Great Travel Ideas for Spring:

1. Take the Capt. Barry Experience.
2. Golf at GlennRiddle
3. Go Fish—From a Kayak
4. Tour Some Lighthouses
5. Catch Crabs with a Waterman

Charlie Buckley, aka “Mr. Waterfront,” Long & Foster, Annapolis

2011 bargain pick: This four-bedroom, five-bath South River waterfront home is selling for $1.4 million, $300,000 off its original list price.

Predictions for 2011: I think things are taking off. Right now, the volume is up dramatically. In 2009, we did $24 million in sales. In 2010, we sold $40 million (compared to $100 million in 2006). That said, the prices do not seem to be going up. Buyers have seen we hit bottom. Now is time to cherry-pick the bargains. There’s a lot of inventory, but in six months or a year, the really good deals will be gone.

The sweet spot: A lot of people think the waterfront market is immune. Wrong. On average, it’s dropped about a third. The sweet spot has dropped, too. Almost all my sales have been under $2 million, with the bulk $800,000 to $1.3 million. In 2006, it was all $2 million to $3 million. Almost nothing in the [Anne Arundel] county is selling for over $2 million. Any volume at all is coming up from the bottom. It’s an entry-level world.

Advice to buyers: It really is a great time to buy. Prices are down and interest rates are down. Of those two things, interest rates are more important. It wasn’t that long ago that jumbo mortgages were at 7 or 8 percent. … If you bought a $1 million house several years ago compared to now, that $1 million hasn’t changed, but that monthly payment has. 

Hugh Smith, Chesapeake Real Estate, Coldwell Banker, Easton

2011 bargain pick: This 6.5-acre Church Creek property has a pool, tennis court, and five bedrooms. Originally listed at $2 million, it’s now $900,000.

Predictions for 2011: I’ve seen a gradual improvement tracking the national economy. Consumer confidence numbers, improvement in pace of sales. Based on the stock market, I’m encouraged. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing increased energy and calling for higher-end listings.

Where the bargains are: The bargains are in Cambridge. It’s a buying opportunity for anyone. You’ll definitely get bang for a buck. There’s tremendous value in most of the market. The lower end has been seriously challenged by foreclosures; inventory is very high.

Where the sales are: I am very encouraged by what I’m seeing in the $1 million to $2 million range. They mostly seem to be buyers coming from the suburbs of D.C., purchasing pre-retirement and retirement homes. We’re seeing some good action from the Philadelphia market, too. Most of that has been in Talbot County. Kent has been pretty challenged. Dorchester, too.

Advice to buyers: There’s never been a better time to buy. It’s astounding. Right now the waterfront values I’m seeing are once-in-a-lifetime. There’s a whole new segment of people that couldn’t afford it and now it’s laid out at their feet. But we are seeing investors stepping in. You can feel the tipping point. I tell my own buyers—you’ll only see the bottom in the rearview mirror. 

Mike O’Brien, O’Brien Realty, Solomons

2011 bargain pick: This St. Mary’s County bayfront property with beach was originally offered at $725,000 in fall 2009. Price now: $449,900.

Predictions for 2011: The number of people who have strategically defaulted has gone up. Short sales and foreclosures will continue to influence market value. That’s never a positive thing. I think we’ll have one more year of the same and after that a more predictable market. I think we’ve done all of the rollback we’re going to do.

Trends: The higher priced homes are slower moving. Even homes between $200,000 and $325,000 are selling but not at anything but modest rates. There’s been a little bit of price stability and a little bit of moving upward on waterfront. I think people are recognizing that low interest rates are even a better bargain than a low purchase price.

Appraisals: The issue now becomes appraisals. As prices start to move up, appraisals trail the market because they’re based on looking back in time, so they become a restraint in terms of prices increasing.

Where the bargains are: Anybody interested in a house over $500,000 can get a very good value. Virtually anywhere in rural areas where people bought large lots and built large homes seem to be the best bargain, 60 percent off the peak of what the property sold for. The other bargains are in the foreclosed properties being sold as is—houses with plumbing problems, mold contamination, etc.

Debbie Hileman, Hileman Real Estate, Berlin

Best bargain 2010: This waterfront rancher off the St. Martin’s River in Ocean Pines sold in 2005 for $400,000. It was listed in 2010 for $299,000 and sold for $208,000.

Hitting bottom: I’m going to be honest, I’m not sure if we’ve hit bottom yet. I’m hoping that we’re very close. Our market is more second home buyers. We got hit first and I’ll think we’ll recover last. But I’m optimistic because if you do have money, they’re some really good values out there.

Best bargains: There are some really good deals—Ocean City condos and some of the newer things built. The prices were incredibly high during the boom, but now you can get some of them at 50 cents on the dollar. 

If you can’t sell, rent: There still is a wave of bank property that needs to get blown through the market in order for us to level out here. I expect about the same for 2011. We’ve been very busy with rentals. What first started happening was that people who couldn’t sell have rented, and that created a higher supply, causing rental rates to go down. A lot of people who had short sales and lost property are becoming the new wave of [renters].

Advice for buyers: Right now (pre-season) is a really great time to buy—you don’t have competition. I’ve seen deals as much as $100,000 lower than asking. Even something priced at $200,000, people will offer $150,000. You have to have thick skin as a seller.

Cliff Meredith, Lacaze Meredith Real Estate Co., Easton

2011 bargain pick: The former house burned on this two-acre Royal Oak lot, leaving behind $200,000 worth of improvements, including a pool, driveway, septic, and dock on the Miles River. Priced at $1.6 million.

Prediction for 2011: If I had to guess, I’d say it’ll be better than 2010. I believe some of the higher-end markets have experienced increases. Naples, Fla., for instance, has experienced a 10 to 12 percent increase in prices. I would say overall the market seems to be moving slow but steadily upward, both in volume and price. Still, there’s no sweet spot in the market. People are still looking for bargains at any level.

Advice to sellers: I recommend they look at comps and price it to the market if they want to sell. We’re still seeing listings start at maybe what they were five or six years ago, but we’re in a different market. If it’s overpriced, the house could go for 30 or 40 percent less of list.

Advice for buyers: I’d get a good realtor and just use common sense. Look at what comparable homes have sold for. Low balling is very common today because, well, we’re still in a very unusual situation.

For more than 20 years, Rob Timm has been a familiar voice on local radio. The Boston native arrived in the area in the late 1980s and worked as a helicopter traffic reporter before becoming a DJ on the late, great WHFS-FM in the 1990s. Since 2004, he’s been a fixture on Annapolis’ WRNR and plays drums in a band called Prozakistan.

I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was young. I was playing in a band with two guys who worked in radio and they seemed to really enjoy their jobs and their lives and I looked at them and said, “This might be a good idea.” I went to college for it and it turned out I had a knack.

My voice is an accident of birth. I sound a lot like my father. When he was younger it was very difficult to tell us apart on the phone. I’ll claim my father for my voice and my mother for my sense of humor.

I’m a good enough musician to know that I’m not a good enough musician.

I found there’s good stuff in almost every genre. Unfortunately, that’s not the way we Americans tend to consume music. As Auntie Mame said, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”

It’s hard to not like a good pop song. The Beatles wrote good pop songs.

My biggest problem with working in a traffic helicopter was that it was so peaceful and serene that I would have a tendency to fall asleep between reports.

HFS was an astounding place. It was really like we had lightning in a bottle. It was an extremely fertile time musically and we had an extremely talented group of people who were given license to do things that no other station was allowed to or had the ability to do.

It’s not the public’s imagination: Radio stations really do play a lot more commercials than they did 20 years ago because they’ve amassed these huge loads of debt they have to pay off.

How has the business changed? I don’t know, that’s depressing. I don’t want to talk about that. Luckily, I’ve found this little oasis in Annapolis.

Violinist Andrew Bird after visiting WRNR called it “a well-curated radio station.” It’s a high-brow way of looking at it, but I think it hits the nail on the head. It may be the only curated radio station left. Most of the others are researched in cold, robotic ways. We don’t research the music. We listen to it, decide it’s good, and play it.

Imagine if museums were curated [like most radio stations] through demographic research, what horrible places they’d be. Every place would have nothing but Monet’s “Water Lilies.” Don’t get me wrong, Monet’s “Water Lilies” is a wonderful painting, but there are other things.

I really never got Stern. I’d rather watch paint dry than listen to Howard Stern. I don’t understand strippers on the radio. I can’t see them. What’s the point?

I did adult contemporary and I thank the Lord every day I don’t have to play any more Lionel Ritchie records.

What’s been extremely gratifying over the years is being able to do things for nonprofits and for people by being in this position. That’s been a huge bonus I didn’t even realize when I got into this business—helping causes from the environment to homelessness to women’s issues.

I have a lot of unemployed friends who used to work in satellite radio. I don’t know if it will ever really take off or not. Of course, when I was a kid, you never would’ve \convinced me that I’d be paying 100 bucks a month to watch TV, but I do. So there is hope for it.

