March of the strawberries: '08s are history

"Sad but true," says the sign at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown. "Strawberries are over."

They mean local strawberries, of course. Strawberries are marching up the continent, and they've just moved north of us now. At least for a few more weeks, you'll still be able to find boxes of berries picked in Massachusetts and New Hampshire at farmstands like Walker's in Little Compton and Schartner Farms in Exeter (Schartner even has a satellite farm on West Side Road in North Conway, NH, so they'll be getting their farmstand berries from there for a while longer.)

For now, local pick-your-own places are featuring raspberries. In a couple more weeks, there'll be blueberries. Those are the big three for local berries; after that, it's all about corn and pumpkins.

In addition to picking raspberries, you might want to head to beautiful Sweet Berry Farm on Tuesday evenings (beginning tonight) for their summer series of free outdoor concerts. Tonight's is a '50s picnic with "The Elderly Brothers." You can bring a blanket to sit on and your own picnic, or purchase food from the farmstand, where the menu is paired with the music and includes nostalgic items such as mini-marshmallow Jell-O, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese.

Pick your own (damn) strawberries

It's probably only me who reads the emphasis as, "Pick your own strawberries," as in, "Hands off of mine!"

Last week, my friend Deb and I picked these berries (20 pounds total!) in about an hour at Middletown's Sweet Berry Farm, the place which every year seems to me to have the sweetest, reddest, best-tasting berries around. (Other great places I can personally vouch for are Four Town Farm in Seekonk and Schartner Farms in Exeter.) While the going rate for they-picked berries at most farmstands seemed to be around $5.50 this season, these "picked-them-ourselves" berries were $1.79 a pound, as long as you picked at least ten pounds, which Deb and I made sure we did.

With my berries, I made three pies -- two of my family's ancestral recipe for a glazed pie, and one double-crusted strawberry-rhubarb (a favorite of my Retired Guy, who finds the ancestral recipe too sweet). I still had plenty more berries, and they weren't going to keep because they were so ripe and so full of water, so I didn't even wait till the next day to freeze the rest in containers (after slicing the berries and dusting them with sugar).

The ancestral pie recipe was allegedly discovered by my grandmother Zeller back in the '50s in a Ladies' Home Journal type of magazine, which printed it as a favorite of First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. Having terrible sweet-tooths, we all loved it, and the pie has been enshrined in family recipe boxes ever since. Unfortunately, as those boxes predate the internet, I'll have to type here the recipe as given by Mamie herself. Don't wait to make it, though. "Pick your own" berries are going by fast.

MAMIE EISENHOWER'S STRAWBERRY PIE

1 baked pie shell (supermarket brand is fine here)
1 generous quart strawberries
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 to 4 ounces softened cream cheese
1 cup cream, whipped and sweetened as desired

When the pie shell is cool, spread the cream cheese in the bottom, being careful not to break the crust. If you do, just cover over the break with some cream cheese. Put half (one pint) of the berries into a blender or food processor and puree them. In a saucepan on the stove, bring the puree to boiling, then add the sugar and cornstarch, which have been mixed together for ease of blending. Cook this mixture slowly, stirring continuously, for about ten minutes or until it loses the cloudiness from the cornstarch. Then place the hot saucepan in a sink of cold water to chill it. Meanwhile, place the other pint of whole, perfect berries on top of the cream cheese in the pie crust. Pour the cooled strawberry mixture over the top of the whole berries and spread it around to cover them completely. Refrigerate the pie, just to set it, and before serving, top with the sweetened whipped cream.

Local clams? No, thanks

Are we all done talking about "food miles" and carbon footprints yet?

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for eating local when it comes to certain critical foods like strawberries, asparagus and tomatoes. Right now, I'm counting the days till I can pick my own strawberries at great local farms like Four Town in Seekonk and Sweet Berry in Middletown.

But anyone who thinks that forgoing foods that have come from other places in the country or the world is going to save the world is just plain loco.

"Big Foot," an excellent article in The New Yorker some months ago, should put to rest the faddish and simplistic notion that "eating local" is going to help save the planet. Quite the contrary, as it turns out. (Among its interesting points: Because there is more sunshine in certain parts of the world, and therefore a longer growing season, it is actually more energy efficient overall to grow foods where they grow best on the planet, rather than "locally," where the additional energy costs of things like fertilizers far outweigh the energy costs of shipping. And that's not even to mention the sheer impracticability of growing enough food in a heavily developed state like Rhode Island to feed all the people who live here.)

