurants and bars committed to celebrating local bounty.

We took advantage of a beautiful day to poke about the incredibly scenic byways of the Boothbay region of midcoast Maine.

Boothbay Harbor is  about 10 miles south of Route 1 just over the bridge from Wiscasset, and it is the primary destination for most tourists, with good reason. It is beautiful, and in the summer it is full of shopping and dining.

We explored all afternoon, starting on the eastern Linekin/Rines Wharf side of the peninsula and finishing at sunset at the Cape Newagen boat landing on the Southport Island side. At every turn there was another gorgeous vista worthy of a calendar. The roads wind left and right, up and down, and you never know what you'll see next, but you know it's worth the trip. 

Best of Show goes to the Boothbay Craft Brewery, led by founder/brewer Win Mitchell.

We had a fine and productive day exploring Rockland, Maine's pleasant downtown shopping and dining district. It's a nice area for walking, with the pretty park-bordered waterfront just steps away, and views of the busy harbor. The weather was pleasant and sunny, if a little cool.

Rockland boasts many foodie delights, including Rock City Coffee Roasters and the associated cafe, the busy Brass Compass Cafe with its legendary Lobster Club Sandwich, a fine kitchen shop, bakeries, taverns and more. There's really no excuse to go hungry while shopping in Rockland!

I see some of the "Finer" things that John is doing with this site. My mouth waters every time I read his posts or I yearn for the items he is showing off from the Farmer's Markets and vendors. This stuff is just spectacular. I love the local flare shown here. Whether we know it or not, we are all local flare. Did you know that?

I am not sure how many of you have children. Some of the "Finer" things in children's lives are connecting with their parents on any level. As much as they may rebel against us, like we did with our parents, they love us as we do our parents. What better way to connect with our children than getting down to the most basic of life's requirements? Social eating is as old as caves. Cooking with children is about that old.

As we get more and more into a service lifestyle where we tend to order our basic needs online we need find a way to keep some of the basic rituals alive especially cooking.

I have been divorced for a long time. My daughter was 5 when this happened. Right now, I am happy to say, my daughter and I have a fantastic relationship that somehow developed around getting together to eat. I didn't have much money so I would bring her over to my house and cook dinner for her. It wasn't long until I had her helping. That basic element created a fantastic bond that continues to make us closer.

Of course, after time, the skill development and the imagination grew. And, the internet began to influence our thinking. My daughter found a YouTube series of videos called Epic Meal Time.

We had an excellent feast to welcome autumn 2012! This year was a real surprise - our discoveries hit home runs on every front. That is not hyperbole; this was a really great dinner.

Every year I am so glad when the fall comes and I can cook all the great harvest goodies. This year I already knew what I wanted to make ever since the Mass. Brewers Fest in late August.  There I got to try the Brut from Enlightenment Ales and I knew what I had to serve with it when the time came.

I have been pairing foods with beers from New England Craft Brewers for some months now, and this planned pairing really excited me. I am glad to say it worked out very well.

Enlightenment Ales makes Biere de Champagne, an exciting new style of beer that has the celebratory effect of champagne, the dry seriousness of fine wine, and the accessibility of craft beer. The Brut is effervescent and dry, but hoppy-herby in a way that wakes up spices and complements mild flavors without overpowering them.

This feast would be a great menu for vegetarians for a Thanksgiving feast.

When last we saw our intrepid pilgrims, they had enjoyed a productive visit to Shoreham, Vermont and acquired the coveted Northern Spies and Golden Russets, a jack o'lantern pumpkin, and a handful of interesting winter squashes. Now night was approaching and there were more treasures yet to be discovered on the map.

Top on the list was something I had already tried three times for, each time with increasingly nearer misses: The Alchemist's Heady Topper. Heady Topper is one of the stars of the many craft brewers of Vermont. What makes it special is a story for another page; for now the story is how I finally got it, and you can too.

Of Vermont's many Craft Brewers (I count 21 on that page) there are three celebrities that are the buzz of beerhounds all over New England and beyond. The Alchemist, Hill Farmstead and Lawson's Finest Liquids are nationally known and celebrated award-winning brewers of interesting ales.

We took advantage of what might be our last chance for a foliage drive in Northern New England for this year with a trip out the Mohawk Trail to Williamstown, then north through western Vermont as far as we could go. It was a great trip! I got way too much foodie goodness to record in one post, so there will be another later this week with more. 

The ride up the Mohawk Trail was leisurely and beautiful. In the higher elevations, the foliage was past peak, but the river valleys had plenty of color, and the vistas from the high ground were definitely worth the trip. Our goal was on the far side of the mountains, so we knew that we would see some bare trees on the way.

Route 2 meets Route 7 in Williamstown, MA. From Williamstown we turned north along Rte 7 through Bennington, VT and on to Manchester.

In Manchester we stopped at the great Garden Arts Fresh Market where I got some pasture-raised pork for this weeks lunches, and a bag of Deano's Jalapenos for sustenance on today's drive.

We went to Wellfleet for their annual OysterFest. We had heard of it for years, but never attended. This year I made it a priority; I visited the website (link above) and prioritized the many events and talks, and noted vendors I wanted to see. We had been warned that it draws a big crowd, so we planned to get there early.

It was mobbed!

I have never seen crowds like that on the Cape, not even in P-town in July, and especially not in October. But everyone was well-behaved and the event was very well organized. There were plenty of trash containers, and extra buckets for recycling oyster shells, of which there were many. There were also plenty of workers emptying the trash and keeping up with it pretty well.  

Best of Show had to go to the oysters. The Fest really is all about Wellfleet's prized bivalves, and there were at least a dozen tables set up with crews from various oyster farms shucking as fast as they could, trying to keep up with demand.