I was in this business for 15 years before I dropped the F-bomb on the air. … I meant to say, “It’s fricking cold.”

If there is any wisdom to be had out of all these years in this business which can be incredibly competitive, it’s that kindness is more important than competitiveness. I believe doing something you enjoy and doing it well and treating people kindly is worth so much more than striving for what many people would consider success—through any means necessary. Life is short but it’s far too long to live that way.

What have I learned from fatherhood? I’m a far more patient person than I ever imagined. I’ve also learned you cannot outrun projectile vomit.

My son informed me that every day is the best day ever. I think if I could somehow think more like he does, that even if the world wasn’t a better place, it would seem that way.

Most of the artists I’ve interacted with have been surprisingly generous with their time and are much nicer than you might imagine. ... But interviewing Keanu Reeves is like talking to a stump. 

I always have something stupid on my mind and the ability to unleash it. Perhaps I’d make a fantastic politician.

Buying coffee 20 years ago was an easy task. You picked up a can of a national brand ground coffee from the supermarket, or, if you were slightly more gourmet, you ground your own bright red bag of whole bean Eight O’Clock Coffee in the equally bright red grinder at the end of the cashier’s station. Your choices were regular or decaffeinated; French Roast was a treat; and latte was just the Italian word for milk.

If it all tasted pretty much the same—hot, strong, and bitter—well, that’s just how coffee was supposed to taste. Not anymore.

In this article, we introduce you to a handful of local micro-roasters, folks who roast small quantities of coffee in their basements, their garages, or compact business spaces. You may see them or their coffee at your local farmers market, café, or restaurant. Or you may have ordered their gourmet roasts online. Nonetheless, their ability to offer fresh, limited quantities of high-quality roasted beans is changing the local coffee landscape.

Good Dog Coffee Micro Roasters
West River, Maryland
571-748-7519, http://www.gooddogcoffee.com

Even though it’s not his full-time job, Leo Miranda knew he had to do something with coffee. “It’s in my DNA,” he says with a laugh. “I love the product, all the culture, and the history—the whole package.”

Miranda, a biologist and supervisor of the Chesapeake Bay Field Office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, grew up in the coffee-growing region of Puerto Rico and even owns a small coffee plantation there. Since he couldn’t plant coffee after he moved to the area, he decided to roast it, and began selling his beans under the West Indian Treasure Brand, adopting the name Good Dog Coffee as an homage to his three Labradors in 2005.

Miranda’s business is small but growing. He roasts shade grown and organic beans to order out of his garage nearly every day in 1 kilo amounts, and sells his coffee though the Internet and by word of mouth.

Miranda is fortunate to be able to buy much of his coffee directly from farmers in Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Colombia, and through a Bolivian family in Massachusetts who import coffee from their own estate.

“I go the extra mile and make contact with the farmers,” says Miranda, who often finds coffee growers through friends and by word of mouth. “I like to sit down and talk to them because I learn so much,” he says. Plus, growers value the relationship and often boast about having their own private roaster, says Miranda.

“For me, coffee is my life,” he explains. “For my clients, I try to get them to have a coffee experience and not just drink coffee. It’s not like going to McDonald’s just to have the caffeine shot. I like to talk to people about my coffee and why they got it and how it got there. I try to get my passion out to my clients.”

Caffe Pronto
Roastery and cafe: 90 Russell St., Suite 500, Annapolis, 410-626-0011;
Cafe: 2329 Forest Drive, Suite G, Annapolis, 410-266-5776,
http://www.caffepronto.com

“We see ourselves as stewards of the bean,” says Vince Iatesta, owner of Annapolis’ Caffe Pronto. “Our job is to do everything the best we can to showcase coffee, to bring out everything that coffee has to offer.” This means Caffe Pronto does not offer flavored coffees or roasts so dark that they obliterate the character of any given bean.

Iatesta’s stewardship of quality coffee (and coffee’s qualities) is reflected in every aspect of Caffe Pronto. He sources beans directly from farmers in Central America and Ethiopia with whom he also works to improve quality control and farm sustainability.

Back in Annapolis, the beans arrive in burlap or sisal bags, ready for roasting, which occurs frequently and in small batches. In order to maintain absolute freshness for the consumer, Caffe Pronto beans have a very short in-store shelf life: No coffee is sold after three weeks of roasting. Even Caffe Pronto’s name, “coffee now,” is a reference to the freshness of the product.

Iatesta gained his appreciation for coffee in Europe, where he was studying as part of his graduate program in international marketing. Not long after his return to the States, he was ready to make a move from corporate America to opening his own café in 2002. 

Every day at 2 p.m., the roastery offers free public cuppings (tastings) that explore different qualities of coffee—body, acidity, and roast profiles. The café also offers product demonstrations of new coffee-making equipment and is offering classes in coffee brewing in conjunction with the local Whole Foods.

“Coffee has more flavor [and] aromatic compounds than wine does, and more complexity,” notes Iatesta. It’s more than just a morning pick-me-up or “caffeine delivery system.” For Iatesta, it’s a consuming passion.

Chesapeake Bay Roasting Co.
Crofton, Maryland
410-454-0102, http://www.cbayroasting.com

Rick Erber and his partners at Chesapeake Bay Roasting Co.are fanatical about their coffee and the environment—so much so that five years ago they founded a coffee company designed around the concept of being eco-responsible. Here, blends have names like Oyster Reef and Boater’s Brew and are sold in 100 percent recyclable and reusable steel cans. Beans are organic, fair trade, and rainforest certified. Even their Sirocco roaster is green: It re-uses the chaff from roasted beans (as much as 3,500 pounds a week) as fuel and releases fewer emissions into the atmosphere.

Erber, an Annapolis resident and avid boater, is also serious about Bay restoration. Motivated by what he characterizes as “a great passion for the region and the Bay,” the company regularly provides free catered coffee service to events promoting watershed restoration. Plus, a percentage of all profits from their coffee are donated to efforts to save the Bay.

Chesapeake Bay Roasting Co. coffee is sold primarily through wholesale accounts, online, Graul’s supermarkets, and at coffee shops listed on its website.

Eastern Shore Coastal Roasting Co.
Willis Wharf, Virginia
757-414-0105, http://www.coastalroast.com

Kristin and Jamie Willis have their hands in many connected pies. Among other endeavors, the couple own and run the Eastern Shore Coastal Roasting Co., a wholesale business they started in 2006 that roasts both coffee and peanuts (in separate roasters).

Nearly everything about Eastern Shore Coastal Roasting is connected to the narrow strip of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, from the roasting facility in Willis Wharf to the marketing of the coffee itself. “We wanted to provide a local niche and promote local places [through the naming of the coffee blends],” says Kristin Willis. Blends boast names like Hog Island Sunrise, Oyster Roast, and Machipongo Morning. Mockhorn Bay Birders Blend, a shade-grown, bird-friendly mix, is a nod to the migratory pathway along Mockhorn Bay. Zoe’s Decaf takes on a more personal significance: It’s named for the Willises’ three-legged dog, the company mascot.

Through a green broker, the Willises buy ethically grown coffee from 14 different origins, as well as maintaining several direct relationships with growers. “I’m particular,” says Kristin. “I want to know where [the coffee] comes from.” The couple roasts approximately 400 pounds of coffee a week to order for small businesses, cafés, and bakeries on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.

Kristin feels strongly that people be particular in seeking out local coffee whether it’s hers or a roaster’s in another community. “When a customer goes on vacation and seeks out a local coffee roasting company, that, to me, is massive, that I helped to get them to appreciate supporting a local business. It’s not in our business plan to have our coffee beans sold in Arizona.”

Rise Up Coffee
Multiple locations including
1216 S. Talbot St., St. Michaels, 410-430-8144;
529 Riverside Drive,, Salisbury, 410-219-1150; 
Tred avon shopping center, Easton, 877-474-7387,
http://www.drinkorganiccoffee.com

Call Rise Up Coffee and you’re liable to hear Bob Marley urging you to “rise up this mornin’ [and] smile with the risin’ sun.” It’s that kind of sunny optimism that pervades Tim and Abigail Cureton’s funky chain of drive-through coffee stands.

Tim’s fascination with coffee began during a Peace Corps stint in Micronesia between 1999 and 2001 when an Australian friend “opened his eyes to coffee.” (Today, Rise Up sends coffee to Peace Corps volunteers who contact the company through e-mail or Facebook.) Soon he was a self-proclaimed “coffee head,” and by 2005, Rise Up had its first drive-through in St. Michaels, followed by a location in Salisbury, and most recently, Easton.

Rise Up is “all about creating community around coffee,” says Noah Kegley, the company’s general manager, a task accomplished through a number of relationships, both local and international, which give rise to the company motto: “Grown by friends. Roasted by friends. Enjoyed by friends.” Organic beans are purchased from small farms through fair trade agreements, and roasted by a Pacific Northwest-based pal of Cureton’s. The drive-throughs use milk from Nice Farms Creamery in Federalsburg, and Rise Up Coffee is a component in EVO Rise Up Stout from Delmar’s Evolution Craft Brewing Co.

