North Shore
All Souls Day: Requiem
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.
What’s your local fave place to eat?
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?
A day in the sun
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:
Broken windows and good neighbors
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.
Technorati Tags: neighborhood | neighbor | fireworks | crime | vandalism | Peabody |
Farmer’s market
We just got back from the farmer’s market on this beautiful July Saturday morning with a new haul of tasty eats. This week’s trip was complicated by Melanie’s ongoing morning sickness, such that every question was answered with “Ugh, I don’t know. It all sounds nauseating right now.”
Well, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. My first step was the baker’s booth where I bought a raspberry cream cheese scone for breakfast and a loaf of delectable cinnamon chip bread for later. If it makes until Monday, I’ll bring it to work to share.
For fruits and vegetables we got some yellow swiss chard, arugula, sweet corn, and tomatoes. Blueberries and strawberries were added to the list when Bella saw them and started intoning, “Yummy, yummy, yummy.” Of course, I could pass up my favorite cheesemonger who was selling her aged reserve cheddar and a raw milk cheddar. The latter is tangy and creamy.
I finally made sure to keep room in the budget for a steak from the organic beef rancher. I plan to grill up the New York strip steak for dinner along with the corn.
We wandered about for a little while longer, checking out some of the other stalls. Melanie found a children’s book in the Friends of the Library book sale that she’d had on her Bookmooch list.
While the sun was pretty warm, there is a cool breeze today and it’s a perfect summer weekend.
As we were heading back to our car, Melanie and I agreed that the Marblehead farmer’s market is much busier this year than last. Every vendor has a line now and the scramble for parking spots is much more intense. Such popularity is a good thing, but I wonder if the organizers are giving any thought to finding a new locale to expand into. I know that this is already their second location in three years, but they are victims of their own success.
After all, this is one of the only weekend farmer’s markets in the area, which means you’re going to attract much larger crowds. I hope they’re thinking about it even though in all likelihood we won’t be living in the area next summer anyway.
Technorati Tags: farmer's market | food | vegetables | fruit |
Fun things to do on a sunny Saturday afternoon in early Spring
It was a beautiful early spring day here on the North Shore of Massachusetts and we wanted to get out and about. So we hopped in the car and headed north.
The nice thing about the North Shore, constituting the coastal towns of Essex County north of Boston to the New Hampshire border, are all the ways to get around without getting on a highway. Many times we’ll drive up Route 127 through Beverly and Manchester-by-the-sea , past “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” Magnolia into famed Gloucester and Rockport.
But this time we decided to head up Route 1A. Melanie had mentioned a farm she’d been to called Russell Orchards and I was curious where it was. As usual for these trips we had no itinerary and would go wherever the urge led. So we headed up Route 1A, which would take us to Cape Ann. As we got to North Beverly, crawling through weekend traffic the whole way, we stopped at our favorite bread bakery, Great Harvest. Everything is made on the premises and they even mill their own wheat for the freshest possible flour, which means their bread lasts forever even without preservatives. By early afternoon the selection was meager, but we did get a loaf of honey whole wheat along with a couple of cookies and a turtle bar. Isabella, who’d been cranky so far, immediately brightened up at the prospect of some very fresh bread.
We continued on our way through the very tony towns of Wenham and Hamilton, past early American and colonial-era homes worth a small fortune plus a lot of horse and vegetable farms.
Incipient Spring
Technorati Tags: Massachusetts | North Shore | Ipswich | Rowley | Beverly | Crane Beach | Plum Island | fun things to do on a Saturday afternoon |
Bah humbug to Halloween in Salem
So today is Halloween and like every year I will blog about how bad it is here in Salem. Evidently, my neighbors are beginning to agree. Starting with the first weekend in October, the traffic congestion on Saturdays and Sundays grows and grows until by the end of the month, you just don’t bother going out on the weekends. On Halloween, nearly the entire center of the city is shut down so that tens of thousands of people can come in and wander around the streets in costume. Not that there’s anything for them to do: the bars fill to capacity nearly right away, the restaurants are packed as well, and the haunted houses have long, long lines. And so they wander around. While public drinking is forbidden, that doesn’t seem to stop many folks.
Our city leaders claim that we need Halloween as our city’s economic engine. I doubt it provides the dollars they think it does. For one thing, many of the businesses that set up for the month are operated by out-of-towners who take their cash, come November 1, and head for warmer climes. Yeah, the restaurants and bars make money and the kid working the haunted houses for minimum wage. But what about the costs? How much business is lost because folks are scared away by the milling and sometimes rowdy crowds? How much money is spent on the suffocating police presence? This year they’ve set up a mobile command center and put up video surveillance around town. They say they don’t want a repeat of last year’s stabbings. Unfortunately, there’s been a warning of possible gang activity. Oh joy.
Afternoon in the museum
One of the few benefits of being unemployed is the opportunity to do things during the day with Melanie and Isabella. Today, we went to the Peabody-Essex Museum here in Salem for its Painting Summer in New England exhibit. As residents of the city we get in for free, which is a price you can’t beat. It seems, though, that it’s well worth the price of regular admission since this has been the museum’s most popular exhibit ever.
