#4

Leftovers

~Written by Margo Mallar~

~Edited by Erik Neilson~

Day 1

A bare-chested jogger holding a shirt in his hand ran in front of the rusty globe at the intersection of Franklin Arterial and Commercial Street.

Someone wearing a red lobster suit shuffled back and forth on the sidewalk on Commercial Street, occasionally waving in the general direction of people walking nearby.

A man in a white shirt put a bag in the backseat of an SUV near the entrance to a hotel.

A man walking a black lab spoke to another man pushing a child in a jogging stroller. Both men were wearing shorts.

2 pigeons and a gull were walking in the parking lot near Standard Baking Company, which was selling day-old Challah bread for $3 a loaf.

Day 2

A cop car on Congress Street flashed its lights, and then turned left onto Franklin Arterial.

Irish IRA was written in black spray paint on a dark yellow house at 28 Hampshire Street. The house next door had a “For Sale” sign from Sullivan Family Realty in the window.

An orange 3-speed bike was locked to a lamppost on Fore Street.

An African woman wearing a grey head covering walked past a sign on Park Avenue that said “Farmer's Market Today.”

A single container of Miyake Seafood Yakisoba cost 4.75 at the West End Deli.

Day 3

A white car with the license plate "MR LUNT" was parked on Moody Street.

The Portland Press Herald box at the corner of Moody and Munjoy was empty.

The Angela Adams vitrine on Congress at India had a display of umbrellas.

A bus without passengers crossed Franklin Arterial and headed up Congress Street toward the Eastern Prom.

A man in a jean jacket stopped to light a cigarette near Antoine's Formal Wear.

A TDBanknorth sign read 55 degrees.

A woman in a tan jacket reached up with her right hand to catch a key that was dropped to her from someone in a second floor window.

Day old ham and cheese croissants were half-price at Rosemont Market on Brighton Ave.

#3

Mortal Morsels

~Written by Ken Courtney~

~Edited by Erik Neilson~

At my funeral, may the powers long forestall its occasion, I sincerely hope there to be an abundance of over-sized cubes of bright-orange, generic cheddar cheese, coupled with nearly transparent, essentially flavorless iceberg lettuce on offer; by special request, one could have it drowned in thousand island dressing. If those present were feasting upon piquant demi-canard confit (read: duck) coupled with a marvelous burgundy, audible groans of envy might emerge from the recently disembodied; imagine something like the indignation of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

It might occur to attendees that they are enjoying themselves just a wee bit more than they ought to be. To prevent this, the idea would be to provide something to eat but also to make everyone there suffer for eating without me. Besides, when one contemplates other obvious examples of life-affirming activities, and the degree of their inappropriateness at a funeral, attendees should consider themselves lucky to be allowed any form of indulgence at all.

***

These, and other thoughts occurred to me out in the water on a particular Autumn morning when the offshore conditions in the Atlantic were such that most sea-going vessels were commanded to stay at harbor. Public beaches were closed to recreational access, and, for those who peruse such things, the figures from the NOAA weather buoys sent chills down the spine. Two compatriots and I arrived at the conclusion that this would be a fine occasion to ply our amateur surfing skills, and our pre-meeting phone conversation concluded with one of them cheerily intoning, “Hurricanes make for swell days.”

Here, a couple of caveats should be added. All of us had swum competitively at some point in our histories, and we’d all done a fair bit of surfing over the past couple of seasons. That said, the decision - in our considered analysis - didn’t cross over the threshold from asinine to suicidal. Second, while no one would deny the aquatic conditions that morning were certifiably hectic, the handful of professional-caliber surfers in Maine who were out probably never lost their cool, and if one regularly surfed Durban, South Africa, Mavericks, or Oahu, this might have been an average morning session. Suffice it to say that - for us - this was not the case nor any bit close to it.

Surfers refer to the main dish we were served that morning as a 'clean-up set.’ After a concerted anaerobic effort, the three of us were positioned safely beyond the shore break sizing up the conditions when one of our troop, looking outward, simply yelled “Let’s go!” and started madly paddling toward the foreboding black lines growing on the horizon. Not even time for profanity.

