Lobster for Chocolate

Well, it was bound to happen. The summer just got busy over night. I’m not complaining. It was a pretty lean spring around these parts, and it’s nice to have some cash coming in. The cafe is steady, the Rockland and Stonington Farmers’ Markets where Steve vends Thursdays and Fridays are starting to fill up, we’ve got lots of new, shiny wholesale accounts, I have cake and pastry orders, and everyone around the island seems to find a reason to buy chocolate.

And as much as I’m happy to see business pick up again, the beginning of the season always takes me by surprise. Yesterday, Steve hauled off hundreds of boxes for delivery and markets and we were scrambling until the second he headed out for the last boat of the day. It’s Thursday, and I suddenly realize my cafe chocolate stock is severely depleted, so I’ve fired up the melter and as soon as I’ve got our dark into temper, I’ll be chocolating for the rest of the day. And, I’m behind on billing, ordering, returning emails, laundry, etc.

And all this buzzing sometimes seems extraneous. The ads, marketing, networking–all of it. A lot of fuss over a little chocolate.

Yesterday, an entourage from Yankee Magazine stopped by with our neighbors Lynn and Seth. They’re out shooting a story the magazine is running on Lynn next summer, and they came by for some sidebar ideas.

We were happy to oblige, of course. They snapped some pictures of the chocolate asked some questions, including the one most frequently asked: Why the hell did you decide to try making chocolate on a tiny little island in the middle of nowhere?

We, of course, have an answer for this. And it’s a good one, gets the point across, and it’s true and if you want to see it, you can go to the website. It’s the same answer I gave to those folks from Yankee, and everyone else who calls. But maybe it’s this gloomy weather we’re having, or the hectic-ness of the start of the season, or a 30 second conversation I had with 12-year-old Eddie Liu the other day, but the real answer is longer than that. And it’s not something anyone could put in a sidebar, or in a brochure, or on a business card. It’s not interesting enough to be a marketing or networking commodity.

It’s just this: I make beautiful, delicious chocolate in the place that I live because I can. There’s not much I know how to do, but I feel very lucky that this thing–this trivial, extraneous, luxury item–is something that people value.

And I guess, for me, that’s what work is all about. Putting something out there–a service, a product, a gift–that people value enough to give something in return. I feel like sometimes this very basic exchange of goods and services gets lost in our scramble to get noticed, to win more customers, in a world where we all have decreasing attention spans. Even our values become marketing opportunities: fair trade, sustainably-grown, locally produced. What matters is how you package yourself, how efficiently, and with how much flash. I can’t tell you how many times “experts” have told me that quality isn’t even half of what makes up the value of a product. The rest is where you are, who you know, what color ribbon you use, what certifications you have.

Not that I’m against this. Let’s face it, I’m no purist, no Luddite, and I admit that I do like the spotlight at times.

But mostly, I see my chocolate as a commodity. Something I make, that I can, in turn, exchange for something else of value. And sometimes it takes an 12-year-old kid to remind me of that.

The other day I ran into Eddie Liu and his mom, Kassie. Eddie hauls a string of traps from his skiff all summer for spending money. He asked me if I would consider trading chocolate for lobster later in the summer. I’m not sure that I’ve felt prouder of my product than I did at that moment. More than money, more than any ad or brochure or picture could communicate; all of the sudden my chocolate had a value that I could understand. This is why I do what I do in the place I call home. Because I can.

The cafe is open…plus Garden Fair, classes, and a magazine article

Here’s sort of an update of the day-to-day goings on around here lately. I’ll get back to some of those stories I’ve got in the hopper–from those Captain’s logs I found in the woods, to what’s been going on around the island–sometime next week.

I’m happy to report that the cafe had a successful opening on Memorial Day weekend–I think we had close to 100 people come through and munch on my Raspberry-Cream Cheese Scones, Banana-Coconut Bread, Orange-Glazed Cinnamon Buns and chocolate chip cookies.

We’ve been open every weekend since and as the locals get used to coming round for their daily cup again, I’ve had some time to work on some new truffles for our upcoming Farm Market Collection. Steve and I dreamed this one up sometime this past winter, no doubt while we were fantasizing about longer, warmer summer days. Each truffle in this 8-piece collection will feature an ingredient grown or produced on a small farm on the Blue Hill Peninsula. Cardingbrook Farm had a fabulous sugaring season this spring, and I’m currently working on a “tree to sea” caramel featuring their syrup and Maine sea salt. I’ve just finished recipe testing for a truffle featuring Stoneset Farm blueberries and zippy lemon zest. He looked at me real funny when I suggested it, but Bob Bowen of Sunset Acres Farm seems game to let me experiment with his wife’s soft chevre I dream of incorporating in a silky dark chocolate truffle. Rhubarb, strawberries, mint, pumpkin and Pete and Kim Lindley’s island-grown Wolf River apples are all on the list for testing. One of the most exciting new ingredients I’m playing with is Elena Bourakovsky’s Creme de Cassis–made with her own currants she grows in her beautiful garden in Blue Hill.

Meanwhile, we’ve just come home from a gorgeous event at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens where we were one of 21 vendors at a 4-day Garden Fair. Though the weather was far from ideal for chocolate (freezing and pouring rain one day, sweltering hot and humid the next), Steve, Lisa and I met lots of great folks, including our great tent-mates from Fish in the Garden, Stillwood Pottery and Courtney Design jewelry.