(N.B. The museum is one of the oldest in the country, originally founded as a ship captain’s club. When they brought back treasures from their jaunts around the globe, they’d display them in the club. In fact, the Oriental galleries were the original exhibits of the museum.)
The Summer in New England exhibit includes some of the most well known American painters, including John Singer Sargent, Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Maxfield Parrish, and even Normal Rockwell, as well as many lesser known but also talented artists. The styles varied from realism to impressionism to abstract to pop art and on. It’s very nice with a lot of art I really liked (as well as some that left me cold.) The curators engaged in a little of the standard art-criticism twaddle in some of the descriptions (bringing in irrelevancies like one artist’s bisexuality and how it supposedly influenced his painting, making it “detached” and “awkward.” Huh?)
My favorite, I think, was Maxfield Parrish’s “Hunt Farm”. This print doesn’t really do it justice. The colors on the original are much deeper and the light is magical, almost evocative of a fantasy or fairy world. He also used a glaze atop the painting that works almost like a polyutherane coating on a hardwood floor: bringing out the colors and the grain. (This link to a story about the whole exhibition has a much better reproduction, as well as examples of the other works.)
Bella was very good for most of the show. We made it through four of the five galleries before she started squawking about her dirty diaper. She was very popular among the other art patrons and museum employees, drawing almost as much attention as the paintings. Unfortunately, the paintings didn’t excite her much at this point. We’ll have to wait a year or two.
I always say I have to remember to visit the museum more often. It’s a privilege I don’t take advantage of enough.
Technorati Tags:art, museum, New England, painthings, Peabody-Essex, Salem, summer
The chapel in the mall
Every so often one of the newspapers in the area does yet another profile of the Carmelite chapel at our local mall in Peabody, Mass. The St. Theresa chapel was founded by Cardinal Richard Cushing back in 1960 as the first large shopping malls were just popping up around the country. Cushing’s idea was to bring Christ to where the people were. In the old days, when people shopped downtown, there were churches there. Now that people were shopping at the malls, that’s where they need to be. And St. Theresa’s was one of the first.
On the last Wednesday in July, as tank-topped teens and others prowled the lengthy commercial corridors of the mall above, 40-plus faithful, mostly elderly and middle-aged, reverently celebrated the feast of Sts. Joachim and Ann at the 3 p.m. Mass. Saturday’s later Masses, which fulfill Catholics’ Sunday church obligation, can pack the chapel, Jones says.
``If I’m in the mall, doing any shopping at all . . . it isn’t that much time to take to come over here and kneel down, say a prayer,” says Ed Flynn, a widower from Peabody who did just that before the Wednesday Mass.
I’ve always appreciated having the chapel there. In the Christmas shopping season, I always take a break from the madness upstairs to go down to the chapel, sit in the quiet and pray, remembering what Christmas is really about.
During the rest of the year, it’s a convenient place to go for confession. My group used to get together on a monthly basis to go to confession on a Saturday morning and then go to lunch together afterward at a restaurant in the mall. It was nice in that it helped us remain accountable to another, it made it easy for confession to become a habit, and it was a nice chance to get together after. The priest’s comment that it’s become the confessional for the North Shore is right on target. They have confessions before every Mass and there’s always a line. I think part of that is because: (1) Confession times at most parishes are all on Saturday afternoon which is a pain if that’s not a good time for you and (2) as more and more people have stopped going to confession and as more and more confessionals are ripped out, the welcome anonymity of confession has eroded. Thankfully, St. Therese chapel still has the old-style confessional booths.
By the way, they also have a small book and gift shop next door (emphasis on the “gift") that’s also convenient when you need to buy a confirmation or communion present.
Technorati Tags:Boston, Catholic, chapel, mall
“I want you to build me an ark”
Okay, this isn’t funny anymore. You may have noticed on the national news, if you’re not a local, that we’ve been getting a little rain in these parts. More than a little rain, actually. I’ve seen some reports that this is the most rain we’ve had in a century. And when it rains, it floods.
There are a couple of places in Salem that always flood in big storms and one of them is just down the street. It’s the appropriately named Canal Street, and here are some photos I took of the flooding back in 2004. Keep in mind, though, that it’s much worse this time. Some Mensa candidate tried to drive through the flood zone--past barricades no less--and had to be pulled out by the fire department. There’s always one.
Swimming in the sewage
Technorati Tags: flooding, Massachusetts, Salem, weather
Rainy Saturday means ice cream, books, and red sauce
It’s raining again.* It’s been raining for a week straight. It will be raining for another week, they tell us. If I’d wanted to live in Seattle, I would have moved there. Last Saturday, on what would turn out to our last day of nice, sunny, Spring-like weather, I almost wrote that Spring had finally sprung. Yecch.
In order to preserve our sanity, we decided just to get out of the house today and go anywhere. We’re tired of being cooped up and Melanie is tired of waiting for this baby to get on out here. We would have gone to my nephew John Paul’s First Communion down in Norwood today, but I didn’t relish the thought of racing an hour back to Salem in the torrential downpours if Melanie went into labor.