I later recalled a very bad traffic accident I had been in, and remembered that at that moment - as I was watching headlights approach with terrifying inevitability - I could muster no string of inventive curses. I only said - in a plainspoken voice - “Oh no.” It adds insult to injury when, feeling the danger of great physical harm, one is reduced to monosyllabic babbling. It is also a clear indication that, in such situations, one is operating on the level of his or her most basic intuitions; more often than not, this is not good.

What the circumstances of a ‘clean-up set’ require is profoundly counter-intuitive; with a massive outside wave approaching, your only hope is to charge right at it, in order to get deep enough to pass over the wave before it breaks. Accomplish this and you’ll be lifted meters above sea-level by the rising wave and set back down as gently as a leaf settling onto the surface of a stream. Fail to get deep enough, and the quantum forces of a big breaking wave will spin you and your gear - some of which is rock hard and has sharp edges - like so many garments in an industrial washing machine. This serves to disorient you so severely that you have no sense of what direction is up, and holds you underwater for the entire length of a football field, allowing you ample time to wonder how much longer – hypothetically - you could keep holding your breath if you don’t make it to the surface soon.

I don’t know how big those waves were.

The lasting image I am left with was friend number two just a bit further out than myself, almost vertical as he paddled up the face of a wave on his ten-foot board, with several feet of green water both below the tail and above the nose of it. When I broke through the lip of the same wave just before it curled, both friends gave a barbaric yawp of victory on my behalf. As the wave closed out behind us moments later, coastal residents from Florida to Nova Scotia took note of its thundering resonance.

Emerging from the session, all of us appeared unscathed, despite minor kinks in the neck or shoulders, and the odd nick from a fin or sand abrasion from a quick tour of the bottom. Our tone of conversation was typically jovial and self-deprecating, which reinforced the illusion that nothing of note was different than on any other given ‘dawn patrol’ morning. It wasn’t until we were driving across the bridge back into Portland that something was amiss came to light.

I wasn’t hungry.

***

A bit more background will be useful here. First, I am hungry by disposition. Always, even immediately after finishing a wonderful meal. In the normal habit of conversation with other people, of course, I naturally commiserate when someone says something like ‘I’m stuffed,’ or ‘I couldn’t eat another bite,’ but in doing so I’m being entirely disingenuous - I could eat many more bites. In truth, if there were no danger of getting caught doing so, I would gladly finish everything remaining on the table, perhaps in the room. Apparently at the zenith of their affluence, feasting Romans were known to force themselves to regurgitate in order to have more stomach room for continuing on with the feast. Were it not for my concern that bile probably somewhat ruins the palate, I would consider theirs a reasonable course of action.

Secondly, surfers are never not hungry - logicians will quibble, but this is different than saying they ‘are always hungry.’ There are various theories to account for this, most invoking the level of physical exertion involved and some chalking it up to extra calories being consumed in cold water, but whatever the case, a surfer - particularly immediately post-session - who claims not to be hungry is being sarcastic, self-sacrifingly polite or is just plain mistaken about his or her own internal condition. And yet I couldn’t eat.

The restorative power of a couple of slices and a pint, which had been most welcome many times before, offered nothing for me on this day. Of the dozen venues—just among my personal favorites, regardless of the route I took —that I would pass by returning to the East End from Casco Bay Bridge, no culinary offering was desirable. Hours later, as the time neared for me to go to work, I told myself that I must eat something for energy, but nothing—not even God’s own nectar in the guise of a crème anglaise milkshake—sounded appealing.

***

The restaurant was busy that Saturday evening, and amid the banter of our guests I would occasionally overhear remarks about the storm, be it the size of the waves someone had seen that day, or damage to property that had been done. I carried steaming plates of food with my usual care, but felt a very unusual disconnect from the sensuous aromas rising from the dishes I delivered. Typically, when serving people dinner I think of them both as benefactors and as recipients of a great gift; namely, the food which they are being served and which I have the privilege to bring to them. These feelings are balanced by just a modicum of jealousy since, as explained above, I would almost always be delighted to devour what I carry. Having spent a decade in the industry, I’ve also told myself that were I not to feel that way about the food and serving it, it would be time to move on. However, this evening was different. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I had come to view eating in the abstract, had suddenly lost a sense of what this was all about, and with that had lost my appetite both for food and its ferrying.

