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But if you’re reaching your junk-food limit, take a detox detour. Located in Concord proper, Verrill Farm is one of the best-known produce vendors in the state for numerous good reasons. It practices sustainable agriculture on its 140 acres. It acts as a supplier to such acclaimed restaurants as Oleana, Craigie Street Bistrot, and No. 9 Park. And it hosts all kinds of special events for the public. On June 18, for instance, you can attend the 10th annual strawberry festival, where you’ll feast on burgers, hot dogs, and homemade strawberry shortcake; get down to some live music; take hay rides and pony rides; and maybe even pick a few berries of your own before heading home. Other crops you can expect to find in the bins at Verrill’s stand this summer include chard and spinach (June), eggplant, beets, new potatoes, and corn (July), and leeks and peppers (August). What’s more, there’s also an excellent on-site kitchen, turning out picnic-perfect upscale deli fare and baked goods. Back up in Ipswich, the seasonal Russell Orchards reserves the majority of its 120 acres for fruit (though it grows some vegetables, too) — apricots and cherries, pears and plums, raspberries and currants, several varieties of apples, and more. Though it doesn’t have a deli, it does have a bakery, where pies (blueberry-rhubarb, anyone?), scones, cider doughnuts, and so on are prepared daily. It, too, has a pick-your-own program — go in July, for instance, and you can not only feel good about the antioxidant-rich blueberries and blackberries you ingest but about the exercise and fresh air you got while gathering them. And it, too, holds festivals to celebrate its harvests — from a peach festival on August 13 and 14 to a wine-and-apple festival on November 5 and 6. Said wine comes straight from the farm’s own cellars, which produce funky fruit varieties like dandelion, elderberry, and jostaberry. Russell also brews its own hard ciders. Still, you might argue, nothing rounds out a summer repast like good old ice cream. While creamery stands are everywhere, some of the best are in the middle of nowhere. Take Hodgie’s, a shabby but sweet little red-and-white clapboard shed out on Haverhill Road, in Amesbury. Even on a cool spring weekday, a steady stream of customers flows between the parking lot, the order counter, and the picnic tables situated in a grove out back — leaving us to wonder, doesn’t anyone ever go to work anymore? To be fair, though, polishing off a cup or cone from Hodgie’s is work. Given the choice of one to five scoops, we opt for three, and wind up with well over a pint of ice cream between our greedy little mitts. Still, this is one job you won’t want to take and shove, since, we’re pleased to report, quantity does not come at the expense of quality here — in fact, it comes at hardly any expense at all ($2.25–$4.50). The intriguing flavor known as frozen pudding is a candied-fruit-and-rum-spiked affair not unlike Sicilian cassata (or the gelato inspired by it); fudge-striped raspberry truffle surprises with loads of white chocolate chunks. By yummy contrast, peanut-butter cup surprises without manifest chunks of the namesake ingredient, which instead seems to be spread evenly throughout the base, resulting in pure peanut-butter-flavored chocolate ice cream. Other tempting varieties include chocolate marshmallow, Danish almond cream, and grapenut. The texture, meanwhile, is impressively dense and almost velvety, even fudgy. At Carter’s, in neighboring Haverhill, meanwhile, a classically creamy mouthfeel nicely balances the whole kernels studding the pistachio and maple-walnut flavors ($2.50–$4). While the menu is more limited than at Hodgie’s, Carter’s compensates with its proximity to the Merrimack River, giving you a scoop with a view on a sunny day. Then again, if you’d prefer yours with a scent, hit Mad Maggie’s: Steve Reppucci’s seasonal stand occupies a corner of the Boston Flower Market, in North Reading. While a greenhouse has got to be a close second to the beach for soaking up summer’s sultry aura, it’s also a pretty dreamy locale for the dreamer who owns it, a laborer-of-love determined, he says, "to get people to think of us as a destination," rather than as a shrub-shopper’s bonus. Reppucci works to "build up a following" not only by hiring "real friendly, outgoing kids" and developing a camaraderie with the customers (many of whose grinning mugs are posted on the Web site’s photo album) but also, of course, by making memorable ice cream. "We spend a lot of time hunting around for ingredients. I go to conventions and ask around — ‘Where do you get your chocolate, where do you get your vanilla?’ I don’t care if I’m paying $10 for really good almonds if it makes the ice cream better. My product isn’t always consistent, because I’m always changing the recipe, and hopefully it’s always getting better." Best of all for jaded aficionados, Reppucci notes, "I don’t settle for the normal flavors. It’s kind of fun because we take a lot of customer suggestions." Candy Store Floor, Mad Maggie’s first trademarked flavor, is the brainchild of one of Reppucci’s four children. It features M&M’s, chocolate chips, and pieces of Nestlé Crunch and malted milk balls speckling malted chocolate ice cream as though they were swept into the batch. Or how about coffee-and-doughnuts, or ginger-chocolate? For that matter, how about heading to Reading and presenting your own sweet ideas? RHODE ISLAND If New England and the Deep South competed in a contest for the quaintest culinary terms, Rhode Island just might be the deciding factor in our favor. Case in point: the menu at Iggy’s Doughboys and Chowder House, in Warwick. Perched on Oakland Beach facing Narragansett Bay, the hut has survived a change of ownership and name, expansion (adding not only a dining area but a second location altogether, in Narragansett), and two hurricanes in its 80-year history. It can handle you in your feeding frenzy, easy. But can you handle the jargon? Your best choices are the eponymous doughboys ($2.95/six; $4.95/12) — pockets of fried dough that are sticky with sprinkled sugar and wonderfully wicked in every sense of the word — as well as the clam cakes ($2.95/six; $4.95/12), which aren’t the crab-cake relatives they sound like. Rather, they’re fritters, fat golden-brown balls of chopped clam-studded batter. And while the stuffed quahogs ($1.50 each) aren’t made on-site, you might want to get a couple simply as an excuse to ask for "stuffies." Ask for ’em at the service window of Evelyn’s Drive-In, in Tiverton, though, and they will indeed be house-made; a weekend specialty ($2.99 each), the quahog shells are stuffed with a decadent mixture of their own chopped meats, crumbs, and chorizo. Fork into them while lounging out at the covered picnic tables lining placid Nanaquaket Pond, and you can add the meal to your list of quintessential New England outdoor-dining experiences. But Evelyn’s is also a full-service eatery, and a bit of a quirky one at that, with a dining room that has the down-home aura of a country kitchen, offering a relatively extensive menu — including a few items one would be disinclined to call "classic." So while we’re not suggesting you actually pass up your usual fried-seafood platter — a market-price embarrassment of riches such as salty-sweet pieces of battered cod, scallops, shrimp, and of course clams, plus fries and coleslaw — for a chow-mein sandwich ($3.99), its utterly incongruous presence is duly, indeed cheerfully, noted. And while we’re not too sure we consider coffee milk ($1.89–$2.25), a sort of lowbrow latte, a sufficiently refreshing or appropriate accompaniment to the aforementioned platter on a hot July afternoon — at least as compared to beer — we readily hail the soothing charm of its invention. Perhaps you could gulp one down for dessert — with a shot of Kahlúa or something on the side. Unless, that is, you’ve already got Gray’s Ice Cream in your sights. The old-time Tiverton parlor (there’s also a branch in Bristol), located amid the galleries and boutiques dotting the Four Corners area, isn’t renowned for its funky flavors ($2.25–$3.25) so much as its standard-bearing quality, plain and simple — as exemplified by its oft-vaunted coffee and ginger varieties (though if you ask us, peach brandy’s where it’s at, intrigue-wise). Not that it’s alone in that regard. But we’ve got to stop listing New England’s finest somewhere, or you’d still be reading as the first flakes of snow fell come autumn. Best you just get out there and eat while the gettin’ — and eatin’ — is good. Ruth Tobias can be reached at ruthtobias@earthlink.net page 1 page 2 page 3 |
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Issue Date: June 10 - 16, 2005 Back to the Features table of contents |
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