Life Imitates Art in Western Maine

!±8± Life Imitates Art in Western Maine

When most of us think of Maine, we picture coastal fishing villages, preppy island resorts, and vintage lighthouses. A tour of Western Maine is a lakeland and forest adventure in a region full of real and imaginary ties to novelist Stephen King. Bridgton, where King raised his children, became the town of "Castle Rock" in his stories. The writer summers on Lake Kezar (Dark Score Lake in the book "Bag of Bones"). Less than an hour from Portland, thousands visit this region to canoe, take in the fall foliage, or ski. One may also track down King's sources of inspiration.

Stephen King is from Durham, Maine, and is perhaps the state's best-known native son. Whether a King fan or not, a southwestern tour of the state offers attractions for everyone- skiing at Sugarloaf or Sunday River, great local antiques and craft shops, romantic lakefront bed and breakfasts, and steamboat rides on the Songo River. The other story is told by King in his thrillers, and the locals whose lives surround him.

Western Maine grew as a logging center. Tall tales sprung from the woodsmen's camps, where, from September to April, the workers shared labor, meals and stories. The best place to learn of this heritage is the shop of R.J. Richard (on Rangeley's Main Street), also known as "The Mad Whittler". The son of a logger who lived to be 93, he carves out a living crafting lifesize figures with a chainsaw. Ladies need not feel exclluded, Richard will induct you into his worldwide "Bunny Club" by giving you a tiny wooden rabbit. Visit Rangeley Lakes' Logging Museum, which features art dedicated to the woodsman tradition. "The Mad Whittler" himself conducts the tour, full of spirit and appreciation.

Ask your Rangeley innkeeper or hotelier for a good spot to pick blueberries in season. Also here is a stony lodge home overlooking the nearby and the distant mountains- this was the residence of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian immigrant to 1940s and 1950s Maine who was equal parts Sigmund Freud and Nikola Tesla. Reich was a proponent of a human energy he called "orgone". A tour led by a volunteer who knew the scientist, includes the doctor's study, his B-movieesque technical equipment, and the rooftop observation deck. The view is captivating.

While in the Rangeley Lakes area, dine at the Kawanhee Inn and Restaurant in Weld, a log-lined retreat where the young Stephen King worked as a dishwasher. Order the smooth chowder, and finish with a local blueberry-filled dessert. Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover are among those who came here to fly fish with "Fly Rod" Crosby, a colorful local woman who knew Annie Oakley. Not far from here is Naples, a lakefront town where King served as a kitchen hand for a defunct hotel called The Woodlands. There he met a Black cook who served as the model for Dick Halloran, the clairvoyant chef in "The Shining". The rest of the impetus for this tale was King's real-life winter gig as caretaker for the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, built by one Francis Edgar Stanley. A must see for both King readers and auto lovers is The Stanley Museum in appropriately-named Kingfield. Once a schoolhouse, this white-columned edifice houses the vintage turn-of-the-20th-century steam-powered cars that shattered land speed records. Museum founder Susan Davis will chauffeur you about town in style in a rare Stanley. Kingfield is best known for the slopes of Sugarloaf- for East Coast skiing there's no equal.

To top off an evening here, dine at the stately Herbert Hotel, a restored Victorian that was one of the first finest stays north of Boston in its 1930's heyday. Traveling west, you'll come to Route 302 in Bridgton. This town is cast in fiction as "Castle Rock", which appears in King fiction, and is the name of the production company that converts the novels into movies. The Food City supermarket in the little mall at 119 Main Street here was the Federal Foods of King's dreamy novella "The Mist". If you've read the story, the store is identical to what your mind's eye conjured up. Continue a short drive north to Lovell, where King has a summer home on Palmer Lane in the Lake Kezar area. On the main road here, King was struck by a van in June of 1999- he has since donated ambulances to Bridgton's Northern Cumberland Memorial Hospital on South High Street. For a possible King sighting, head into the nondescript market called Melby's on Route 35 in North Waterford. The locals still call it Tut's, a former name.

Keep north into Bethel, where can lunch or play 18 holes at the Bethel Inn. Later, have a bite at Cho-Sun Sushi on 119 Main St. The owner, Pak Sun Lane, is a good friend of both King and his novelist wife Tabitha.