As the evening wound down, my last table took their leave and I was cleaning up in back when one of the chefs stopped me and asked if I’d like to try an oyster.

“Okay,” I said, after pausing for a moment, “Thanks.” With skilled, smooth movements, he shucked the calcified shell and cut the oyster free. Providing himself one as well, he explained they had a few extra left from the order for the evening, and we both chomped them down at once. The sensation was visceral. Every detail of the morning’s experience came back in a rush; the North Atlantic had been rendered into edible - indeed delicious - bite-sized morsels.

Shortly after, the other chef joined us and more oysters were cracked open. These were one of several varieties of Damariscotta River oysters whose texture, salt, and mineral content placed them on par with some the most well-regarded in the world. Near the river-mouth were shell pilings a half-mile long, evidence of Native Americans reliance on oysters as a food source here for roughly the past two thousand years. Still more oysters were opened, and pieces of our table bread were passed around.

***

Apparently, a woman and her two children hand-picked these particular oysters in scuba gear earlier the same day. I visualized this as we ate, imagining being underwater at the very same moment that morning, getting buried by a breaker while this industrious trio was retrieving our delicacy from deep in the river. I also thought about the bread I was now greedily munching on, complimenting the oysters deliciously; we knew the bakers by name, their biographies, where they sourced their ingredients and the stories behind all of the reticulate connections. I mused that the ubiquity and directness of such connections and their nearness to the surface here must be in part what makes Portland a place to eat above most others.

If we make sense of our lives in story-form, we’re bound to care about the tales surrounding what sustains us. Narrative lifts food from filling to fulfilling. Though my fast had hardly been worthy of Mahatma Gandhi or Kafka’s hunger artist, it was the remembrance of this principle that brought me back down to earth. I noticed that the lingering aromas from the kitchen had once more assumed their full powers of seduction, and after I was handed an IPA - as if on cue - glasses clinked all around and someone simply said, “To life.”

#2

breaking the maine shell

~written by zack bowen~

~edited by lynn crothers~

i love food. but, i don't know shit about it. i grew up in southeast Texas, in a town that would barely pass for a city and whose restaurant culture centered around Sysco distributors. like many other Texas towns, Beaumont was an oversized strip mall in which Chili's and TGIFriday's shared a parking lot with one of the many Baptist churches – not really the breeding grounds for a cultured palate.

my one saving grace was that i came from a cajun family. the food was amazing. no, i mean fucking amazing: the seafood gumbo, made with gulf shrimp and blue crab caught that morning; the maquechoux (pronounced "mock-shoe"); dirty rice; cornbread; green beans; boiled mudbugs; cracklin’; garlic turkey breasts; shrimp creole; meat pies (and not that mincemeat bullshit); pecan pies... i could go on, i just need to stop there before i get too homesick. it was amazing, and every bit of it was homemade. i remember the looks an aunt of mine -- and only by marriage, thankfully -- received when she walked into one gathering carrying a chocolate cake with the grocery store label plastered on the casing. i could see it in my grandmother's eyes: "bitch!"

but, in the true form of cajun food, the ingredients were simple: onion, celery, green pepper, garlic, some tomato, and cayenne. if you wanted more flavor, you added more cayenne or some tabasco. and the base for many of the dishes was roux: slowly cook equal parts flour and vegetable oil, constantly stirring in a skillet so that it doesn't burn; cook until a medium to slightly dark brown, then start adding shit to it. pretty damn simple. so, even though the food would -- in the words of bessie jackson's song "shave em' dry" -- "... make a dead man come," there was little diversity in ingredients.

when i moved north to Dallas, my food experiences still didn't gain much ground. i sustained myself on fried catfish and chili con queso -- and when i say queso, i am not referring to cheese. i make this clarification because i realize that in Maine, people don't know the chili con queso i know. it is not a Mexican dish, nor, in it's truest form, even cheese. it is Tex-Mex for bowl-of-melted-cheese-food. it is velveeta with peppers, which were probably more for color than taste when i think about it. it is also tasty as shit! i lived on the viscid crap for too damn long. i still have such strong withdrawals that i have to head to Tortilla Flat on 302 for a fix; at one point, i was even making specific trips to On the Border in South Portland just to have something vaguely resembling queso.