Come June 2011, the company hopes to have its own roasting operation. “We take what we do very seriously,” says Kegley, who recently completed a course of study at the American Barista and Coffee School in Portland, Ore. “Roasting coffee ourselves is going to give us more flexibility, and space for classes and demos.

It’s going to be great.” Coffee heads on the Eastern Shore can hardly wait.

WHAT’S IN A BEAN?
Organic, fair trade? How to decipher what’s in your cup.

Organic, perhaps the most familiar term to consumers, indicates that the beans have been grown under organic production methods, including no use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides. Shade grown means that coffee farms maintain a shade canopy that not only allows for a longer growing season that results in a bean with a more intense flavor, but also creates a rich habitat for birds and other animals. To be labeled bird friendly, a certification developed by the Smithsonian’s Migratory Bird Center, coffee must be both organic and shade grown and create an environment conducive to migratory birds. The Rainforest Alliance designation certifies sustainable, eco-friendly coffee production. On the economic side of coffee trade, roasters who engage in Direct Trade practices travel to the source of their beans to purchase directly from growers, while coffee that is Fair Trade, a certification developed by Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International and licensed in the United States by Transfair USA coffee, is sold through co-ops that regulate coffee pricing and promote sustainable methods of farming.

The wind is gusting so strong I am certain my golf ball will blow into the Chesapeake. It’s cold, too. We move fast and speak quickly, hoping our mindless chatter will keep us warm while Mother Nature butts into our round.

As my husband, Terry, prepares to hit the ball, I swear there are tears in his eyes when he looks at the churning Chesapeake flanking the fairway and says, “It’s magnificent.” Sure, the cold air might have something to do with those watery eyes. Then again, maybe the beauty of this moment is the cause of such emotion.

Truth is, we weren’t expecting much. Normally we like to test our mettle a few times a year on name-dropper courses throughout the United States and United Kingdom, but these days, the hassles of air travel make those long jaunts less appealing. We thought Bay Creek Resort & Club by the historic Victorian town of Cape Charles on Virginia’s peaceful Eastern Shore would be a pleasant substitute, a stress-free drive from our Annapolis home. As it turns out, we were blown away by the place in more ways than one.

Bay Creek is the first resort to have both Jack Nicklaus- and Arnold Palmer- designed 18-hole signature courses. The Wall Street Journal ranks them in the top 100 residential golf courses in the United States. Each one offers different challenges; both offer awesome beauty and hints of the land’s history as a working plantation. There’s even a golf cart bridge featuring a quarter-scale replica of Cape Charles’ Old Plantation Flats Lighthouse.

I’m not exaggerating when I say the Nicklaus course has four holes along the Chesapeake that rival Pebble Beach for “wow” factor. They really are that stunning. With more than 100 bunkers, miles of sand dunes, mature trees, and elevated tees, this is far from your average resort course.

The property is part of a residential community developed by Richard Foster of Baymark Construction Corp. Situated on 1,729 acres, the resort features 6½ miles of Bay and creek frontage, 55,000 roses, azaleas, hydrangeas and natural grasses, plus 7,500 magnolia and holly trees. When complete, Bay Creek will include 2,700 homes in distinct villages or districts, each reflecting a different architectural style, from Victorian to contemporary. While a full-service hotel is on the drawing board, for now, guests can rent condominiums or two-level villas.

We stay in one of the colorful West Indies-inspired villas in the Marina District. Painted white furniture in our two-level building looks like something straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Downstairs, our bedroom has a sitting area with a flat-screen, 40-inch TV, small balcony, and a bathroom big enough to host a party for 10.
Upstairs, a fully equipped kitchen and family room are encircled by windows revealing super views of the 124-slip marina, which offers quick access to the Bay, the Atlantic, and the Intracoastal Waterway. 

Before dinner, we browse the resort’s string of retail shops, which stock a fun mix of resort wear, coastal home décor, jewelry, and local wines. Upstairs, a gallery features work by local artists, highlighting the area’s thriving arts community. 

Every resort needs a stellar restaurant and Bay Creek’s Aqua doesn’t disappoint. Perched on the Chesapeake with never-ending views of the Bay, this casually chic restaurant has several distinct areas to dine or sip a cool one, including a snazzy, under-lit onyx bar and outdoor dining overlooking the water.

We sit at one of the interior banquettes and follow our waiter Spencer’s excellent recommendations: Thai-fried shrimp tossed with sweet chili sauce, lime and cilantro for starters, followed by grilled mahi-mahi with golden pineapple-mango salsa. 

We awake at dawn the morning of our departure to take a brief beach walk. Overnight, the wind turned into a whisper. The Bay looks like a lake; not one whitecap is in sight. We talk about this unexpected gem, its two world-class golf courses that rival our famous favorites, and agree to return even before we check out.

Bay Creek Resort & Club
500 Marina Village Circle
Cape Charles, Va.
757-331-8620
http://www.baycreekresort.com
Rates: Accommodations start at $250 per night; greens fees range from $65 to $115.

Some editor’s letters are harder to write than others.

Some flow effortlessly from personal experience. Others are squeezed out only after days of false starts.

This one was especially tough to write because it’s the last.

Unfortunately, after a dozen years of publishing award-winning articles about the Bay and its denizens, we’ve decided to cease publication of Chesapeake Life magazine—another casualty of the Great Recession.

Most editors don’t get to write farewell letters to their magazine’s readers, so I am grateful that I have this chance. I’ve worked for a variety of publications in my day, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an audience as passionate about a magazine as this one has been. Thank you for your letters and comments—both positive and negative—over the years. This magazine could not have existed as long as it has without your support.

I’d also like to thank those we’ve written about over the years. The best part of this job has been getting out in the community, meeting the people of this fascinating region, and hearing their stories.

For an editor always looking for fresh subject matter, the Chesapeake area and its colorful inhabitants provide an unending bounty of rich material.

Although this is beginning to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech, I also have to thank our fantastic writers and photographers, who have lent us their incredible talents. [Music starts to swell…] Most of the pages in our magazine have been produced by freelancers, and without them, we could not have done it. And finally, I’d like to acknowledge art director Kim Van Dyke, who has worked passionately over the years to design a magazine as beautiful as the Chesapeake itself.
This is goodbye, but not farewell, as they say. Kim and I will continue to work for Alter Communications’ other publications. In the meantime, see you out on the Bay.

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As an Anne Arundel County-based builder, Charlie Berliner of Berliner Construction Co. has spent the past 38 years listening to homeowners and architects tell him how they want him to build their houses.

So when Berliner and his wife, Kathy Dahl, decided to build their own home in Annapolis’ Murray Hill neighborhood, it was a freeing experience.

“I had the liberty to decide how it was going to be,” says Berliner. “And I didn’t have to deal with the owner. Well,” he pauses, with a knowing look at his wife, “except for her.”

Berliner and Dahl’s co-creation, a modern take on an Arts & Crafts bungalow, has both contemporary and old-fashioned touches, and remains imminently livable. “People respond to the house’s simplicity,” says Dahl, a retired zoning attorney. “It’s a peaceful house.” 

Originally, a 1920s bungalow stood on the property and the couple thought about restoring it, but its tiny bedroom windows (ample light was a priority) and slanting second-floor hallway with just enough headroom for Charlie to walk down the middle convinced them that a renovation would be too challenging. Architect Gary Schwerzler of Fourth Street Design Studio in Eastport sketched out a floor plan for a new three-bedroom, 3,200-square-foot building and Berliner added his own details to the design. An experienced woodworker, Berliner also designed the moldings and woodwork that adorn every room and give the new house a much older feel. “You’ll notice the scale of the house,” says Berliner. “The doors are big, the windows, high and large. It just has a scale that works well.”

Berliner also designed the living room’s walnut mantel to highlight the embedded rosettes that Dahl found at a Baltimore antiques shop. “The owner swore to me that they came out of [actor] Jack Palance’s house,” she says. “So we designed the mantel around them.”

Dahl spent hours combing eBay for the French Art Deco light fixtures that hang in the dining room/library and hallway. She also found two deco sconces from an old Western movie theater. “I thought they were the most outrageous things I had ever seen,” recalls Berliner.

“He said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t bring them in the house!’” says Dahl, with a laugh. But Berliner eventually made peace with the fixtures, and they now hang prominently on the walls of the entry foyer.

The couple cooks and entertains frequently, so the kitchen had to be spacious and well-organized, and allow for easy flow. “Not that I’m an efficiency expert, but I’ve done hundreds of them so I’ve seen every mistake that people make,” says Berliner. One side of the kitchen, divided by a granite-topped island, is the “cooking side,” which contains the Sub-Zero stove and area for food prep, while the other side serves as storage for plates, serving bowls, and the like. Even the island’s double stainless-steel sink has “a cooking and a cleaning-up side.”

