We were taking a rare overnight trip for Lorna's Birthday. Friday we went to Cadillac Mountain and had dinner in Bar Harbor, then spent the night in Camden.

We started Saturday touring scenic Rockland. Rockland has a thriving foodie scene, with plenty of fine markets and artisans both in town and in surrounding towns. Some of those are listed at the bottom of this post.

Best of Show has to be the incredible lobster club sandwich at the Brass Compass in downtown Rockland. It features all the meat of a very fresh 1-1/4 lb Lobster and plenty of perfect bacon. It's enough for two. The lobster stew was equally generous and made fresh while we watched. We didn't need the Maine Blueberry Pie, but got it anyway...

We took a foliage drive out through the Berkshires even though it was a cloudy day because the next sunny day would be during the week and we work for a living. The foliage was about peak through the higher elevations along the Mass Pike, and very good during our drive from Pittsfield south through Stockbridge and Great Barrington and then east through the hills of northern Connecticut to the scenic Barkhamsted Reservoir.

In Pittsfield, we found the Wandering Star Craft Brewery, one of the 100+ Craft Brewers of New England. I have not seen any of their beers in cans or bottles, but they were filling growlers, so I get a few. Chris and Shannon were extraordinarily busy (as craft brewers tend to be), but also very friendly and helpful (as craft brewers tend to be). Even Fuggles the brew-cat was friendly, in her kitty way. You can follow Wandering Star on Facebook.

I had to go to a car parts place in Wareham today, which brought me through Carver. Southern Plymouth county, especially Carver and Wareham, are famous for cranberries, and now is the time to harvest them, so I hoped to see this iconic south coast image famous on postcards and calendars from these parts.

The cranberry harvest is an interesting and picturesque endeavor. Cranberries grow on vines rooted in sandy cranberry bogs. Ripe berries float, but sand doesn't, and there lies the secret of the modern cranberry harvest. A little Yankee ingenuity made the old rake-scoops obsolete in favor of much faster, less labor intensive water and pipes.

Each "bog" looks like a flat plain of sandy soil covered with a wiry vine and bordered by drainage ditches. Usually there is a nearby upland area with a pond behind a dam, and some pipes to the drainage ditches.  When the berries are ripe, the bog is flooded and the berries float to the surface as in the second photo above.

I had jury duty at the Hingham courthouse in the morning, but they let us go before lunch, so I had an opportunity to explore this well-heeled seaside town on the Boston end of the South Shore. There are some fabulous homes along the coast and hidden among the marshes and woods. We have driven through there many times; today I wanted to explore on foot. Fortunately the area around Bare Cove and Hingham Square are particuarly nice for walking around and finding some lunch, and roses were blooming everywhere.

My first stop was by the waterfront at Bare Cove. It's a scenic area with a string of parks and public spaces with harbor-views looking past expensive shorefront homes and out toward Quincy and Boston.

There by a park was Redeye Roasters. What a great little discovery! The people were busy, but very welcoming and friendly. They roast their own coffee in a cheery red-and-gold San Franciscan roaster. Owner Bob Weeks delivers fresh-roasted coffee all over Hingham, and ships coffee wherever you need it.

I had hoped to get to Rangeley Lake in northwestern Maine on Saturday. It's a long way away over mostly country roads and the drive is just so nice that it's easy to get distracted and then not have enough time to get that far.

That's not so bad, because after all the journey really is the destination and it's beautiful country to drive through. We saw farm country, broad vistas, rugged hills and rocky waterways, and the trees were just starting to turn. Evans Notch and Rte 113 were worth the trip alone. And of course we found some real local flavor.

One of my goals all year has been to penetrate far enough into central and western Maine to track down the elusive Maine Red Snapper. In central Maine, the Red Snapper is not a fish, it's a hot dog with a bright red casing. To be honest, the Red Snapper is just like any other standard supermarket hot dog, but it's red. I wanted it more for anthropological reasons than as fine dining! 

There's more food little-known beyond western and central Maine.

The next few weekends will be the height of the foliage season in northern New England, so we decided to scout out the best foliage drive in Vermont.

A foliage drive is all about seeing the turning leaves, but driving through endless corridors of trees can be frustrating; the best foliage drives include open space as well to offer vistas. We found a route that offers near and distant mountains, lakes, farms and fields, and corridors of trees, and farmstands, all along roads that wind left and right, up and down.

The foliage drive started on Route 9 in Brattleboro, VT. A few miles west of Brattleboro (and the locavore Chelsea Royal Diner and Dutton Farm), you cross the top of Hogback Mountain, where a scenic turnout offers glorious vistas southward to the Berkshires and the Connecticut River Valley.

