North Shore

Click the thumbnails to see all the photos and click on “notes” to see the captions.

We went to our first farmer’s market of the season this morning, although it’s their second week. June in New England doesn’t see a whole lot available from the fields just yet and the market reflected that. There were lots of flowering plants as well as vegetable plants and herbs. Of course, there were also lots of strawberries as well as leafy greens like Swiss chard.

One reason we love this market is because some of the vendors have become so familiar to us. The lady from Crystal Brook Farms in Sterling, Mass., which produces wonderful goat cheeses, always remembers Isabella and dotes on her. This year she cooed over Sophia too. Next to her booth is always the lady from West River Creamery of Vermont, makers of delicious English-style cow’s milk cheeses.

The market also has food vendors, local restaurateurs who bring food down to sell to the crowds. The Thai restaurant, Sticky Rice, is a perennial and the owner is a friendly and popular family man who is always surrounded by his kids. New this year was Zaika, a new Indian restaurant in Marblehead. We got a combo platter from them of chicken tikka masala, chana masala (chick peas), a samosa, rice, and nan. My goodness, they must put crack in the food, it was so good. We were fighting over the right to mop up the last of the sauce with the nan.

The patrons are an interesting melange of stodgy WASPs and crunchy hippies, which is sometimes reflected in the eclectic mix of vendors. There’s always musical entertainment. Unfortunately, this week it consisted of some hippies who happened to be singing an anti-Catholic/anti-organized religion song while we passed by. I wonder if anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic sentiments would have been tolerated in this oh-so-liberal town. I think not.

Apart from that off-note, it was nice to have the farmer’s market back again, which has quickly become a sign of summer’s return. We’re going to miss it very much when we move.

In honor of All Souls Day, Melanie has created a photo-and-music slideshow of our local Catholic cemetery, which she has titled “Requiem”.

I took so many photos the other day in the cemetery that I decided to make a slide show. I had the perfect piece of music in mind from an album I love called Celtic Requiem. It was only after I’d started assembling the pictures and viewed a rough cut with the soundtrack that I realized how appropriate it was for the season. The project became a meditation on the meaning of All Souls Day and a perfect commemoration.

Although I had taken many pictures, once I got them all together I realized I wanted a few more to fill up the length of the song. So I went back yesterday with my camera and went crazy getting all the shots I’d wished I had. Too many! Now I have enough pictures for three slide shows. It was hard to cut some of them, they were all so beautiful; but finally I pruned it down to just enough to fill the song’s five minutes.

So here it is, in honor of All Souls. Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.

New York foodie Ed Levine was just waxing poetic about local faves, those places you go for authentic local food and he highlights a candidate in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, called Oxford Creamery.

Meanwhile, last night I watched the latest episode of Alton Brown’s show “Feasting on Asphalt 2: The River Run,” in which he stopped at a local roadhouse in Illinois for some ridiculously inexpensive, high quality food.

That got me to thinking about my local faves, although I think I need to define what that is. Launching from Levine’s springboard, I will advance the completely arbitrary definition of a local fave as a local place that serves good, home-style food at a low cost and where you’ll find primarily local folks being served by a (generally) happy and welcoming staff. Even better if it’s not a place that’s ever been written up in a bestselling book about food and restaurants, featured in a magazine’s “best-of”, or lauded in a TV show.

The no-chains rule eliminates the first one that comes to mind for me: Kelly’s Roast Beef. Kelly’s is a Boston tradition, starting with a single outlet on Revere Beach, selling, well, roast beef, but ironically more famous for the fried clams. But over the past decade or so, they’ve opened up several quite slick locations around Boston, so I have to eliminate them from my list.

On the other hand, the Clam Box in Ipswich would qualify, except I’m pretty sure they’ve been featured in plenty of best-of books and magazines. Likewise for Woodman’s in Essex. No, I think I have to get even more local.

And I think I need to add another qualification and this is bound to be controversial: a local fave needs to serve more than one meal, and perhaps must serve breakfast. Arbitrary, maybe, but I think that it’s a sign that the establishment is truly a part of the local fabric because it meets a variety of needs.

