My Maine Squeeze

"Now, if we catch a female with a carapace longer than this little gal here," says Captain John Nicolai, ambiguously brandishing a small measuring instrument in one hand and a live two-pound lobster, claws snapping angrily, in the other, "What do we do? We throw her back. There you go, little lady,” he murmurs, gently lobbing the thrashing crustacean over the side of the little boat, Lulu. “In less sustainable fisheries than Maine, you catch a five, six – heck, once I caught a twelve pounder – you sell it on the market for a good sum, but you’re killing your cash cow.” He goes on to explain that a larger lobster lays exponentially more eggs than a small one, and that large lobsters keep populations up in heavily fished places like Bar Harbor. “Now, what do we do if we catch a great big male? Any guesses?” (A little boy, the youngest of Lulu’s fifteen or so passengers, shouts “eat it!”) “Nope! We throw ‘em back. Why? Because a great big female can only pair up with a great big male. Every lady lobster’s got to find her perfect match.”

I imagine the lucky demonstration female, briefly and bizarrely airborne before sinking slowly down to her murky bed, perhaps to seek her perfect match. (Then I imagine the tender, salty-sweet lobster meat on a toasty, butter-saturated bun that I gleefully consumed on the roadside in Wiscasset the previous day, and admit that both images fill me with a similar warm-and-fuzzy contentment.)

Captain John brings the boat up alongside Egg Rock, a tiny islet harboring an old-fashioned lighthouse and a colony of seals, lounging in the low tide like absurd, great-eyed lumps. J squeezes my hand, and I feel the gentle pressure of his too-big engagement ring between my fingers.

Indeed. This lady lobster’s found her perfect match. Let me tell you how it went.

Bar Harbor, Maine, got its name from a sand bar connecting the mainland village to Bar Island, a small forested hilltop rising out of the sea no more than half a mile offshore. The bar itself, however, is only exposed at low tide, when it becomes a sandy path some forty feet across, lined with mussel beds that bubble and wheeze when the tide goes out.

We crossed the bar around three in the afternoon, collecting seashells and prodding at tidal pools as we went; by three-thirty we mounted Bar Island’s little slope and followed a dirt track through glades of apple trees to a field of long, sweet-smelling grass. We lounged there and talked softy and seriously, eating bruised sour fruits and watching a heron cross the wide blue sky. We laughed for a long time and then lay quietly, watching the autumn leaves turn to fire as the light changed.

Finally, we made our way back down to the beach. At first we thought that we had come out the wrong side and that the expanse of unbroken ocean before us was a mistake, but no – the bar was gone, the tide was coming in.

I started unlacing my boots. “Come on!” I shouted.

“What?” he asked me.

“We have to cross!”

“What?” he asked again.

“The tide just started coming in, right? So it can’t be too deep – we’ll just walk across like Moses! What, do you really want to call the Bar Harbor police station and have them send the coast guard? Or should we just wait here until this time tomorrow?”

My sense of tides, it turns out, was woefully wide of the mark – tides go in and out not once but twice a day, and this far north of the equator, it’s a nine-foot difference between high and low. But J, though not an aquatically-inclined person, was no better informed than I – and, after successfully suppressing mild panic, he took off his boots and began to roll up his trousers.

I didn’t even hitch up my skirt - we anticipated no more than knee-deep. I should add that we were dressed for a romantic day of lobster-eating and window-shopping, not beachcombing and certainly not ocean-fording. But we resolutely tied our boots together, slung them around our necks, perched purse and camera bag on our shoulders, and felt the icy bite of the North Atlantic.

In no time we were up to our waists, and a half-mile of indeterminate sea stretched out before us. And it was really, really, really cold. By this time, a small crowd of tourist onlookers had congregated on the far shore and were waving and snapping photographs. J was beginning to panic – but we gripped hands, breathed in resolve against the cold, the current and the rising tide, and crossed the sea like Moses.