For the longest time I always thought sausage came in two ways - either cased like a "sausage" or else in a patty. You could mix it with tomatoes to create nice gravy for your spaghetti, grill it to enjoy with peppers and onions, pan sear it for breakfast, or whatever. It was not until about a year and a half ago that I discovered Sausage Fatty. Google it, it is a real thing that can inspire much cooking creativity.

This weekend I competed with the Andy King and The Bastey Boys in a BBQ Cooking Contest at the Harvard Fall Festival  in Harvard, MA. There were two sausage contests; People’s Choice and New England BBQ Society (NEBS) Grilling. The past two years I have entered these events using a homemade sausage from the Sausage Lady on Rt. 27 Hanson. I would buy her Smoked Provolone & Roasted Red Pepper sausage and grill it, with excellent results.

Lorna had to visit a shop in Dublin, NH, so we took advantage of that locale to explore that corner of the Granite State from the Massachusetts border through Jaffrey north as far as Route 101, and from Peterborough west to the Vermont border. There's a lot to see there, but you have to cover some ground to get to it.

The Monadnock area works to sustain their local economy, including several deep commitments to local farms and artisans like Sawyer's Artisanal Cheese of Walpole. 

In the eastern end of the region at Peterborough, Nature's Greengrocer provides a center for local produce, cheeses, and meats, and also for communication and locavore community building.

To the west, Keene is the market center for the region.

Lorna had noticed a spot on the map that we had to find. It's called Satan's Kingdom, and it's nestled on the shores of Lake Dunmore in the rugged western slopes of the Green Mountains just southeast of pretty Middlebury.

To get there would require an east-to-west transit of the Green Mountains through Green Mountain National Park near Rochester.  At the end we would still have daylight and be at the southern end of the beautiful Champlain Valley. It would be a fine expedition!

We started by rocketing up I-93 and I-89 through New Hampshire to Lebanon, NH near Quechee Gorge, arriving around noon. We made a quick stop at the Hanover Food Coop and then ducked across the mighty Connecticut River to Norwich and the King Arthur Flour Company Baker's Store.

Every summer we make it a point to make a New England-style paella out at Richmond and Annette's cottage on Plymouth Long Beach. A New England-style paella is just a traditional Paella with some added New England goodies. After all, the seafood we get isn't exactly like you would have in Spain, so if you're taking a few liberties by necessity, let's add a lobster, too!

Honestly, anyone who tells you there is only one authentic recipe for this Iberian beach classic just doesn't get it. Think like a Spanish fisherman ready for dinner with your crew: what do you have? Work with what you have, make it nourishing and fun. Anybody have a guitar?

We cooked it outside on the Smoky Joe grill over hardwood charcoal. The rice was a special "Paella Rice" that I had found at Morse's Sauerkraut on one of our expeditions, and it worked great, but arborio rice works just fine. You cook the rice like a risotto, except you add lots of goodies along the way. All the flavors mingle and come together in the rice - it's a wonderful thing. 

After our old-fashioned fun at the Windsor Fair, we followed scenic Rte 105 out to Camden. We did not know that it was the day of the Camden Windjammer Days festival. The waterfront was full of exhibits relating to the sailing ships that built Camden. We parked in one of the lots behind the main street shops and explored.

Camden is a pretty tourist town even in the dead of winter, with a great rocky waterfall leading into a picturesque harbor often populated by sloops and schooners in addition to the usual fishing boats and pleasure craft. In the summer there are flowers everywhere, and on this day it was sunflowers that made the show.

Of all the exhibits, naturally the one I like best had to do with cooking.

We love going to agricultural fairs in the harvest season. From little ones in far-off corners of New England to the enormous Eastern States Exposition (the Big E), we like to see the animals and the giant pumpkins and the people browsing the sometimes wacky delights of the midway.

This weekend we went to the Windsor Fair, about 20 minutes east of Augusta.

Like most country fairs, the Windsor Fair has been running for over a century. It features livestock and 4-H exhibits, quilts and preserves, kids' exhibits and safety displays, and a midway full of rides and the usual peculiar foodstuffs (I did get a Corn Dog, of course, so my "fair experience" was to specification). 

This particular fair also has old tractors, harness racing, and an onsite living-history museum with re-enactors in old houses explaining what life was like in Maine in colonial times and in the 19th century. You can see some of the livestock, the tractors and the color of the midway in a few photo albums on the Foodie Pilgrim Facebook page.

By now you know that I took last Friday off for some serious research in Boston. The final event of the day was a visit to the Mass Brewers Fest at the convention center in Fort Point. 