Vera Karelian of Vera Karelian Designs in Tracys Landing picked out the mix of 18 to 20 different, mainly neutral custom paint colors for the house. Dahl’s budding collection of art, an eclectic mix of abstract paintings, adds color, as does original photography by her brother-in-law, Harry Tarzian. 

All in all, the couple couldn’t be happier with their home, which they occupied in 2007. “It was a pleasure to do,” says Berliner. “There are times when you want to do things your own way and you can’t on [someone else’s] house. But I really enjoyed this process.”

There was a time about seven years ago when I didn’t know the definition of barbecue. I was a trained chef, a graduate of culinary school, I had opened a well-respected restaurant, and I thought barbecue described food that was cooked on a grill and smothered in a sweet sauce. How little I knew.

But then, to my surprise, in October 2004 I was invited to be a celebrity judge at the Super Bowl of barbecue—The Jack Daniel’s World Invitational BBQ Competition, simply known as the “Jack.” I had to attend an eight-hour class at the site of the Jack Daniel’s distillery to earn my certification in order to judge the next day in front of TV cameras and alongside Food Network stars.

Before then, I never thought much about barbecue. I had eaten only uninspired renditions from random restaurants north of the Mason-Dixon line. But when I sank my teeth into my first real hunk of barbecued meat, to my complete astonishment and delight, I found it to be some of the most delicious food I had ever eaten. Goose bumps rose on my arms and I wanted to grab somebody—anybody—nearby and tell them about my new discovery. Still, when someone asks me to name the top meals ever to have crossed my lips, the barbecue at the Jack easily makes the top 5. And the most important thing I learned that weekend was that good barbecue is not cooked on a hot grill, but “slow and low” with smoke.

From that moment on, I returned to Maryland on a quest—to re-create the barbecue I tasted at the Jack. But it wasn’t easy. By far, barbecue has been the most challenging cuisine I have ever undertaken. It took seven years—and many inedible attempts along the way—to finally produce quality barbecue that competes at a national level. (My own competitive barbecue team, Walk the Swine, started earning some trophies just last year.)

Unfortunately, when I started my quest, there was minimal help out there. You can buy books, read blogs, talk to professional chefs, but no one is willing to divulge their secrets. The winning combination of sauce, smoke, meat, brines, cooking times and temperatures is personal and hard-fought—you just don’t reveal what took you years to accomplish. (Sorry, dear readers.)

But one of the most enjoyable aspects of barbecue is the satisfaction of creating a product that is uniquely yours. To help you get started, I’ve prepared some useful steps to guide you through the basics. You can also Google a million recipes for sauces, rubs, and brines or buy quality rubs and sauces online or at specialty gourmet stores. At my restaurant, The BBQ Joint in Easton, we sell my competition rubs and bottled sauces, too.

Just remember, there are myriad paths to success on the barbecue trail. All it takes is creativity, determination, and some sweet-smelling smoke. 

Smoked Pork Butt
Smoked Brisket
Smoked Ribs
Smoked Chicken

Brique is not the same restaurant it was when it opened in June 2010. Though the dining room still boasts the same historic brick wall and large, unnecessary sign featuring the restaurant’s logo, the bar has grown from a snug five feet in a corner near the kitchen to 20 feet and extends into the dining room. Chef William Dolan has been replaced by brique’s co-owner Billy Fairbanks. And while brique retains its Gallic moniker (the French word for “brick”) and stylized lowercased name, the fancy French meals (with the matching fancy prices) have disappeared in favor of casual, Maryland-style bar fare.

The changes, says brique’s other co-owner, Thomas Inzer, resulted from feedback from the folks of Centreville who saw the restaurant as too upscale for their community.  And while some may mourn the demise of fine dining in Centreville, the re-vamping of brique has proven to be a good move, one that has resulted in perhaps a less-interesting menu, but a much more consistently executed one, with reasonable prices to boot. 

For instance, brique now offers a plate of fried oysters and fries rather than baked oysters with goat cheese as an appetizer. There’s also classic bar fare like peel-and-eat shrimp and a rich crab dip, as well as a heaping plate of crispy pork dumplings in a dipping sauce spiked with star anise.

Sandwiches, including hamburgers, pulled pork, even a gourmet hot dog on a pretzel bun, are served at both lunch and dinner, and the number of entrees has more than doubled and doesn’t stray far from classic comfort food. Now fish and chips share the menu with steak au poivre, a crab cake platter, and a very satisfying steak and Guinness pie. Topped with a cloud of mashed potatoes, the stew benefits from an aromatic gravy laced with celery, carrots, and onions.

If the evening we dined is any indication, the catch of the day lets the kitchen play more widely with flavors, so that a fillet of grouper is pan-seared to a light crispness, sprinkled with a confetti of corn, and finished with a light sauce with a tempered hint of coconut milk. It is bright and clean tasting, and I bet it would sell well as a regular item.

Brique retains a few holdovers from the previous menu, like the excellent Caesar salad, though the latter has lost its anchovies and fried cheese nibs in exchange for house-made white and pumpernickel croutons. Neither has brique lost its generous spirit, whether it be the size of the wines by the glass or the portions of the meals, especially the hulking slices of house-made, candy-themed “pies”—Kahlua-spiked toffee pie(!)—which look more like thick wedges of fudge than pastry. There’s also the continued warmth and patience of the servers, who split plates of salad without being asked to and check in throughout the meal to see if they can be of service.

Inzer concedes that with its less distinctive menu, the new brique might not continue to pull in the rave reviews or clientele from the western shore. So be it. Centreville is clearly pleased because the new brique is just what every community needs: a bustling, noisy dining room of friends enjoying casual and well-made food and drink.

Food writer Mary K. Zajac eats all over the Bay.

Rock Hall, once a hard-working waterman’s town, attracts more yachts than skipjacks these days—exceptionally nice yachts, in fact. As we follow the meandering drive to the Inn at Osprey Point, we behold a passing parade that looks like a casting call for “America’s Top Cruisers.” Impressed, we decide that the spectacular Swan Creek setting merits another B (as in bed, breakfast, and boats). When we settle in, we are as contented as the chubby ducks nestled along the shore.

Innkeepers Owners Shirley and Jerry Messina knew they’d found a special spot when they bought their property—30 waterfront acres with an 1895 farmhouse—in 1990. They’d been making the trip from suburban Philadelphia for years, kids in tow, to spend weekends on their sailboat. Phase One of the dream was the marina—now home port for 160 boats—which opened with 28 slips in 1993. When they conceived Phase Two, a waterside lodging for slipholders and their guests, Jerry envisioned “the kind of comfortable place we’d like to stay.” As Shirley notes with a twinkle, “Jerry’s the kind of person who remembers every meal he’s ever had,” so Phase Three led to the gourmet restaurant on the first floor, a fine feather in Osprey Point’s cap.

Rooms The two-story inn, built in 1994, has a Williamsburg feel and a casual, friendly atmosphere that extends to the picnic tables and swimming pool outside. With a four-poster bed, sleep sofa, double closets and spacious bath, our second-floor Carina suite offers legroom to spare, cable and Wi-Fi. Tall windows frame a view of the inn’s pond, and the downstairs screened porch, a cool retreat for reading or relaxing, waits below. Osprey Point guests can also lodge at the Annex, three minutes from the main property, where five handsome rooms overlook Gratitude Marina and a panorama that stretches to the Bay Bridge. The four-bedroom farmhouse on the main grounds, now restored, is available for groups and is especially popular with hunters.

Special touches/diversions Two words of advice: Dine in. Chef Eliza Abby (Abby to all) imparts a delicious polish to dinners at the inn’s restaurant. Ours includes spiced-pear martinis mixed by P.J. at the bar and a delicious vanilla and coriander-spiced pork chop, followed by profiteroles with chocolate sauce. Yum! The next day, we explore Main Street, where Chester River Kayak Adventures outfits paddlers and the Hickory Stick offers gifts and accessories. Don’t miss the venerable Durdings, a former pharmacy turned ice cream parlor, where you can sip a milkshake alongside antique apothecary jars or make a call (on your cell) from the vintage wooden phone booth.

What’s for breakfast In the morning, aromas from the Old Kitchen, a bright space off the main dining room, draw us downstairs. Contemplating a buffet  laden with bagels, biscuits, fresh fruit, yogurt, granola and warm broccoli quiche, we decide we’d better add an extra few miles to the morning bike tour. As we relax with fellow guests at the half-dozen tables, we watch cheerful folks in boat shoes sprint down the docks to their boats.

Romance Factor An afternoon by the water, an exquisite dinner, and a quiet room just steps away—the Inn at Osprey Point wraps the charms of the Eastern Shore into a lovely package. No wonder the waterfowl look so happy.

Cost $115-$280.