We emerged to applause, dripping wet and relief. After stripping down to our wet underwear, we climbed into our rental car, cranked up the heat, and laughed until we were warm again.

That night, under a sky filled with more stars than I have ever seen – and meteors streaking across them like a code only we could decipher – J asked me to marry him.

That was two weeks ago – and even after we left that land of vanishing islands, lobster love and autumnal fire, my life continues to be more vibrant, more delicious. My heart is full of gratitude, and I’m so looking forward to this season of celebrating – the harvest, the spooks, the fire in the hearth, and all our love for one another. Thank you all, as we reach for each other across these ephemeral high-wires, for being here to celebrate with me.

In Praise of Salmon

Once, a long time ago, in a much greener place called Ireland, a young servant boy named Fionn mac Cumhail was preparing a fish for his master's supper. Now, his master wasn't just any master - he was Finegas, the legendarily wise Irish poet - and Finegas had spent seven years on the banks of the river Boyne, daily dropping hook, line and sinker in hope of catching the Salmon of Knowledge.

This one particular afternoon, seven years since he had cast his first line into the river Boyne, Finegas had caught that coveted fish, and brought it to Fionn mac Cumhail to prepare for his supper. Wanting the knowledge for himself, Finegas warned young Fionn not to eat a single bite.

Always a dutiful servant, unwitting Fionn obeyed, frying the fish just the way his master liked. But the salmon's flesh was rich and tender, and the buttery skin popped and sizzled in the pan, spattering Fionn's thumb. He gasped with pain and instinctively put his thumb in his mouth to cool the burn, tasting the savory salmon skin.

And that is how Fionn mac Cumhail became the wisest of the Gaels, leading their warriors ever to victory with his fantastic powers of perception.


So, maybe is isn't just those omega-3 fatty acids that make salmon the ultimate brain food! It is true, at any rate, that while farmed salmon plays host to dangerous levels of harmful chemicals like PCBs, an array of pesticides and antibiotics, dubious chemical color enhancers, and lower levels of omega-3s - not to mention hefty environmental risks - wild-caught salmon is pretty much the healthiest meat around. It's low in fat, high in protein, and full of healthful fatty acid chains that combat inflammation, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, some types of cancer, blood clots, and even depression. So much good-for-you-ness...and it still manages to be delicious!

All that said, wild-caught fish are not risk-free, especially environmentally speaking. Many fish (though, notably, salmon is the exception) have an extremely high mercury content, which can lead to nerve-poisoning and irregular development of the nervous system in babies; also, nearly all species of fish - especially the big ones like cod and salmon - have rapidly diminishing wild populations. Wild Alaskan salmon, which is certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council, is your best bet, according to Seafood Watch; other Pacific salmon (Washington, Oregon, California) is a decent alternative. Farmed and Atlantic salmon should be avoided. You can download their free printable wallet-sized nation seafood guide here; they also offer regional guides. In January, Dingle Town's burgeoning tourism industry is still a faint glimmer on the horizon, and in the early hours of a brisk Irish morning, the steel-gray clouds match the pavement of the town's empty streets. Seabirds wheel over the fishing boats; a lonely vendor peddles oysters, halibut, and glistening slabs of fresh-caught Atlantic salmon out of a cart on the pier. A brilliant rainbow appears, and J and I take it as a sign of good fortune - we couldn't resist, the Seafood Guide be damned.