We certainly had a great crowd! Many people had a lot of fun, with no disruptions, nobody arrested, no barfing frat-boys... Just a lot of Bay-State Beerhounds discovering the latest and greatest in locaal brewing.

Have you tried anything from Jack's Abby Brewing? Rapscallion? High and Mighty? Cody's? Mayflower? They were all there. I have bought four of those five at my local packie in Plymouth, MA. Local beer is here!  

 A beerfest calls for proper attire. It's not really the black-tie kind of night, but some fashions are de rigueur, like the pretzel necklace. With all due respect to the fine gentlemen who agreed to pose as models of this latest trend in haberdashery, there were some equally fine specimens on young ladies with plunging necklines, but your humble pilgrim felt it inappropriate to approach them for purposes of thoracic photography.

It was a year ago that the rains of Hurricane Irene began and didn't stop. The roads and homes of Vermont were pounded and flooded and just plain wrecked. The people weren't.

After the storm, Bobcat Cafe and Brewery brewed their special Flood Suds Belgian-style Wit. It's Belgian-style, not Belgian, because everything in it is from Vermont!  The ingredients are listed on the bottle. Take that, Irene!

This is more than symbolic. Vermont needed lots of dollars to repair the damage wrought by Irene. Dollars spent locally strengthen the whole community, circulating from pocket to pocket until they leave to fatten some far-off corporation's bottom line.  The dollars that might have been spent on Belgian malt or noble hops from Europe went to local farmers, who spent it repairing their own properties.

Beyond that, Bobcat brewed a heck of a Wit. It's delicious. I gave it 5 stars on Untappd, and I don't do that often. We had it with a broiled haddock and greens (reds?) from the Heaven's Harvest Farm CSA and my favorite Greek salad. The beer was a perfect match for the summer fare!

I took a vacation day on a late summer Friday and spent it exploring Boston's North End.  I love the North End for shopping and eating, people-watching and just exploring. I love the narrow back alleys and the smells and the sounds, and the shops cluttered with all sorts of good stuff that I can't get anywhere else.

I visited a number of favorite shops, including:

Dorchester isn't a scenic place, but it has a few charms of its own. Chief among them for me was the presence of GrandTen Distilling, one of the 11 makers of Artisanal Gins made in New England. I visited GrandTen to learn more about American Gin and the craft distilling movement. I had a great visit with Matthew Nuernberger, who with Spencer McMinn owns and operates the distillery.

GrandTen makes Wire Works Gin, plus Fire Puncher Vodka and Medford Rum. I am a big fan of the gin, as you can read in the link above. My visit was primarily about the gin because I have been studying gins for these pages.  

I asked about the American Gin style: is there a style? What characterizes American Gin as opposed to London Dry Gin or Navy-Strength Gin or Genever? He explained that London Dry Gin is an old, set style that is always juniper-forward, supported by other botanicals.

American gin has a freer hand with the botanicals, which explains the wide range of flavors.

We took a long trip to the Upstate NY Farm Country to go to the annual Madison-Bouckville Antiques Fair, and so we could explore the Erie Canal byways and our old friend Route 20 in NY. The weather was glorious and we covered a lot of ground.

In upstate NY, the farms are much bigger than those in New England. Farmers are busy with large-scale production, and a culture of value-added artisan foods has not developed in the relatively poor farm towns between the Hudson Valley and the Finger Lakes.

One bona fide food of this region is Salt Potatoes. Salt potatoes are small potatoes boiled in heavy brine. They are sometimes made today with new potatoes, but they were invented in Syracuse by poor laborers at the brine works where table salt was produced. They would bring small utility-grade potatoes for their lunch and boil them in the brine that was being evaporated for salt. Of course, potatoes love salt anyway, so the simple combination of salted potatoes and melted butter is an enduring regional winner.

We escaped the Green Mountains at Bristol and headed down into the Champlain Valley. For touring, you can think of the Champlain Valley in three parts: the hillier and rural lower end from around Rutland to around Middlebury, the beautiful rolling farmland in the middle area from around Vergennes to around Shelburne, and the lake and Hero Islands north of the Burlington sprawl. For this adventure, we explored the farmland of the middle valley.

Ever since the Microbrewers of the Pioneer Valley trip alerted me to how many small brewers work in New England, I have been fascinated by the quest for more. My list of Craft Brewers of New England is over 100 names long now! We passed Bobcat Cafe and Brewery in Bristol, and stopped at Fiddlehead in Shelburne where I got a growler of their delicious Belgian Pale Ale.

Philemon Walters makes a variety of delicious products, but his hot sauces have a sublime complexity of flavor and artistic vision in the blend of flavors and how they reach across the palate.