So who does make the list? In Salem, I think Red’s fits the bill. Yes, yes, I know, Red’s has won “Best of Boston” and similar awards on a consistent basis, but you have to go there to see why it must be included. The place opens at an ungodly hour, like 5 am or something, to serve early rising workers or outdoorsmen. It has counter service. The menu is a slice of Americana, serving all the comfort food you can imagine and nothing exotic. While tourists come in, it’s a place that locals frequent. And it’s been there forever.

Moving outside of Salem, I would also nominate Chute’s in Windham, Maine. My mom and my sister live in Windham and whenever we’re up there, we stop at Chute’s after Sunday Mass. It’s a small, local place with friendly waitresses who call you hon’ and serve fresh-baked muffins and pies and you feel like you’ve stepped back in time. And it’s not going to be featured in any travel magazines.

So am I off-base? Should the definition of “local fave” be expanded? Am I being too picky and parochial? What’s your local fave?

The nice thing about working for the Church is that holy days of obligations are days off. So after going to Mass on Wednesday, I’m going to spend the day with family and friends.

My friend Andy—who’s been living in Louisiana the last couple of years working as youth and music minister for a couple of parishes—is back in town for vacation so a bunch of us are taking off for the day to Bradley Palmer State Park in Ipswich. It’s a bucolic little park, not very close to anything and not much besides trails inside…

Except, a very nice wading pool for kids. This place is great. There’s several features that throw water in various directions; it’s fenced in so that kids can’t wander too far; there are picnic tables and grills; and while it’s always packed—especially on near-90 days like Wednesday promises to be—it’s never overwhelming, at least on weekdays when everyone else has to be working.

I’m very excited because I haven’t been able to see Isabella at the pool this year and Melanie says she’s taken to it like, well, a fish to water if you’ll excuse the cliche.

Speaking of Isabella, she’s had a cute little episode the other day when she found my old belt and wanted to wear it like I do. So I wrapped it around her several times and latched it. It still hung down like a cowboys gunbelt, but she was very happy with her fashion statement and spent quite some time staring at herself in the floor-length mirror and laughing uproariously.

Here’s the video of it:

As I went out this morning at 6:15 to get in my car to go to work, I noticed the neighbors across the street out by their minivan, sweeping up broken glass. Someone had driven by last night and heaved a huge rock through the large side window.

The police had just left and now they were cleaning up. These are very nice people—they have three Pug dogs that Isabella goes crazy and they’re very nice with her—and they said they couldn’t think of anyone who would do such a thing. They’re immigrants, Brazilian or Portuguese, and they keep their yard very neat.

(The town of Peabody has a large Brazilian population and our neighborhood has many Brazilians and Portuguese because of Our Lady of Fatima parish around the corner. You can tell which houses have the Portuguese-speaking people living in them: they have the neatest and most beautiful yards and gardens.)

I think the vandalism was just a random act of some punks who saw a big window and threw a rock at it. It could just as easily have been our van across the street in our driveway or my car parked in the street.

That’s the worst kind of crime in when you think of the quality of life in a neighborhood because it is a kind of friction that wears down the bonds of neighborliness and makes everyone wary. It’s the sort of thing that makes people stop saying, “We live in such a nice, quiet neighborhood.” I hope it’s an isolated incident.

N.B. In a matter unrelated to the vandalism, but related to neighborliness, about a week ago, at around 8:30 or 9 at night, a guy two houses down started lighting off fireworks, which are illegal in Massachusetts anyway, thank you very much. I would have let a few firecrackers or bottle rockets go, but they kept coming until finally I stormed out of the house and yelled down the street, “Hey, I’ve got a baby trying to sleep here!” I didn’t yell, but only muttered “dumb (another word for donkey)”. He yelled a sheepish “Sorry” and that was that.

In another kind of neighborhood my reaction would have led to a confrontation. In another kind of neighborhood, I would have been unwilling to take the risk of an escalated response. I don’t want to live in that kind of neighborhood. My neighbor got the message and we can be cordial. Mistakes are made and that’s that. This is the way it should be. I just hope that rock wasn’t meant for me and just went in the wrong direction.

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