it's alright, you can judge me. i have come to grips with it now. as a native texan, attributing the word "fresh" to food meant the grease in the frialator had recently been changed.

when i moved to Portland, i immediately moved onto The Hill (one of the best decisions i have made since moving here). shortly thereafter, or so it seems now, Bar Lola was set to open, and then the Front Room. i now had three great restaurants within walking distance of my home: Blue Spoon, Bar Lola and the Front Room. it sounds rather ridiculous, but it was at the Blue Spoon that i had my first vegetarian meal. it was also the first time i think i ever ate summer squash -- actually, it was the first time i had ever heard that there was more than one type of squash! this was a fancy meal to me. then i tried Lola -- wow! it is because of Lola that i even started in food photography. and then the Front Room -- great. fuck, they were all great. i learned what gnocchi was. i learned there were more fish in the sea than catfish and bass; what frisée is; that vinaigrettes aren't explicitly made in Hidden Valley.

i mention that Lola was what inspired me to want to shoot food. i have been shooting for catalogs and magazines for years; product and fashion mostly, but never food. one day i asked to speak with the owner or manager at Lola. Stella came over and i laid out my proposition: if she would let me shoot their food during off hours, i would give them a copy of all shots to use for anything they wanted. i would get the beginnings of a food portfolio; they would get free photography to use for advertising. it was a risk on their part, though. i had never shot food before and, frankly, i didn't know what i was doing. all things considered, the shoot was successful. i learned a ton and they got some decent shots.

from Lola, i bounced across the street and proposed the same exchange to David at Blue Spoon. either i'm a good salesman or David is a person who can find charity in someone, because he said yes. again, a successful shoot, and with the portfolio pieces i had gained from Lola and Blue Spoon i was able to get my first paying food photography client out of Cambridge.

i was learning about shooting food the best way anyone can learn: by actually fucking doing it. aside from learning to shoot, i was getting to see these chefs in action -- i was getting in their way every possible moment with a lens large enough to make people think i was compensating for something. and, i was asking questions. i was asking what spice they were adding to that dish, or why they were raking the back side of a blade along the skin of a fish filet. and no matter how asinine my questions may have been (bear in mind the questions were coming from a guy who didn't know that filet meant without bone), the chefs were eager to answer. and not just give an answer but provide an explanation that usually ended with a tasting. these chefs were eager and sometimes giddy to share what they were doing. it was a love affair they could publicly share without worry of misdemeanor charges. it was their passion and you couldn't help but be in awe of it.

after seeing these chefs in action -- coupled with the fact that the peninsula has no major chain restaurants -- my outlook on food was beginning to change. fewer and fewer meals were centered around sustenance. i became more aware of what i was eating. above all, dining became more personal -- i now knew what was going into each meal, what the chef was performing in the kitchen, and therefore developed a new appreciation. the thought that went into where their ingredients came from, the pairings, the portion sizes, and presentation of the meal right down to the timing between courses -- at times, it felt more a performance than a meal, which was intimidating. they never cared about presentation at the Iron Skillet. i felt uncouth and uncultured, but i was wrong for feeling that way. these newly discovered chefs weren’t conjuring up their meals to try and flex their gastronomic muscles, or flaunting knowledge of spices to try and pick up chicks. they were people who loved food, and loved the challenge of preparing new tastes. they just wanted to share. they wanted you to enjoy their treats, and they wanted feedback. at the root, they were no different than my family back in Texas.

everyone -- the chefs in Portland and my family back at home -- adhered to the same core thought: food was meant to be communal and enjoyed and nourishing to more than just your belly. it is a social bond -- our cells remember a time when we would gather around the campfire after a day of killing mammoth to share stories and compliment the chef on the tenderness of the mastodon shank. it transcends cultures and economic status. it is also the biggest Maine shell breaker. the people i have met, the knowledge i have gained and the portfolio i have garnered would not have been possible without the openness of those i know in the Portland food community.

to everyone who has helped me out and welcomed my lack of foodie etiquette, i say thanks.