Visiting small towns in Ireland in January has its perks - we were the only occupants of the Grapevine Hostel, which had beds for at least thirty. Its generous manager built a cozy coal fire in the hearth and let us have the run of the place; we made good use of a well-stocked kitchen, a local grocery store packed with Irish potatoes and $1/lb KerryGold butter ("This costs eight dollars in New York!" I shrieked, to J's general embarrassment), and a weathered copy of a paperback cookbook called Festive Food of Ireland. The recipe, as best as I can remember it, essentailly called for poaching the salmon in saltwater and serving it with a sauce made from egg yolks, butter, lemon juice and parsley. I pan-seared the fish in olive oil with salt and pepper, and adjusted the sauce as follows:

Salmon in Irish Butter Sauce

INGREDIENTS

1 plus 4 tablespoons butter
1 small shallot, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup cold whipping cream
1 egg yolk
Juice if ½ lemon
1 tablespoon freshly chopped parsley
½ teaspoon dried tarragon
Salt and pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

Melt 1 tablespoon butter in medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add shallot; sauté for 1 minute. Add minced garlic; sauté for 1 additional minute, or until garlic begins to brown.

Add wine; increase heat to medium and let simmer until wine is reduced by half, about five minutes.

Reduce heat to low. Whisking continuously, add cream; add egg yolk while mixture is still cool. Add remaining butter, one piece at a time, whisking continuously, adding more as the previous piece dissolves. Mixture should thicken slowly (if it thickens too quickly or begins to “scramble,” remove from heat and add lemon juice immediately).

Remove from heat when all butter is melted and sauce is sufficiently thick. Stir in lemon juice, herbs, and salt and pepper to taste. Serve over poached or pan-seared salmon fillet.

Serves 2.

We enjoyed it with Irish mashed potatoes, stewed mushrooms and brown bread, next to the fire, while the rain fell on the roof.

Six months later, salmon continuous to play a fortuitous role in my life; good fortune comes in the form of Annie, the proprietor of my local fish market in Brooklyn, just around the corner from my house. J and I eat Annie's fish about once a week, but I find myself visiting almost daily, just for the company - fittingly enough, my friendship with Annie began with an Irish barter: a fillet of her salmon for a loaf of my Irish Soda Bread.

Annie explains her business this way: she and her husband had planned to retire, but after less than a year - and these are her exact words - they were bored, so they opened the fish market in Bed-Stuy, whose burgeoning Caribbean community demanded good fish at good prices, and a lot of it. Today, boredom isn't the problem: Annie's husband fetches fresh fish from the Bronx fish supplier every morning - at 1:00 AM! "You have to be there early to get the best fish," she explains.

And they certainly do have the best fish. In early spring (before the summer heat made eating thawed raw fish from the market inadvisable), I sliced Annie's brightly-hued wild salmon filets and cured my own gravlax with this simple recipe:

Home-Cured Instant Gravlax

INGREDIENTS

1 salmon filet (no skin, about 12 oz.)
1 tsp. fine sea salt
¼ tsp. sugar
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon chopped dill, if desired

DIRECTIONS

Thinly slice filet into about ten slices. Spread out a two-foot-long piece of plastic wrap on the counter.

Mix salt, sugar and pepper in a small bowl; sprinkle half the mixture over one side of the plastic wrap. Arrange salmon on top of salt mixture so that no slices overlap; sprinkle remaining mixture evenly over the top, along with dill or other herbs, if desired. Fold plastic wrap over and wrap edges up to seal.

Place package on a platter or baking sheet and refrigerate for at least two hours or up to one day. Weight package with a griddle iron, or other heavy refrigeratable items (I use pickle jars!) to expel liquid and hasten the curing process.

To serve, remove plastic wrap and garnish with capers, olive oil, sliced red onion, or crème fraiche – or serve with cream cheese and a fresh bagel!

This recipe takes less time to cure than most gravlax recipes because the fish is pre-sliced, rather than cured whole. If you are concerned about the safety of eating raw or home-cured fish, read this informative guide.

And finally, for those of you inclined to fully cook your fish before you eat it, let me refer you to this excellent recipe for Grilled Salmon with Tomato-Olive Salsa - a simple, delicious alternative to the usual butter-lemon-parsley number than gets prepared all too often in my kitchen. Eat up!

