“What! No sugar? Are you crazy?” These are the words I was expecting to hear from my fellow Chewonki community members, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by their excitement and encouragement for our week of no refined-sugar. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything other than curiosity and support for this endeavor, but after researching …
In tandem with Chewonki’s Refined Sugar Awareness Week, I decided to look into how Chewonki can use natural alternatives to refined sugar in the kitchen for my Human Ecology Project. Specifically, I explored the feasibility for the kitchen to stop using refined sugar. Human ecology is the study of the relationship between humans and their …
…or haymaker’s punch is a favorite beverage both with the kitchen staff and farm crew here at Chewonki. Switchel may have originated in the 1600’s in the West Indies although the ancient Greeks were drinking oxymel, which was a honey sweetened vinegar syrup. Herman Melville wrote in I and My Chimney, “I will give a …
Here’s another great fish from Salt + Sea in Portland: Atlantic Pollock (Pollachius virens). We’d catch these guys occasionally when we were fishing for mackerel as kids and my mother would cook them up for the dog or cats to supplement their daily ration of dried food. The fillets that Jay delivered last night were …
Here are some observations on cheese making and Chewonki by Clare Churchill-Seder, one of our Outdoor classroom instructors: I just have to tell you, the feta Bill and I made last week is wild. It’s delicious. It has a smoother texture than the traditional sheep or goat’s milk feta and tastes tangy, salty and fresh. …
This spring several Semester 52 students led by faculty members Pete Sniffen, Esther and James Kary, and Steve Kerchner have tapped 18 maple trees on Chewonki Neck to collect the sap for syrup making. After the first three days of collecting, the group had amassed 21 gallons of sap. The sap was then frozen and …
From Aaron Laflamme, Chewonki’s Outdoor Equipment & Logistics Coordinator: Long a staple of Chewonki trips, the Wilderness Trip Cookbook has traveled throughout Maine, the Northeast and beyond dispensing culinary wisdom. Loaded with nutritional facts, cooking methods, and recipes, it has everything the backcountry chef needs to prepare adventure ready meals. Check out the often overlooked …
I’d like to share one of my favorite passages from Wendell Berry. It’s taken from the essay “Elmer Lapp’s Place (1979),” from the book Bringing it to the Table: on farming and food. “Standing in the stanchion barn while the cows are being milked, I am impressed by how quietly the work is being done. …
I think I have a new favorite fish and kind of an unlikely one. It’s Acadian redfish (Sebastes fasciatus), also known as ocean perch. It’s unlikely because when I was in my teens I spent time lobster fishing and our bait was usually the carcasses of this fish, heavily salted and shipped from Canada. Nothing …
The hardest thing about cheese making is the waiting. So Saturday I finally cut into a cheese that had been aging in our root cellar since early January. This is blue cheese based on Fourme d’Ambert, one of the oldest French cheeses. During production, the Chewonki farm milk is inoculated with Penicillium roqueforti, the bluish …
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