Thus we made our way up Route 114 to Middleton to Richardson’s Ice Cream. It’s a family-run dairy farm that’s been in the same place for 300 years! They also happen to have very good ice cream, and what better way to brighten up a gray day. Afterward, we stopped by the Barnes & Noble store near the mega-mall. I don’t go to the brick & mortar bookstore much. Amazon is much more convenient for me and I generally know what I want. Still, I picked up a couple of books, including Carol Olson and Sandra Miesel’s “The Da Vinci Hoax”, Amy Welborn’s “De-coding Da Vinci”, and “The Cook’s Illustrated Guide To Grilling And Barbecue.”
Update: Links fixed.
Technorati Tags: books, restaurant
Do Boston restaurant reviewers go outside of Boston to eat?
Why is the two Boston newspapers--the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe--don’t seem to think that people outside of Boston go out to restaurants?
Every week--actually several times a week in different sections--I look for reviews of restaurants north of Boston. When we got out, we try to stay within a several town area of Salem, but there are never reviews of restaurants here. Let’s note that there are nice restaurants opening up in this area all the time, and by area I mean Salem, Peabody, Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, and Swampscott.
But to read the newspapers, people only go out to dinner in Boston or one of the immediately adjoining tony towns like Cambridge, Newton, and Wellesley. Occasionally, they’ll venture out of their comfort zone up Route 9 to Natick, but they never seem to cross the Tobin Bridge (or take the Ted Williams Tunnel! It’s fast and easy to get from both Morrissey Boulevard and Herald Square) to the North Shore.
I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if someone else was doing reviews, but the Salem News doesn’t have a restaurant critic. Yes, yes, there are a lot of Internet sites devoted to diner reviews, but frankly they’re hit or miss. A professional reviewer knows how to evaluate a restaurant and its food. It’s a lot more complicated than say, movie reviews. You have to check the food, of course, but you have to try more than one appetizer and one entree. You need a large sample of the menu. You need to try the wine list, if they have one. How’s the atmosphere, the parking, the wait staff?
Technorati Tags: Boston, media, newspapers, restaurant, reviews
It’s free Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Cone Day
You did know that today only you can go out and get a free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone from one of their stores, didn’t you? I may not agree with their politics, but they make yummy ice cream. And since I didn’t pay anything for it, I’m not supporting their pet liberal causes! In fact, you could argue that by eating their ice cream for free, we’re taking money away from them…
I had a couple of errands to run downtown so Melanie came along and we walked down to the store. And since it’s a fairly nice day in town, it was a nice way to walk off the calories.
Frustration and fun
I had all kinds of great blog entries planned for today, including one about the terror bombings in London that was in progress, until my computer decided it wanted to keep crashing every couple of minutes. In frustration I just gave up on it. This computer is just too old and unreliable. I wish I could get a new one, but it’s that or a nice wedding for my bride. You know which one I chose. Expect more blogging later, maybe on Monday.
So tomorrow is the great bachelor party. In the morning we’re going deep sea fishing out of Gloucester (although with this weather it’s likely to be a re-enactment of the Perfect Storm) and then to Woodman’s of Essex for lunch (where they say the fried clam was invented), then some laser tag in the afternoon, followed by dinner at Bertucci’s Italian restaurant and ending with stogies and Scotch. The guys are jealous, I know, and the women are just shaking their heads.
Oh, and on Tuesday I’m heading out to San Francisco and won’t be back until Friday. You might see some blogging on Tuesday and Wednesday, but not on Thursday. On that day I’ll be traveling from morning until night. Fun.
Two great, very different dining experiences
Today is my girlfriend Melanie’s 30th birthday (or the second anniversary of her 29th birthday) and for such a momentous occasion we have been celebrating it as a triduum of feasting with Mexican, Italian, and Ethiopian cuisine. Saturday was moving day, so dinner was a matter of “we’re hungry, what’s close?” Thus we went to Chili’s, just down the street. I knew my mom and sisters and my sister’s Evy’s family would be there as they had called earlier to see we could join them, but we couldn’t get there in time. So we saw them leaving as we came in. But they surprised both me and Melanie by arranging to have the waitress bring a birthday surprise dessert at the end of dinner. Very funny look on Melanie’s face as she tried to figure out how I managed to arrange it without leaving the table. But I just waved my hands in the air and said, “Don’t look at me.”
On Sunday night, we went to my favorite Italian restaurant in Salem, a place that really reminds me of restaurants in Italy: Bella Verona. I’ve never had a bad meal there. It’s a small place of just a few tables, but the service is attentive and the food is always well prepared. I usually get some variation on seafood including calamari, because it is one of the few places that can cook calamari just right without overcooking it. Too long on the heat and it becomes rubbery. When they cook it, it’s perfectly al dente. If you go, try the Risotto ai Frutti di Mare (Risotto with “fruit of the sea"). This time I had the Linguine alle Delicie del Mare (linguini with a variety of seafood), and Melanie had linguine with clams and red sauce. With dinner we drank one of my favorite new grapes, Barbera. This one was Barbera d’Asti, Ascheri (Piedmont). It paired well with our dinners., For dessert we shared a handmade cannoli and a lemon sorbet served in a frozen lemon. Another great dinner at Bella Verona.