Inn at Osprey Point
20786 Rock Hall Ave.
Rock Hall, Md.
410-639-2194
http://www.ospreypoint.com

The Annapolis water treatment plant is crumbling. The city’s Market House, once the pride of downtown, awaits revamping after years of mismanagement. An energized citizens’ group wants to create a council-manager form of government that would reduce the mayor’s clout. On top of all this, the city is broke, refinancing its debt to make ends meet. So why would anyone want the job of mayor, especially a bright young guy like Josh Cohen?

“Despite the bad wrap politicians get, I believe politics is a noble calling,” says Cohen. “I have enough of an ego to believe that I have something to contribute and confidence in my ability to make a difference. I have an opportunity to effect a positive change—or to crash and burn.”

Just one year into his term as Annapolis’ 126th mayor, the jury is still out. Despite dealing with the worst snow storms in history, passing a balanced budget without raising property taxes, creating the Annapolis Economic Development Corp. to attract and expand business, and making progress toward securing a long-term solution to the Market House, his short time in office has not been without controversy.

“I came into office during a difficult time,” he says. “When times are tough and there’s not the money to do some of the initiatives I’ve promised, every issue is a battle. Anytime there is a new sheriff in town trying to assert himself, there is inevitable tension.”

At 37, this lifelong Annapolitan is driven, a tad cocky, and plays a mean saxophone. He’s more handsome—think a shorter JFK Jr.-type with glasses—and more personable face-to-face than he appears on his weekly YouTube address where he comes off as stiff. Trim and athletic, he jogs three times a week in his West Annapolis neighborhood where he lives with his wife, Lesley, a registered nurse, and their two daughters. A Key School graduate, he briefly attended St. John’s College at the New Mexico campus but got his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. Before taking over as mayor, he spent eight years working in the criminal justice field as a Maryland parole and probation agent and director of special grants for the Maryland Crime Victims’ Resource Center.

If likeability were the sole job requirement, Cohen would have it aced. Even critics agree that he is funny, forthright, and well-intentioned. “I like the guy’s spirit,” says Frederick Paone, the city’s lone Republican alderman. “Even though we disagree on some things, he has a good grasp of issues. I’ve never seen him lose his cool.”

Alderwoman Classie Hoyle says, “When we disagree, we talk about it, then we shake hands or hug. That’s a good thing. He doesn’t lose his temper or fly off the handle—quite different from our former mayor [Ellen Moyer]. And he listens.”

This trait is obvious during a recent council meeting when Cohen gives the same level of attention to a request for a proclamation from a homeless war veteran dressed in camouflage to probing questions about the Market House from savvy Council-woman Sheila Finlayson, with whom he often spars. “Sometimes he doesn’t always consult with the council and makes decisions as if he is totally autonomous,” Finlayson says. “We each have a voice in the city, a voice that we’d like to be heard. After he is called on it, he does come to us, but we would appreciate it if he would keep us in the loop.”

In his rare spare time—13-hour days are not unusual and weekends are reserved for the family—Cohen enjoys a good read. “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon” by David Grann is a recent favorite. Perhaps Cohen feels a connection to the story of an explorer who ventured into uncharted territory with little more than a machete, a compass, and a passionate sense of purpose. 

Cohen wasn’t the city’s first choice for mayor. He became the Democratic nominee only when Zina Pierre, the first black woman to receive the nomination withdrew from the race due to personal financial issues. (Pierre declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cohen was elected to the city council when he was 28, and later to the county council, but he didn’tfinish his term in order to run for mayor, a fact that draws criticism—and it’s not something he is particularly proud of. “I knew people would beat me up about this, but when I saw the shape the city was in, and the people who were lining up to run, this may sound ridiculously cocky, but I felt I had to run.” While Cohen candidly admits to being open to future political opportunities, he relishes his current role. “I will finish out this term as mayor.”

The idea of a young, ambitious mayor with future political aspirations doesn’t sit well with some area residents. “He’s a political animal. Each decision is made with an eye on the next rung on the political ladder,” says Trudy McFall, a mayoral candidate who lost to Cohen in the primary. “His strong suit is his ability to stay calm in the face of anything. It’s an extraordinary skill, especially for someone his age. He’s good at maneuvering behind the scenes while maintaining his choir- boy persona.”

During Cohen’s first year, perhaps nothing in his administration caused as much of an uproar as the firing of 33 employees in March. Cohen admits that he failed to appreciate the magnitude of the budget crisis. “I thought that by controlling overtime and reducing spending we’d be able to avoid layoffs, but it became clear we had to lay off employees.”

He was chided by a few aldermen for not exploring other alternatives. “My request was to look at every other option first,” says Finlayson. “Some employees were handled rudely. They were approached that Friday morning and told they had to vacate their desks. We have low morale in the city. We have to rely on people to provide good service in the community. We are destroying that atmosphere. We’re paying now for some of their firings. Some people are suing the city.”

Cohen says that he had to act quickly. “We didn’t have the luxury of time. Every day we failed to take action, we created a bigger deficit.”

If he had to do it over again, he says he would have communicated more effectively, both with the council and employee unions. “Even though I don’t believe it would have changed the outcome, the need to lay off employees is such a fundamental reversal of the city’s culture that it left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.”

He says he avoided raising property taxes and cut the budget by 13 percent, the biggest cut of Maryland’s 147 municipalities. “In 45 years the Annapolis budget was reduced no more than 2.5 percent three or four times so this reduction is pretty dramatic,” says Cohen.

But critics say he hasn’t cut enough. Bill Kardash, chairman of Annapolitans for a Better Community, says the city’s budget is based on “hypothetical sources of income,” projected savings that may or may not materialize, and that with 700 city employees, the payroll is bloated. He says Annapolis has 18 departments while larger cities such as Rockville, Gaithersburg, and Bowie have eight or fewer. Kardash says that 85 percent of Annapolis’ city budget is personnel and personnel benefits. “If he took the medicine and laid off 50 or 60 people when he came into office, he would have made a huge impact. We have three arborists. I’m worried about the trees, too, but maybe this is something we could contract out,” says Kardash.

Local blogger and Capital contributor Paul Foer describes the mayor’s handling of the budget as “Cohenspeak,” where bad news is slapped with a smile. “I think he feels that it is more important to reward people than get things done,” says Foer. “He is doing nothing to cut an overspending bureaucracy. Everything comes down to politics instead of governing.” 

But Cohen claims the payroll isn’t bloated, pointing out the nearly 80 positions he eliminated in this year’s budget. (A combination of early retirements, eliminated positions and the 33 layoffs.) According to Cohen, comparing Annapolis to larger towns isn’t fair. You have to compare the services, he says. Do they have full-service fire, police, and public works departments? “We may be comparable in population, but we have a tremendous demand on services both in terms of our physical infrastructure, as well as law enforcement and public safety, because we have over a million visitors a year.”

Cohen says his challenge is to forge a steady path without being pulled too far to one extreme or the other. “One side says I cut too much, I should have raised taxes instead. The other side says I didn’t cut enough. Passions are high on both sides; it’s hard to carve out a middle ground.”

Kardash is the primary force behind a movement to create a council-manager form of city government. Currently, the city manager reports to the mayor. In a council-manager system, he would report to the nine-member city council.

Cohen opposes this direction. “There are small towns that have part-time mayors and the citizens turn the keys over to a full-time professional manager. That’s not Annapolis. Our residents and business persons want to call City Hall and know the mayor is in charge. There is never a guarantee that we’re going to elect a good mayor, but at least when the buck stops here, the mayor is accountable. If you make the nine-member council responsible for the city manager and have him report not to the mayor but to all nine council members, you lose that accountability. The reins of government would be in the hands of a non-elected official who would report to nine bosses, each with a competing agenda. It would be a recipe for political gridlock.”

But Kardash claims that inaction has been a hallmark of Cohen’s administration thus far. “Analysis paralysis,” says Kardash when describing Cohen’s management style. He says Cohen creates too many committees and studies everything to death. Decisions don’t happen.

“That is in the eye of the beholder,” counters Cohen. “There are some people who think I’m rushing decisions. It really is a judgment call.”

Perhaps his management style is best reflected in his approach to the redevelopment of the city’s beloved Market House. “What I’ve found is that the key to successful politics is to understand when the right time is to put on the brakes and when the right time is to press the gas pedal,” he says. “I believe in taking the time on the front end to make sure there is a lot of thought put into something that is as multi-faceted as the Market House, to make sure the people are heard and that we have the right guiding principles. But once it gets to a certain point where we’ve talked about it enough, then we need to move forward deliberately.”

Cohen says the Market House—and the economic development of the entire Historic District—is one of the biggest challenges facing Annapolis. Main Street and Maryland Avenue are dotted with empty stores owing to high rents and the recession, and the new Annapolis Towne Centre has taken its toll. “Downtown should be a vibrant destination for locals primarily. If you make it work for locals, the tourists will come,” he says. Cohen wants to attract unique retailers—not chain stores—with an emphasis on quality and personal customer service.

