"Many thanks, serious eaters, for all the shout-outs of support and encouragement." I scared myself into not eating last week, and not just because of what I ate on the road in Chicago. Erin pointed out that my real downfall was the double meal I ate last Tuesday night. It started with oxtail, shepherd's pie, jerk chicken, leg of lamb, and goat at The Islands with Erin and Carey. Then it was (and this was the killer) two pork roasts and two fried chicken recipes from Donald Link's and David Chang's books that Cook the Book's Caroline Russock made at her house for a cookbook competition we are participating in. So when you think about it, my two-pound weight gain...
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Martha's Vineyard is an island full of mediocre hot dogs. You can get a hot dog just about anywhere you turn either on the island, or on your way there; in the ferry terminal in Wood's Hole, on the ferry itself, in convenience stores, even in clam shacks. But until Dinghy Dogs opened in Oak Bluffs Harbor there was not a hot dog worth the calories and salt. It's a tiny place—just a stand, actually—but they do hot dogs right. They start with a a grilled all-beef kosher style hot dog made by Pearl Meat Packing Company in Boston. Ask for your Martin's Potato Hot Dog Roll toasted, some good deli mustard, some chopped onions, and sauerkraut if it...
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I forgot my scale (I was going to throw it into my duffel bag when we left the house on Wednesday), so I'm afraid there will be no moment of reckoning, no not-so-high drama, in my diet post this week. We have been up on Martha's Vineyard for two days now, and I must say my diet challenges up here are great, so there's plenty to write about and report on. I have been coming to the Vineyard for more than thirty years now, and I have battled my addiction to pie for at least that long. Check that. I think my mother must have been addicted to pie, so she gave birth to a pie-addicted son more than fifty...
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Four days of eating on Martha's Vineyard and what did I discover: The best local soda I've ever tasted: Cape Cod Diet Cranberry Ginger Ale: Simultaneously sweet and tart, plenty of cranberry flavor, could go a little heavier on the ginger. I know about Cheerwine and the like, but are there other great local sodas most people don't know about? A very fine Little Rock Farms blueberry pie made with wild Maine blueberries. An excellent Mrs. Blake's Strawberry Rhubarb Pie with her usual moist and flaky crust and filling that could have been less sweet. Fried clams from John's Fish Market in Vineyard Haven that were crunchy, clammy, and yummy. Wispy, thin onion rings that were battered to order (as...
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Having come to Martha's Vineyard for the last 28 years I can tell you that it is not a place you come to eat in great restaurants. I always advise my friends who vacation here to buy some fresh fish at Larsen's, Poole's, The Net Result, or John's Fish Market, some freshly picked lettuce and corn at a farmer's market, and a few vine-ripened tomatoes, and then you'll eat like a king or queen at the house you've rented. But the island does have one amazing foodstuff you can't get anywhere else, Mrs. Blake's pies. Mrs. Blake's husband sells her pies in a little hut in front of their house on State Road a couple of hundred yards before you...
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