No trip to this region would be complete without a stop at Poland Springs. As you approach in your vehicle, you'll feel you've left the U.S. and entered a New England Oz. Once a Shaker village, the upper crust flocked here to schmooze, spa, and drink the mineral waters since the 1910's. Tours the beautiful period buildings, verdant grounds, and original water treatment facility are given (ask for Elliot Levy, the energetic preservation director). This is where Joseph P. Kennedy honeymooned with Rose, and where his sons learned to play golf (on a Donald Ross course). Photos of the elite crowd exhibit walls. President Coolidge and Henry Ford were summer guests in an era when the wealthy insisted they only drank Poland Springs water. The stately stone entrance is one of two buildings still standing from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, where the world first tasted hamburger, french fries, Aunt Jemima pancakes. In the small Shaker community next to Poland Springs, and visitors may tour their former homes, meeting house, and shop at the gift store for memorabilia, music, and literature.

Hiking, biking, presidential folklore, and all in the setting of America's favorite suspense stories. Go west, but do so in Maine.

Life Imitates Art in Western Maine

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3 No Recipe Uses For The Season's Best Strawberries

!±8± 3 No Recipe Uses For The Season's Best Strawberries

No cookbook will tell me what to do when it's strawberry season. It's one of the great seasonal joys in fresh food, and I take full advantage of the short time. The best strawberries come from your local farm, local farmer, local rain and soil.

I celebrate the beginning of strawberry season with a visit to a local strawberry patch and speak with Jessica, the owner/farmer.

Strawberries are one of the most difficult crops to grow because of the long season, hard labor, and fragile nature of the fruit. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money to grow the best strawberries, but the difference is worth it and worth your money as well.

If you bite into a strawberry and it's white in the middle, you don't have the freshest berry. The likelihood is that this berry was picked before ripe and shipped long distances, robbing you of the great flavor and nutrients that fresh strawberries can offer.

For the best strawberries, visit your local farm and eat them when they're in-season. I'd rather have fantastic, flavorful strawberries for only a month than access to bland berries all year long.

Using my knowledge of successes I've had in the past, and basic cooking methods, I've decided to make Strawberry Pancakes, Strawberry Syrup, and a Balsamic Strawberry salad.

Strawberry pancakes are one of my favorite items to make when I get a hold of great, fresh strawberries. The flavor of the best strawberries that are just-picked baked into a griddle cake is a true summer pleasure.

I can even make the pancakes with a pre-made mix. However, Aunt Jemima is over 100 years old. Her hot cakes don't spring up like they used to.

I want my fresh diced strawberries to be surrounded by pancake batter, not have them sticking out the top because the mixture is too thin. What I need is extra leavening to make a pancake that has strawberries inside.

Luckily, with a basic knowledge of baking principles and leavening agents, I can give the old lady a facelift and no recipe is needed. By adding baking powder and citric acid to the boxed mix, I can get an extra chemical reaction for the biggest, fluffiest strawberry pancakes ever.

Even strawberry pancakes made with a boxed mix can be customized for my liking. Aunt Jemima never looked so good after the facelift we've given her.

This same principle can be used for banana pancakes, blueberry pancakes, chocolate chip pancakes, granola pancakes, and many more.

But, I still have a lot of fruit in my bucket and I want to preserve as well as enjoy the best strawberries I'll have all year. Strawberry sauce is a great solution because it can be used as an ingredient in other foods and the sugar syrup will preserve the fresh fruit flavor as well.

Strawberry sauce can be made like candy syrup when you know the right temperature.

All it takes is strawberries, sugar, water, and a thermometer to apply a no recipe approach to making syrup from fresh fruit that is naturally sweet and has a smooth texture.

After capping and dicing the fresh berries, I'll bring them to a soft simmer in a sauce pan with water and a spoonful of sugar.

I'm not trying to sweeten the strawberry sauce by adding sugar. I'm using the best strawberries, so they already have the best flavor. A small amount of added sugar will "set" the color of the berries, inhibiting their desire to turn brown after being pureed.

However, there's an extra trick I'll show you that will keep the strawberry sauce from cooling and forming sugar crystals. Remember our friend Cream of Tartar from the strawberry pancakes we just made? It'll have an entirely different roll in strawberry sauce.

Cream of Tartar helped in the chemical reaction needed to give Aunt Jemima a facelift and leaven pancakes. Today, the acidic quality of this bake shop staple will help inhibit crystallization of sugars in our strawberry sauce.

Once the sauce cools, sugar crystals can start to form crunchy bits in the syrup. I certainly don't want a crunchy sauce, so just the "tip of the knife" of an acid will help limit this effect. There is no recipe that will alert you to this.

Strawberry sauce can be used for dozens of applications during the spring and summer. I love to use it for drinks, to decorate dessert plates, or to flavor and moisten a cake. It's a simple way to preserve your strawberry picking efforts and create an ingredient you can use again and again.