Right now big plans are in place. If all goes as planned, downtown’s Market House will be revamped and open by spring. For decades city officials have talked about reinventing the entire City Dock; Cohen is taking action. He has created an advisory committee to make recommendations for redesigning the entire space, giving the public greater exposure to the waterfront by turning the existing parking lot into a public pavilion and adding underground parking. The ideal redevelopment would put an emphasis on recreation and shopping, and create a City Dock that brings locals and visitors back again and again. “I envision a waterfront that’s a true public space as opposed to a place just to park cars,” says Cohen.

Agree with his policies or not, nobody questions Cohen’s passion to make Annapolis a better place. The question is, what can he accomplish in this economically challenging time? Will additional layoffs be necessary? Will there be continued gridlock on a plan for downtown?

As he told an audience during his December 2009 inauguration: “This is our moment. This is our opportunity to be what we never thought we would be. It’s up to us.” Which is maybe the reason why a bright young guy like Josh Cohen would want the job in the first place.

Mary Ann Treger blogs the Annapolis Insider.

Lesly Sajak Photographer, Pat’s wife

Though her married name may be Polish, Lesly Sajak grew up in Annapolis in a large, extended Italian family. “We always used to get together on Sundays,” she says, recalling visits to Baltimore to see her aunt and uncles. “And we always brought the salad.” Although the family has now gotten smaller, she says, they still try to see each other most Sundays at her mother’s house. And antipasti is still on the menu.

Sajak’s version of antipasti has changed little from her mother’s or grandmother’s recipe. Sometimes she’ll use red wine vinegar in the salad dressing; sometimes she reaches for the balsamic. If she’s making the salad for company, she’ll make sure she has every ingredient, but if the antipasti is for family, she’ll let a few things slide—but only a few. “It has to have the olives, lettuce, tomato, pepperoncini, Italian meats, and garbanzo beans [Sajak’s favorite ingredient] to make it an antipasti,” she says. Now that’s Italian.

Lesly Sajak’s Antipasti

Linnell Bowen Executive director, Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts

“My mother collected people over her dinner table,” says Linnell Bowen, and for the people at Janice Robinson’s table, crab cakes were often the lure.

Although Bowen’s Southern mother thought picking crabs was “barbaric,” after the family moved to Maryland, her mother embraced crab cakes like a native.

“She just put in a dab of this and a dab of that,” explains Bowen, who often prepares crab cakes for dinner parties. “I only learned to make them with great difficulty.”

To save others the trouble, Bowen has written down the perfected recipe, which was included in a goody bag for a recently married nephew so that his new New York relatives could replicate a taste of the Eastern Shore.

Linnell Bowen’s Mother’s Crab Cakes

Joanne Rich Co-owner and proprietress, Inn at Huntingfield Creek, Rock Hall

As an innkeeper, Joanne Rich has what she calls “a pretty nice repertoire of desserts” in her recipe stash, and her chocolate bread pudding recipe is a result of two of them. After cutting up a batch of her grandmother’s German chocolate cake to use in a recipe for macadamia nut chocolate cake towers, Rich found herself with a pile of leftover little diamond-shaped pieces of cake. “This cake has always been so absolutely delicious,” says Rich, “and it would have been a crime to throw it all away. Or it meant [my husband], Jim, and I would have had to stuff our faces full of these diamonds. None of these were good options.”

So Rich put the cake diamonds in the freezer, only to pull them out when she came up with her chocolate bread pudding recipe. “It’s unadulterated bliss,” she says of the dessert. “Lovely and simple with a molten, chocolate cake consistency.”

Joanne Rich’s Chocolate Bread Pudding

Dave Harp Chesapeake Bay photographer, http://www.chesapeakephotos.com

Dave Harp procured this recipe for bluefish dip during a visit with his college roommate and his wife at their home in Maine. “He’s a real avid fisherman,” Harp says of his friend, “and we ate it at their house and thought, ‘This is just great.’”

Harp started making it for his own parties and found that folks gobbled it up. Though he concedes that his wife, Barbara, does most of the cooking, this recipe gets him into the kitchen. “What I like about it is that a lot of people don’t like to eat bluefish,” says Harp. “It’s not as popular as rockfish or flounder. But this dip is just so good, and it uses a fish that isn’t as expensive or popular. So it’s sort of a two-fer, you know?”

Dave Harp’s Montauk Bluefish Dip

Max Onder Proprietor, Karavan: Treasures from Turkey

Max Onder remembers the stuffed grape leaves of his youth in Ordu, Turkey. “In the spring, we would collect wild grape leaves,” he recalls, “and my mom and I would just sit down and make yaprak sarma together. It was like a fun thing to do. We would make tons of them.”

After Onder moved to the States, he re-learned how to make the grape leaves, courtesy of his friend Haluk Kantar, who owns Cazbar restaurant in Baltimore. Now the grape leaves are a mandatory dish for all of his parties.

Max Onder’s Turkish Grape Leaves (Yaprak Sarma)

Renee Brooks Catacalos Community outreach coordinator, Future Harvest: Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture

After a Foreign Service stint in Turkey, Renee Brooks Catacalos thought she knew how to make moussaka. Then she met her late father-in-law, Louis Catacalos.

Catacalos remembers Louis, a Texas restaurateur, as “kind of Old World, first-generation, Greek-American, big hearted, generously hospitable.” He greeted people with, “Hello, come on in. You want a little soup?” she recalls. And he made a great moussaka that was a little different from what Catacalos had learned in Turkey. “It had a béchamel soufflé topping that’s a Greek thing,” Catacalos says. “It’s a very luxurious addition to moussaka.”

Catacalos’ father-in-law passed away soon after the two shared a cooking session in his kitchen, where he showed her how to make his baklava as well as his moussaka. Now she makes it in high season when eggplants are plentiful and at Easter. “Whenever we make it,” Catacalos says, “we think of him.”

Renee Brooks Catacalos Greek-style Moussaka

Margaret Julia Howard Vendor, Anne Arundel County Farmers Market

Margaret Julia Howard has been selling her toothsome baked goods on Saturdays at the Anne Arundel County Farmers Market for more than 15 years. “I don’t sell anything I don’t eat,” says Howard. “That’s just my principle. If I don’t like it, I’m not going to fix it, and these are things I fix for my family all the time.”

While many of Howard’s recipes come from her voluminous cookbook collection, her gingerbread recipe is one that’s long been in her family, passed down to her from her mother. “[My mother] didn’t make it too often,” Howard says, “but in the fall, you could always count on a batch or two.”

Margaret Julia Howard’s Old-Fashioned Gingerbread

Dawn Costigan ECO Radio host, WRNR, 103.1 FM

WRNR’s Dawn Costigan is a self-proclaimed “avid gardener [who] tends to get a little tomato crazy” when it comes to heirloom varietals. To use up and preserve the surplus at the end of the season, she adapted a recipe for oven-candied summer tomatoes created by another radio personality, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, host of American Public Media’s “The Splendid Table.”

“I love gourmet food, but I’m not the one to crank it out,” admits Costigan, who loves the “simplicity” of this recipe. The tomatoes can be frozen indefinitely and used throughout the year anywhere you might use sun-dried tomatoes. Costigan uses them on broiled fish and homemade pizza—“bachelorette cooking,” as Costigan modestly describes it—anything but dull.

Dawn Costigan’s Oven-Candied Summer Tomatoes

Luc Fouquet Co-owner, Hudson & Fouquet Salon, Annapolis

Luc Fouquet brought a taste of France to Annapolis years ago when he first made his mother’s chocolate mousse for a party “and everyone jumped on it.” Now it has become tradition, he says. “Every time I have a party it is expected.”

The key to Fouquet’s mousse is its simplicity. “People think you have to add sugar,” he says, though it’s not necessary. “It’s just eggs,” he points out. “And dark chocolate is good for you. ... It’s almost a healthy dessert.”

Luc Fouquet’s ‘Famous’ Chocolate Mousse

Lisa Hillman President, Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation, senior vice president, Anne Arundel Health System

Lisa Hillman’s busy schedule allows little time for serious cooking. But when time and an occasion allow, she pulls out all the stops with this lemon cheesecake, a recipe she says she’s had “for so many years—at least 25—that it’s quite faded, and I cannot recall where it came from originally, but likely Bon Appétit.”

The cake takes a long time to make, admits Hillman, who bakes it maybe two or three times a year. She likes to serve it on a footed glass cake plate, where “it usually brings lots of wows” and requests for the recipe.

Lisa Hillman’s Lemon Cheesecake

While the holiday season is a time of joy, unfortunately, it can also be a time of stress. Searching for the perfect gift for a long list of family, friends and co-workers is enough to send even the most seasoned of shoppers into a retail spin.

This year the Alter Communications editors at STYLE and Chesapeake Life have once again embarked on our collaborative effort, the sole purpose being the alleviation of pre-holiday shopping angst. Pooling our fashion and design savvy, we’ve compiled a holiday gift wish list of all the objects that make our hearts go aflutter. Wish List is sure to give you loads of fantastic gift ideas and inspirations for your holiday shopping and, you might even find something to put on your own holiday wish list!