What this means to me as a Rhode Islander is that I can feel good about drinking the French, Italian, South African and California wines I much prefer anyway over the additive-laced stuff that is produced around here. Rhode Island wine-growers have to add the additives because the climate around here is not the world's best for wine-growing. Hello! There's a reason they call it Bordeaux.

Still, some people will go oooh! just because it's "local," just as they do for local seafood. They confuse "local" with "fresh." Fresh is good; local isn't always. Take clams. Over the past few weeks, Retired Guy and I have been engaged in a project of vast scope to discover what are the "Top Ten Fried Clam Shacks" in Rhode Island. This entails stopping at likely clam places that we come across in our travels and ordering a box or a clam roll to sample. (Look for the results coming up soon on Projo.)

What I've noticed is that the current fad for "localism" has made fried-clam purveyors skittish about admitting that their clams, in most cases, come from Maine. They hesitate, just for a second, when I ask where they get their clams, while they try to assess whether the answer I want to hear is "Rhode Island."

The truth is that the best-tasting clams and lobsters come from as far north as you can get them: Maine or Canada. The water is colder there, not to mention a whole lot purer than Narragansett Bay. (Check out today's front page Providence Journal story: Are our lobsters casualties of the war on mosquitoes? about the possible effect of the larvicide methoprene on the Bay.)

In most cases, clams for fried clams are frozen anyway, so it doesn't matter how far they've traveled to get here. Right now, there's a red tide alert in many parts of nearby Massachusetts, meaning that no clams are safe to eat from there. While the red tide algae doesn't typically spread south of Cape Cod, have you looked at the "shellfish closings" map that's part of the daily weather report in the newspaper? Those big dark blue areas that wax and wane with the rainfall totals mean that those parts of the local shoreline are too polluted to take clams from.

Well, excuse me for doubting, but I'd rather not eat a clam that someone in Rhode Island's state government has decided is clean enough today when it wasn't yesterday. So when I'm standing at that clam shack window asking, "Where are your clams from?" I don't want to hear, "Oh, they're local." I want to hear, "Maine."

Idea for bumper sticker: "Think Globally, Not Locally." Every food is local somewhere.

Can we all please stop talking about "carbon footprints" now?

Top photo: Evelyn's in Tiverton (clams from Ipswich, Mass.); lower photo: Flo's in Middletown (clams from Maine).

Opening Day: Somerset Creamery

For fans of the homemade ice cream at Somerset Creamery, today was Opening Day — the first day you could get a cone since the '07 season ended in October. You didn't have to buy tickets; you just had to have seen the sign by the side of Route 6 last week announcing the Mar. 24 home opener.

And while I wouldn't say that the stands were packed shortly after the OPEN sign was lit at noon, die-hard members of Somerset Nation were there, greeting each other and owner Carolyn Berube, congratulating themselves on having survived the winter, and taking a few moments to contemplate the list of flavors, savoring familiar names like Cranberry Bog, Mocha Chip, Ginger, Grape Nut, and a rookie, Lemon, that already looks like a good prospect.

Everyone looked happy. And why not? While Red Sox Nation can only hope for a great season, Somerset Nation knows it will be — right up till Columbus weekend.

Edible Rhode Island

Along with my latte at Seven Stars Bakery yesterday, I found a stack of copies of this free magazine, published four times a year and exploring the foods and restaurants of the Ocean State. Apparently, Edible Rhody is part of a family of such publications that also covers New Hampshire, Cape Cod and other destinations around the country. It makes for a good read over coffee and a nibble and makes you feel happy to live in such a great state. The spring issue has features on Charlie's maple sugarhouse (see Post for Mar. 1 below) and the trendy Providence restaurant, also on Broadway, Nick's. Shown in this photo is Seven Stars Bakery. We'll post a photo of Nick's as soon as we can get over there for dinner.

Sweet deal: Charlie's Sugarhouse

With the warmer days of March comes the sound of sap dripping in buckets attached to the sugar maple trees of western Rhode Island. Take a road trip to see sap being turned into syrup at places like Charlie's Sugarhouse in Coventry.
Charlie is Charlie Chase, and the sugarhouse is open weekends in March from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. You can see the fragrant clouds of steam rising as Charlie boils sap into syrup. (It takes 40 gallons of sap to make each gallon of pure maple syrup.) Samples are offered, and bottles of pure Rhode Island syrup are available for sale.

Charlie's Sugarhouse, 124 Hall Rd., Coventry. (401) 397-7102. Directions: From Route 95 in Providence, head south to Exit 10B, Route 117 West, to Route 102. Turn right to go north on 102 to Waterman Hill Rd. Turn left onto Waterman. Bear right at the fork.

(Providence Journal photo by Connie Grosch)