I am particularly fond of his Caribbean Hot Pepper Sauce. I bring it to work, and my colleagues eat it up on me. They all say the same thing: "It's really hot, but it tastes so good!"  The secret is that it brings the heat into the food, instead of just sitting on top of it. Even people who "don't like hot stuff" find themselves trying it a second and a third time.  

I just bought a jar of his beach-plum jelly. It is beautiful in color and translucency, and the flavor is full and fruity, not just sugar and more sugar.

Walters is fanatical about his technique and about the quality of his ingredients, including growing his own peppers on a farm he owns in Jamaica. That's the artisan mind, and you can get it at your farmers' market!

We left the Sunday rain behind us and took the interstate highways to Quechee Gorge and then country roads to VT100 so we could explore that fine road through the middle part of the state as far as the Mad River Valley and Rte 89, and to see Montpelier. One of the most exciting things I saw was before we ever left Quechee.

There is a big complex at Quechee that includes a Cabot store, a huge antiques coop, a winery, and some other shops. Now there is a brand new building there: the new distillery for Vermont Spirits, makers of Vermont Gold and Vermont White vodkas. In the middle of the photo you can see the still with the tall, tall column.  

I am not a big vodka fan. I buy it sometimes to make vanilla extract, but I don't keep it in my liquor cabinet. So why get excited about the vodka distillery? Against the far wall was a big rick filled with oak aging barrels. Vodka doesn't get aged, so what's the story? I discovered that Vermont Spirits is aging a new apple brandy product!

On a hot August night, we joined Richmond and Annette at their beach cottage for a light dinner.

The weather had been threatening all day. It was a Saturday, and by rights Lorna and I should have been somewhere beyond Montpelier or Litchfield, but we stayed home and planned for a Sunday drive. That was very successful - details soon!

So we went out to the cottage for a light summer dinner:

•  Three Cheeses from Spring Day Creamery, ME to start, then
• Shrimp Tahiti and garden-fresh tomatoes with Lemon-Walnut Mayonnaise for dinner, and
• Grilled white peaches to finish

We started with a nice French Chablis, but all good things come to an end. When the wine ran out we were forced to open up the Rangpur for Gin & Tonics.

It was early evening as we turned homeward, but not early enough to catch the brewers at Atlantic Brewing Company, which we missed by minutes! After the success we had with The Magnificent Seven craft brewers of the Pioneer Valley, I wanted to do The Downeast Seven, if I could find seven good brewers in this beautiful but sparsely populated region.

I am a fan of Atlantic's Manly Men series, so I got two of them and was off to a good start.

Nothing says "Downeast Maine in August" to me as well as the little Maine Blueberries. This year, Maine expects the biggest crop in twelve years, so there are already plenty to be had, if you go far enough to get them!

Ellsworth is far enough, though if you get as far as Ellsworth you really ought to visit Bar Harbor. We did, and as usual it was worth the trip for the unparalleled view from the summit of  Cadillac Mountain.

"Far enough" is pretty far. It's 300 miles from Plymouth to Ellsworth, and much of that is on the slower, more scenic Coastal Route 1. It's a pretty ride that I never regret. Some people prefer to save half an hour by taking the highway all the way to Bangor and then cut down boring roads to Ellsworth, but I'll take the scenic route! Our usual adventuring car, the Green Malibu, was in the shop, so we took my trusty Tan Malibu.

Our ultimate destination for the day, Cadillac Mountain, is over 300 miles from Plymouth, so we got out to an early start at 7am. We stopped very briefly at the Bow Street Market in Freeport to get a bottle of Back River Gin, then we made our way over scenic back roads to the Farmers' Market, arriving by 10am. It's a great market, and it was already mobbed.

One reason for the crowds might have been Spring Day Creamery. Sarah Spring's La Vie en Rose just won the first place prize at the American Cheese Society annual meeting in Raleigh, NC, in the crowded field of Original Recipe - Cow's Milk Cheeses. She beat Cowgirl Creamery - how 'bout that! We got three of her cheeses that we will sample soon.

When you go to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, you pass within a very short distance of one of the finest botanical gardens in America.  For quality of collection, virtuosity of landscaping, attention to the needs of visitors, infrastructure, and even brilliant whimsy, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens easily rival the legendary Longwood Gardens (outside of Philadelphia) and Butchart Gardens (Victoria, BC). I posted a gallery of photos on the Foodie Pilgrim Facebook page.

The gardens, while fabulous, are not a foodie delight, but I made a discovery nonetheless!

The cafe offered Green Bee Lemon Sting soda, an all-natural soft drink made with lemon, honey, and rosemary. It was like sunshine in the gardens - I can't think of a more appropriate refresher there.