I Missed You, Too

Sometimes a place can steal your words. Not even from your lips - like a breathtaking sunset - but from your heart: that warm little room whose walls and ceilings you thought you could define with well-arranged, concise sentences. But then suddenly a cathedral or an island or a mountaintop slips in and detonates the whole thing, exploding all that subject-verb chinking you've so meticulously laid into place, as the understanding of place makes new room for itself.

Ireland silenced me for awhile. I hope to be able to share glimpses of that saturated green-and-grey place with you as the words come back.

Then changes set into my life at a pace rivaling puberty - from the moment I stepped off the plane in New York with a four-foot-tall backpack and no home to come home to, or even enough American money to use a pay phone and arrange a hospitable couch.

In those first three weeks we slept on several couches (bless you, dear friends, if you're reading) and the floor of a temporary sublet, inspected nearly forty apartments, found a home that suited us, and J started work - all while still living out of the same backpacks that had sustained us through two months of traipsing through Europe! (It's a good thing his office is generous about their dress code.) Though we promptly moved our possessions out of storage, these consisted mainly of books, clothes, and an appalling assortment of kitchen appliances - we had sold what little furniture we had along with our old three hundred-square-foot apartment in the Village. We spent a week sleeping on a heap of coats while we went about acquiring furnishings and arranging various means of transporting them. (This was no small feat.)

Finally, weeks later, in a place I can call "home" for the first time in awhile, I began to grow things in my garden. Between cultivating my home, my neglected friendships, my connection with a new neighborhood, and my impressive diversity of herbs and flowers - there hasn't been much time to grow my culinary acumen or myself.

And yet (my sitemeter tells me) you've been waiting for me. You continue to visit Pie in the Sky, to leave imploring treatises in the comments. Thank you for caring. Sorry I've been MIA for good long while. I think I'm back now.

Life is pretty good - I'm happy, I love Brooklyn ( more on that later), I'm cooking a lot, and I'm enjoying this stint at homemaking and gardening. But I'm trying not to stagnate. Maybe you folks can help. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I suspect Pie in the Sky will be undergoing some serious renovations in the coming weeks - my paltry offering in exchange for your patience and loyalty. I'm teaching myself web design! We'll see where that goes.

I've also invented the #1 Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe EVER. So don't touch that dial, folks...

Fortified: Carcassonne to Catalunya

There's nothing quite like a taxi driver dropping you off at the entrance of a castle under a full moon and giving you the directions just over the drawbridge, second left past the fountain. You can't miss it, it's just next to the outer wall of the fortress.

Carcassonne, a hilltop city in France's Languedoc region that has been fortified in various permutations since 100 BC, is straight out of a medieval fairytale, complete with moat, two rings of ramparts, and 53 turreted towers. The historic buildings along its cobbled, narrow streets house thriving shops and restaurants that range from a few embarrassingly touristy spots to traditional French cafe fare to bistros sporting Carcassonne's signature dish, cassoulet, a white bean stew regionally served with duck confit or partridge. But, having developed a certain mistrust for regional French cuisine after the bouillabaisse incident (and knowing that we would need our appetites for local cuisine in good form for Ireland), we limited our dining in Carcassonne mostly to the confections of a nearby patisserie. We spent three days inside the castle walls, exploring the 9th century basilica and reading medieval fantasy novels to each other in the archery-nooks of the outer walls (Wizard of Earthsea, for you curious readers - an indulgent slice of fiction between Apollinaire and Joyce/Swift/Heaney. J and I try to make regional narratives a part of traveling whenever we can, but after Rimbaud, we needed a break from French literature.)