Click images for larger view. Or, download the entire section (4MB).

BARTLETT PEAR INN
Former veep Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, have supped here

SLEEP We love that each of the five guestrooms are named and decorated to reflect a variety of pears. The Seckel Pear room is green and petite, but we like the big, brown-hued Bosc Suite for its king-size bed and separate sitting area.

DINE Chef Jordan Lloyd always wows us with his French-inspired cooking. Although he mixes up his menu weekly, this winter, look for roast game, waterfowl, quail [Mr. Cheney, take note], house-made Toulouse sausage, and braised short ribs, which Lloyd marinates in red wine for 10 days.

COST $145 to $295 per night, which includes breakfast. The Romantic Massage Package includes a night in a suite, champagne, and a couples’ 60-minute massage for $450. Easton, Md. 410-770-3300, http://www.bartlettpearinn.com

ATLANTIC HOTEL
Where Julia Roberts and Richard Gere filmed scenes from “Runaway Bride”

SLEEP Berlin’s grand dame received a much-needed face-lift since Julia and Richard’s days at the hotel. The Victorian charm remains, but everything is just a little fresher. Book Room No. 20, the Richard Gere Room, and you can slumber on the queen bed where the star did (or at least where his film’s character, Ike Graham, did).

DINE Drummer’s Café boasts a fireplace, velvet couches, dangling crystal chandeliers, and a well-stocked bar—all essentials to whiling away a cold winter’s night.

COST $55 to $250. The Victorian Romance package features two nights, dinner, and massages, $386. Culinary Country Getaway offers three nights, wine tastings, cooking classes, and brunch from $678 per couple. Berlin, Md. 410-641-3589, http://www.atlantichotel.com

TILGHMAN ISLAND INN
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant spent several nights here in 2008

SLEEP Mr. Plant has good taste. We also like Room No. 12 for its gas fireplace, whirlpool tub, luxe linens, and great views of Knapps Narrows. Pet owners, take note: This is one deluxe accommodation where Fido is welcome to spend the night.

DINE Co-owner and executive chef David McCallum stirs the culinary pot at Isabel’s restaurant. His black-eyed pea cakes are a must-try. Look for special themed wine dinners and other culinary events throughout the off-season.

COST $125 to $250. Off-season packages include two nights, a four-course dinner for two and continental breakfast (or Sunday brunch) each morning, starting at $320. Tilghman Island, Md. 410-886-2141, http://www.tilghmanislandinn.com

INN AT 202 DOVER
Sandra Day O’Connor, the former Supreme Court justice, stopped by for dinner

SLEEP The five rooms in this grand 1874 home transport guests to Asia, England, and France. We like the huge khaki-colored Safari Suite for its bedroom fireplace and exotic bathroom, featuring an air-jet tub and faux elephant tusk vanity.

DINE The intimate Peacock Restaurant & Lounge is home to chef Mark Knipp, who honed his skills at The Inn at Little Washington. Knipp limits his menu to a selective half-dozen apps and entrees—including a comforting bison short ribs.

COST $224 to $379. The Winter Sweetheart Package includes two nights, dinner, and massages for two, $900. Family and Friends Sunday dinners, 4 to 7 p.m. include three courses for $29.95. Easton, Md. 410-819-8007, innat202dover.com

INN AT PERRY CABIN
Vince Vaughn crashed here while filming “Wedding Crashers”

SLEEP Let’s see, 78 rooms, five varieties to choose from… If a fireplace is mandatory, you’ll have to go with a Master Suite, which also nets you a separate sitting room and an Italian marble bathroom. Need to relax? Then hit the posh Linden Spa.

DINE Longtime chef Mark Salter may have departed (see Traveling Gourmet, page 57), but new toque Greg Brandberg has got A+ experience: His last gig was working for “Iron Chef” Morimoto’s namesake restaurant in Philly.

COST $265 to $515. See the website for the inn’s myriad packages, ranging from the $385 Gourmet Package (room, dinner for two, breakfasts) to the Linden Spa Package (room and $115 credit at the spa), $365. St. Michaels, Md. 866-278-9601, http://www.perrycabin.com

There are no historic markers along Virginia’s Route 13 noting that the “Father of Rock ’n’ Roll” lived and died here. No signs point toward his gravesite in Franktown, Va., which, until the late 1990s—25 years after his death in 1974—wasn’t even marked by a headstone.

Ask many in this close-knit region if they’ve heard of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and they’ll shake their heads. If you had asked that same question 40 years ago, many people—at least in the white community—would have responded that Crudup was the tall, soft-spoken crew leader who oversaw migrant laborers picking vegetables on the Nottingham Brothers farm. But a blues legend who wrote Elvis Presley’s first-ever hit and whose work was covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Creedence Clearwater Revival to Elton John? Not a chance.

The truth is, unless you’re a fan of the blues, you’ve probably never heard of Arthur Crudup either. (And likely don’t realize his name is pronounced “Crood-up” not “Crud-up.”) Like many African-American blues musicians of the 1930s and ’40s, he was cheated out of royalties for his compositions while music publishers, record companies, and the white artists who covered his music got rich.

But there’s something even sadder about Crudup’s story. No other blues artist can boast such a strong connection to Presley, who recorded two other Crudup songs—“My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine.” And, at the end of his life, Crudup, who was born into poverty in Forest, Miss., came tantalizingly close to finally receiving those back royalties, only to be denied at the last second by a calculating music publishing executive.

Arthur Crudup may have been dubbed a king, but he spent all his days living as a pauper.

FINDING TRACES OF ARTHUR CRUDUP on the back roads of Northampton County is like following a trail that isn’t marked. Crudup, his wife, Annie, and their five children lived in a variety of glorified shacks, none of which remain standing.

The Malibu Inn, Crudup’s legendary juke joint, where the bluesman and his musical sons, Jonas, James, and George, held court and made and sold moonshine is long gone.

So I’ve enlisted a local, Billy Sturgis, to take me around. Sturgis, 53, may be Crudup’s biggest fan on the Shore. A blues fanatic who co-hosts a radio show every Saturday night on WESR-FM, he produced an album featuring the three Crudup brothers in 2000. The record, “Franktown Blues,” features Big Boy’s sons performing their father’s hits as well as original tunes. Sturgis, also a devotee of the Blues Brothers movies, owns one of the “Blues mobiles” from the second film, but it has a flat tire, so we step into his slate-colored Mercedes instead.

We drive past old farms and small, tidy houses, a pond where Crudup, an avid fisherman, likely cast his line. We end up at the bluesman’s gravesite in the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, overlooking the Nottingham farm, where he toiled for so many years as an overseer. Next to the gray tombstone someone has left a vase of fake flowers, now cracked and faded by the weather. Sturgis tells me that the family was too poor to afford a headstone when Crudup died and his gravesite lay unmarked for years. “This is where we assume he’s buried,” says Sturgis. “Jonas [Crudup’s third son] said there was a tree nearby,” he says, motioning toward a stump.

Crudup’s wife, who died in 1963, lies in an unmarked grave, as does his mother, Minnie. Crudup’s youngest son, James, who gained unwanted notoriety for robbing a local bank and then using the Crudups’ van—emblazoned with the family name—as his getaway car, lies nearby. “When James sang, he sounded just like his father,” comments Sturgis, as we stand by his headstone.

Sturgis tells me at Big Boy’s funeral someone delivered a huge bouquet of flowers—much more grand than anyone in town could have afforded. “Some people say Elvis sent it,” says Sturgis, though he hasn’t been able to verify it.

A combine rumbles past on the road as we climb back into Sturgis’ car, Muddy Waters singing about love gone bad on the satellite radio. We drive a few miles to the site of the Malibu Inn in a thick woods a half-mile west of Route 13. Sturgis has been here before, but as we fight our way through the heavily overgrown underbrush, he can’t seem to find the building’s remains. “Wait, wait, here it is,” he suddenly shouts, pointing to one of four concrete blocks outlining the building’s frame. “You got the cornerstone of rock ’n’ roll right here,” he says. “Look at it!”

We poke around at what’s left of the structure—pieces of old wood, carpet fragments, a screen window frame, and a few rusted bus seats likely used as chairs.

According to Prechelle Ames, Crudup’s granddaughter, and the only blood relative still living on the Eastern Shore, the Malibu was demolished in 1982. “I remember being in there as a little girl,” says Ames, Jonas’ daughter, now 39, who works as the operations manager for Maryland Food Bank Eastern Shore in Salisbury. “There was always somebody there. They would gamble, roll dice, play cards. It was a typical juke joint—open for business 24/7.”

But now there’s nothing left but scraps. Still, to Billy Sturgis, this is hallowed ground. “This is the real deal here,” he says, as we stand surveying the ruins. “I get choked up being here. I really do.”