So, last week found me in high production mode for the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens Garden Fair, teaching 2 cooking classes to some great kids from Rutland High School in Vermont, and a chocolate making class as part of the Inn’s Island Gourmet Girls weekend. Innkeeper Diana Santospago blogs about the weekend on Maine Food & Lifestyle’s blog, Plating Up. Check it out!

Also make sure you check out the new issue of Maine Food and Lifestyle Magazine–hitting the stands this week. In it you’ll find some great stories about summer food in Maine, schooner trips and a story about the island by yours truly.

From the earth…

It’s hard to believe that just over a month ago spring had barely begun.  In fact, according to Kristen (who you met in Chickens, hawks and French chocolate), at around mid-April the ground temperature reached 40 degrees, making it possible to 1) plant potatoes and 2) finally bury Hawkeye who has been waiting in her freezer, wrapped in the same Hannaford shopping bags I packed him in after his unfortunate rendezvous with a hungry hawk in March.  She buried him in a deep hole she dug in her garden where she had found a large, obelisk-shaped stone she found in the spot, ejected from the frozen ground this past winter.

These regurgitated objects are some of the stranger phenomena I’ve seen since moving to a cold climate. Apparently, when the ground freezes, the moisture therein expands (like liquids do in your freezer) and this causes objects in the ground to move. This results is the dreaded frost heave on winter roads. But it also causes objects in the ground to move around, as the increasing mass of freezing ground competes for space. Here on the island, because we have so little soil and the bedrock is so close to the surface, objects tend to move in the only direction available to them: up. This results in the discovery of things like Hawkeye’s grave marker. But sometimes the earth spews out something a little more unusual.

The island has been populated for several centuries–first by indians, and then by non-native settlers who came here in the late 1700’s for the rich fishing grounds. In fact, the descendants of these first settlers–the Bingham family–still live here on the island, and are still fishing today. In its heyday, the island boasted a year-round population of several hundred, plus a healthy summer community. But that was somewhere in the 1800’s. Since then, the population has waxed and waned–mostly waned–reaching an all-time low sometime in the 1950’s. Today, there are 52.

Islanders are an industrious and enterprising people, and so have mastered the art of re-using old stuff. But such a large exodus of people in a single century means that a lot of junk is left in their wake. Today, we have a very organized system of trash collection and recycling. But before the invention of the gasoline engine, getting things off the island was not so easy, so, for better or worse, people tended to either 1) throw their trash overboard, or 2) bury it “out back.” Evidenced by some of the rusty old things I’ve found in the woods here, this latter option was a popular one.

Sometime last month as I was walking to town to collect the mail, I stopped to say hello to Denise, who was laborously turning over the soil in her garden. Come mid-summer her garden is one of the most beautiful and bountiful on the island–a living maze of tomato vines, trellissed peas and beans, virtual bushes of lettuce, chard and basil, calendulas and sunflowers, and a single monster of a rhubarb plant right smack in the middle. But in early May the beds were dormant, the tomato cages empty and the pea trellisses exposed for what they really are: old rusty cast-iron bed frames, their legs buried in the dark soil.

Which got me thinking in the first place about the whole frost heave phenomena and the things I’ve found in the woods out back from my house, and the memory of something I saw the previous spring that Denise’s bed frame trellisses kicked up.

When I got home from the post office, I immediately pushed myself through the feathery spruce saplings that conceal the little path that leads up Black Dinah Mountain. Denise’s bed frames had reminded me that, on a walk the previous fall, I had seen a rusty knob poking up out of the ground nearby the old, crumbling stone foundation between the Black Dinah trail and Wes Bingham’s camp. It had just occurred to me what that knob must have been attached to, and spurred on by my curiousity (and my need for a pea trellis myself), I went to see if the winter freeze had pushed it further up out of the ground.

It had. In fact, nearly all of the head of the frame was exposed. I dropped my mail (which I was still carrying) right there, and tested the hold the ground still had on my trellis. One leg of the frame was lifted just above the ground and I grasped it and gave a tentative tug. The soft spring earth gave way easily, and heartened, I gave another pull–quite a bit stronger this time.

Much to my surprise, the ground resisted very little and I went flying backwards with the leg of the frame in my hands. My surprise quickly turned to dismay when I realized that the ground hadn’t loosened; rather, the frame had. The bulk of the bed frame still lay buried in the dirt, and I held merely the useless broken end of the leg.

I continued to tug and pull and kick at the buried frame to no avail. Decades of spruce growth had the thing tangled up in their shallow roots. I gave the frame one last frustrated kick before I decided to give up for good, when a small clunk made me stop from turning away. I crouched over where the leg of the frame had so easily broken away, and there, out of the hollow of the rung, had fallen a tin tube.

The tube was almost the exact diameter of the rung and so extracting the rest of it was a slow process, but eventually the thing came loose in my hands–and I did what any other sane person would do: I opened it.  Inside, rolled in leather and tied with string, a virtual ream of perfectly preserved paper, every last inch of it written upon in every direction.  And at the top of each page, in larger letters, as if written ahead of time when the pages were still blank, “Log of Capt. Dinah Bride,  The Eos.”