Our one futile expedition beyond the castle walls and out into the Lower City proved that we should have stayed inside. We were trying to see a movie - an American movie - at the local cinema. We had had wonderful success with this in Paris when we saw "Babel" - the trick is to make sure that the movie is in its original format and subtitled in French, rather than dubbed. "Babel" was particularly interesting because, though much of the film is in English, a lot more of it is in French (Moroccan), Japanese and Spanish. So we had to interpret those parts as best we could with the French subtitles, which might have been more annoying if the movie's theme hadn't been the problems that exist in inter-cultural communication. Anyway, I digress - at the theatre, most of the films (READ: every one but ours) were marked "V.O." As a voice-over artist myself, I was familiar with this abbreviation and assumed, naturally, that it indicated that those films were dubbed. Thankfully, the movie we wanted to see was V.O.-free, so we bought an armload of movie snacks* and settled into our seats.

Short version: "V.O." means version originale. Thankfully, they congenially made fun of us and refunded our tickets. We went back to the castle.

*Best snack EVER: Nutella Snack & Drink. A healthy serving of Nutella that puts the frustratingly teensy smear in Cheese 'n Cracker Snack Packs (with the little red stick) to shame; crispy bread sticks to dip in it; and peach iced tea to wash it all down. All neatly packaged in a sexy cylindrical canister, complete with straw. I love Europe.

***

We watched the French coastline turn into the Spanish one from the train. The hills dried out and the roof tiles turned orange, but the sea was still the same radiant blue. We stopped for our first Spanish lunch in Port Bou, just across the border.

After the collective hours we had spent in France looking for something we could afford on menu after overpriced menu, Port Bou was a Catalonian heyday. Wedged into a booth at a local diner, we found ourselves drowning in sumptuous gambas al ajillo, ham and cheese croquettes, crispy baked chicken, garlicky mushrooms. The baguettes had gone bad at the border, but everything else was salty, delicious and mercifully cheap. For dessert we had a regional specialty, creme catalan, which is sort of a less delicate, flan-ier version of creme brulee. I loved it.

Barcelona was cooler than we were. Every beautiful Catalonian was out in slender, well-dressed, dredlocked regalia; our bright-hued hostel was packed with weekending teenaged Belgians and Australians in town to party. I felt old and tired during this part of the trip and attracted a brief cold that dampened our adventuring somewhat. But I do remember Barcelona's food! What diverse decadence we enjoyed there - from creamy gelato to sparkling cava.

Getting sick makes me want sushi. I guess that not everybody shares this particular craving, but there's something about the simple, healthy flavors of fresh fish, seaweed, miso and green tea that restore me a bit. So we sought out a sushi bar for lunch on the pier, just across from the enormous monument to Columbus. It was early, but we were so hungry that we had a round of tapas at a bar next door while we waited for the Japanese restaurant to open. What a mistake! The Japanese "lunch buffet" advertised outside for €7 was, in fact, a circular conveyor belt dotted with what was effectively Japanese tapas. It efficiently circumscribed the room and passed back into the kitchen to be refurbished with fresh sushi rolls, slices of salmon, steamed dumplings, seaweed salads, spring rolls, fried rice, butterfly shrimps.

That afternoon, we wandered through Barcelona's largest outdoor market, the Mercat de la Boquería, where we saw ostrich eggs and braces of conies and I tasted a mangosteen (thanks, Phil and Deborah, who told me to try them!).

My other choice culinary memory in Barcelona was dinner at Botafumeiro, benefacted yet again, in celebration of the eve of J's 21st birthday. Renowned for its seafood, Botafumeiro offers a dozen kinds of shellfish - all displayed in tanks at the entrance - and a delightful array of fish dishes. J ordered the some of the best cured salmon I have ever had (and a certain reader who cures her own salmon knows that I have had some really good lox). I ordered a half-dozen oysters that were good but unremarkable, and also a platter of sauteed baby artichokes that were, honestly, my favorite part of the meal. J's idyllic gambas al ajillo (redux) were almost lobster-like in flavor, and to top it all off, the generous and attentive maitre d' supplied a complimentary bottle of cava (Spanish sparkling wine) in J's honor. The celebrating continued when we returned to the hostel to a chorus of slurred voices in a cacophony of accents belting out happy birthday.