#1

Home, From Away

~Written by Kate McCarty~
~Edited by Lynn Crothers & Erik Neilson~

Me? I am new here, myself. And while I know most people do not readily admit that they are “From Away,” I don’t really feel like it’s something I can hide. Inevitably, when I reveal that I just moved to Portland, people ask why. And after almost a year, I still don’t have a good stock answer. Usually it goes something like this: “Well, my boyfriend went to school here once and really liked it...” or “I was living in Montana and I didn’t want to brave the winter there...”

The fact is I don’t have a go-to answer that captures the love for Maine I’ve developed since I moved here. I’ve moved around a lot since college, and my lifetime of occasional visits to Maine – from sea kayaking in Penobscot Bay to a music festival in Aroostook County to backwoods shenanigans on Vinalhaven Island – taught me that Maine is, well, awesome. You know it – I don’t really have to explain it, or else you wouldn’t have moved or stayed here yourself.

Ironically, my boyfriend found it difficult to make friends the first time he moved here; he thought Portland was a rather closed community. A friend of mine, a new transport herself, was told to find a boyfriend by Thanksgiving or else all the eligible men would disappear into their homes. So when I first moved here last October, I was a bit apprehensive about a long, cold, lonely winter. But because I’m always on the move, I’m used to not having a large social network in one place.

So, I hunkered down for the winter and did what I always do - flexed my culinary muscles. I made crusty loaves of English muffin bread; stuffed out-of-season peaches and garlic into pork loins, whipped up batches of red lentil, Mulligatawny and Italian wedding soup; all with homemade chicken stock. My phone may not have been ringing off the hook with social engagements, but at least I was well fed.

You will be heartened to know that, over time, I did not find it difficult to make friends in the Portland area. To this day, everyone I meet is welcoming, inclusive and friendly. I have made friends by taking classes, by becoming a “regular” at a bar (OK, I’ve met a lot of my friends at the bar), and by coincidentally bumping into an old college acquaintance. Two of my friends, Amanda and Ryan, are engaged to be married; they were even kind enough to invite my boyfriend and I to the wedding.

Amanda and Ryan are both very energetic people - extremely fun to be around. I met them at a bar (surprise), and after trying futilely to engage in some ear-splitting conversation, Ryan shouted over the loud DJs, “We should have a dinner party so we can all talk!” And you know what? They actually followed through and hosted a dinner for us, complete with grilled food and salad.

While I would not say that food is the only thing that brought us together, Amanda, Ryan, my boyfriend and I have bonded a lot over meals. We have helped them chop pungent garlic scapes into pesto after their CSA arrived. I’ve passed Ryan a heaping platter of pork chops out the tiny kitchen window to his position by the grill and I also helped them turn 22 pounds of tiny, sweet berries into a gesture of remembrance for their upcoming nuptials. Amanda had decided (way back when wedding plans were purely theoretical and she had all the time in the world) that she would send her wedding guests home with small, homemade jars of wild Maine blueberry jam. Never mind that she didn’t actually know how to can! Fortunately for her, she made a new friend that did: Me!

So I signed on to help with the massive “jam session.” That day, Ryan and his mom sat around the kitchen bar sifting good blueberries apart from under-ripened ones, gently picking out stems and leaves, and sipping mimosas. As the good berries piled up, Amanda began mashing loads of them. The darker ones gradually gave up their purple juice and yielded an almost black pulp. Amanda and I made sense of the recipes and began cooking down our blueberry mash. As we slowly stirred in honey and waited for the mixture to start bubbling and boiling, the kitchen filled with steam from the boiling water bath and the sweet smell of dissolving blueberries. We carefully ladled hot jam into the little jars and nestled them together in the pot of boiling water.

As I replaced the lid and listened to Amanda tease Ryan about his lack of enthusiasm for his sorting task, I thought of how long ago last winter seemed. In less than a year, I had gone from long days spent alone, cooking in my tiny apartment kitchen with only my cat and my cookbook, to being invited to witness the promise of love between two friends.

As we begin again our descent into winter - and as Amanda and Ryan become husband and wife - I know that no matter how high the snow drifts rise or how cold the wind blows this year, I have found the friends and food that make Maine my home.