However, not everything you make with the best strawberries has to be sweet. Even a fresh strawberry salad doesn't always have to be sweet. I'm going to play with my diner's palates by throwing sour and bitter at them too!

The real art and talent of a great chef or cook is to manipulate the palate of the people you're serving. I'm going to hit on all four of the senses on the tongue with one single salad.

Since my fresh strawberries are so sweet, I'm going to off-set that sensation with balsamic vinegar, a sour liquid. Then, perhaps raw onion and honey to really wake up the mouth.

However, the salad I'll make today will attempt to combine flavors that will play contrast with the sweet fresh-picked fruit.

Since my fresh strawberries are so sweet, I'm going to off-set that sensation with balsamic vinegar, a sour liquid. Then, perhaps I'll add raw onion and honey to really wake up the mouth.

This is a great method to keep in mind no matter what you're cooking, baking, or combining ingredients in your kitchen. What can you do to cause unexpected flavors in your food that will make your guests wonder how you did it?

There are plenty of unconventional flavor combinations all over the world, and using them in contrast can make for the most exciting dishes.

When you are enjoying the fantastic flavor of the best strawberries that are local and in-season, time is of the essence. The season is short, and there's no written instructions that will tell you exactly what your tastes require. Only you can decide that.

3 No Recipe Uses For The Season's Best Strawberries

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Life, Death and Carmen's Avena

!±8± Life, Death and Carmen's Avena

When I was small there were a few things that made breakfast worth getting up for. First, was my mother Carmen's oversized Aunt Jemima pancakes; these were so big that when rolled-up, they could be used for batting practice. Second, was Carmen's Puerto Rican oatmeal (Avena); it was like eating hot ice cream.

Carmen's Avena Recipe

3 cups Quaker Oats
Half a cup of sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups of milk
1 cup of water

In a medium sauce pan, mix all ingredients thoroughly. Then place on stovetop on medium/low heat, stirring constantly. Stir until Avena thickens to a smooth and creamy consistency. Top with cinnamon powder and eat hot.

Those were the good memories and I will share many with you as a blogger. There were other memories I have of growing up in Newark and Elizabeth. Memories of Christmas in the Dayton St. Projects, summers in North Newark, being physically attacked in elementary and middle school by gangs. Hearing teachers assure students they would go nowhere in life.

I think back to the Dayton St. Projects and wonder how anyone could have made it out alive. A walk to the Dayton St. School only three blocks away was like an excursion through a wasteland, without protection from the elements. Between home and school anything could happen and sometimes did. The tall dark red brick buildings cast a shadow upon the earth that followed you everywhere; they frustrated the sun's attempt to shine light upon the concrete floor. The eighth floor where we lived overlooked the Evergreen Cemetery - a huge expanse of death and finality. No matter where you looked, one could find a "dead end."

As a Boricua whose family subsisted on welfare and government benefits, Dayton St. was a place people wanted to live in. It was subsidized housing and really the only thing our family could afford. "Los Proyectos" - as the Boricuas called them - were prime real estate. Many of us adapted to the environment and learned survival skills that we use to this day.

We learned that survival and promotion - like in the work world - sometimes depends on who you know. My family knew Carlos my first cousin and everyone on Dayton St. knew Carlos - the drug dealer and eventual user. He loved his family and people knew that, but most importantly respected that. He would do anything for his family but eventually could not do anything for himself. He died of AIDS from sharing needles for his heroin addiction.

We learned that parents can hold together a family regardless of where you live or who your neighbors are. They can also teach you to be tough in an unforgiving neighborhood. Lesson number one: If you get hit you hit back! Lesson number two: See lesson number one. There were constant struggles between African-Americans and Puerto Ricans and neither wanted to seem weak. So we fought. Sometimes we got our asses kicked and sometimes we didn't. Either way you got respect. My best friends in the projects were people who I had gotten into fights with. People who you could trust because one way or another we were in this together.

We learned that school was a great place to meet people from other places - white people. The fifth and sixth grades were great at Dayton St. School because we had the same teacher, Ms. Schimmel. Before her I did not know who Jewish people were or their stories. She showed us other cultures and took us on class trips, to fossil sites, foundries and even a picnic in Weequahic Park. I think she was the first teacher to believe in us. That was her best lesson.

So many things I can say about growing up in Dayton St. It was the kind of place that either killed you or made you stronger. But at the end of the day it was our home. The place where my mother made Avena and huge pancakes. The place where I went to summer camp with the Boy Scouts and where a girl named Peanut and I made out on the roof.

Life, Death and Carmen's Avena

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