Sturgis bends over to unearth a couple of rusty, 1970s-era Ballantine beer cans. “He wrote his songs and Elvis took them,” he says of Crudup. “Elvis became famous and Arthur went into obscurity. Somebody was gettin’ that money and he knew it. It’s a tragic story. … But that’s why they call it the blues.”

BY THE TIME ARTHUR CRUDUP permanently moved his family to Virginia’s Eastern Shore in the 1950s, he was already fed up with the music business. Crudup, who didn’t learn to play guitar until he was 32, had moved to Chicago in the early 1940s to pursue a career in music. As the story goes, he was living beneath the city’s elevated train tracks in a cardboard box when music producer Lester Melrose, who recorded many of Chicago’s famous bluesmen, heard him playing on the street. Melrose invited him to perform   at a party thrown by legendary blues guitarist Tampa Red,  and after some initial stage fright, Crudup impressed Melrose enough that he signed him to a contract. Crudup, then 36, recorded his first song for Bluebird records, “If I Get Lucky,” in 1941.

Crudup stood 6-feet 5-inches tall (thus, the “Big Boy” label), but he sang in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. His unique sound, clever lyrics, and preference for electric guitar at a time when most blues artists were still playing acoustic attracted listeners and his records sold well. Some, most notably, “Rock Me Mama,” “Mean Ole Frisco,” “Keep Your Arms Around Me,” and “So Glad You’re Mine,” were legitimate hits and would later be recorded by other musicians who made them famous.

According to Dick Waterman, the longtime manager of blues legends from Buddy Guy to Bonnie Raitt, and who served as Crudup’s booking agent during the blues revival of the late 1960s, “There probably wasn’t a week during the decade of the 1970s when there wasn’t an Arthur Crudup song on the Billboard Top 200 albums,” he says, rambling off a list of seminal rock albums from Clapton’s “Slow Hand” (“Mean Old Frisco”) to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Cosmo’s Factory” (“My Baby Left Me.”)

But Crudup, who was paid an upfront fee for his recordings and signed away the copyrights to Melrose (as was typical of blues musicians at the time), only collected scant payments over the years.

“I never knew how much progress I was makin’ because Melrose didn’t tell me,” Crudup said in a 1973 documentary, “Born into the Blues,” filmed in Franktown. “I could hear my songs on the jukebox all through the South. I had a disc jockey tell me, ‘Now, Arthur, you’re supposed to be in good shape. Your records are selling second from the top.’”

In 1946, Crudup recorded “That’s All Right, Mama,” which Elvis covered and released in 1954 as “That’s All Right.” Crudup received credit for writing the smash, which established Presley as a star, but nothing from the singer other than an award plaque, which subsequently burned in a house fire. But Presley, who recorded many other black musicians’ songs, never denied Crudup’s influence. As he told the Charlotte Observer in 1956: “Down in Tupelo, Miss., I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel what old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.” 

Still, Crudup clearly could have used some help. After his second wife was murdered in Chicago, he returned to farm work and odd jobs in Mississippi and later moved to Florida where he established a business shuttling migrant workers from Florida north to Franktown. He only went back to Chicago to fulfill his contractual obligations with Melrose. As he said in the documentary, “Every time I’d go make a record, I’d ask Lester, ‘How many records would a man have to make that he didn’t have to work on the farm?’”

DURING HIS FRANKTOWN YEARS, Crudup settled into a routine of farm work and selling moonshine to earn a living, putting his musical past behind him. “Pop Crudup was quite a distinguished maker and seller of moonshine,” says Ames. “People traveled from deep within the states to get his [hooch].” 
   
He would perform occasionally at the Do-Drop Inn (now Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn), a licensed juke joint in the area that remains meticulously maintained by its owner, Jane Cabarrus, whose father built it by hand in 1967. These days, the club, likely the last juke joint on the Eastern Shore, is mainly used as a catering hall and community center, but its long bar, pool table, and worn wooden dance floor speak to a time when it hosted musical acts from around the region.

Cabarrus, a teenager in the late 1960s, remembers Crudup acting as the club’s doorman, collecting the $3 cover charge from patrons who would come every Saturday night to drink Schlitz beers and watch his sons play R&B hits. Known as The Malibus, the Crudup brothers band enjoyed decent success and toured throughout the East Coast, but were particularly big on the Eastern Shore. “What Elvis was to the world, is what the Crudup boys were to the community,” says Cabarrus, who notes that both father and sons attracted their share of female admirers. “Every Saturday night they’d pack the house.”

Cabarrus remembers Crudup sometimes opening for his sons or joining them on stage, but she says most of the people came to see The Malibus and weren’t really aware of the blues legend in their midst. “I don’t think people knew how big he was, how great he was,” says Cabarrus. “He didn’t really become great until after he died. … A lot of us weren’t knowledgeable about how great the blues were at that time,” as Motown and rhythm and blues were the dominant sounds in the black community.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Crudup did record and tour again as part of the blues revival that swept the country. Lloyd Kellum, a local pharmacist and a close associate of Crudup’s, recalls the bluesman showing up at his drugstore with a beat-up guitar case and an “awful-looking fur coat.” “I asked him where he was going and he said, ‘I’m on my way to England to play for the queen.’ I thought, ‘This man is crazy.’” (Crudup did tour England and then Australia, but he never performed for Queen Elizabeth.) Later, Kellum read an article in a Virginia newspaper that referred to Crudup as the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll. “I just couldn’t believe we had this guy living in our town,” he says.

“I had no idea about who he was—and maybe he liked it that way. But after that, we made him a little celebrity around the store.” 

CRUDUP HAD WORKED with various lawyers over the years to help him recoup some of the monies he was owed. Finally, in 1973, the American Guild of Authors and Composers reached an agreement with the publishing house that held the rights to his work.

Waterman met Crudup, then 68 and frail, and his children in New York City to sign documents guaranteeing an initial payment of $60,000, plus future royalties. But as Waterman describes it, things didn’t go as planned. “Arthur signed the documents and then we waited 15, 20 minutes for the attorney to come back. He was very shaken and said, ‘[My boss] won’t sign it. He said he feels this gives away more in settlement than you could win in litigation.’

“Arthur looked at me and I said, ‘They’re not going to pay you, Arthur. You’re going to have to sue them. We’re going to have sue Lester Melrose’s widow.’ But the idea of a black man suing an elderly white woman—it just wasn’t gonna happen.”

Waterman says it was a blustery day in Manhattan as the group left the office building and huddled outside. “Them people got their ways of keeping folks like me from getting any money,” Waterman says Crudup told him. “Naked I come into this world and naked I shall leave it. It just ain’t meant to be.” 

Resigned to his fate, Crudup returned to Franktown with his children. In March of 1974, he was opening for Bonnie Raitt in Washington, D.C., when he suffered a stroke and died several weeks later at a hospital in Nassawadox, Va.

Disgusted at how things turned out, Waterman met with another lawyer, Ina Meibach, in New York City on his way home from Crudup’s funeral. Eventually, Waterman and Meibach did succeed in securing royalties for the estate, which Waterman estimates has been paid more than $3 million since.

Unfortunately, only a daughter, also named Preshell but spelled differently, and Crudup’s son George, who has battled drugs most of his life, remain alive. It’s unclear as to who’s receiving the money, as the Crudup children each had several marriages between them. All Waterman knows is that a Florida attorney oversees payments to the estate.

The tragedy that “Big Boy” Crudup was never properly compensated for his accomplishments is not lost on his granddaughter, Prechelle. “When I’d listen to his music, I used to be really, really angry and upset cause of what he should have gotten—what it would have meant for our family, what we rightfully deserved,” says Ames, whose 18-year-old son, Pharez, hopes to work in the music industry someday. “But I long got past that. I started to enjoy it and just listen.”

For Sturgis and Cabarrus, they’d like to see the county or state or somebody establish an official Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup Blues Trail, with historic markers on Route 13 and signs pointing the way toward his grave and Gidden’s Do-Drop Inn, where Cabarrus hopes to once again host live music regularly.

“Franktown people need to know about what happened here,” says Sturgis. “Big Boy didn’t necessarily create the music here, but this is where he lived and died. They should know that this is where the Father of Rock ’n’ Roll called home.”

Blink and you’ll pass the entry. The simple metal gate leading to this extraordinary Talbot County retreat is surprisingly ordinary. On reflection, the understated first impression is the appropriate entrée to this discreet hideaway. While there is no welcome sign out front, if there were one, it might say, “Enter and enjoy this natural refuge from the chaos of city life and worldly pursuits. Proceed with an open heart and respect for our planet.”

The owners, who are active environmentalists, wanted to create an intimate, secluded oasis where every visitor—from a distant cousin to a high-profile international friend—would feel welcome and at ease while always respecting the land and its creatures.

Once inside the gate, the two-mile drive to the lodge rambles through fields of wheat, corn, and marsh grasses, presenting a palette of earthy colors and textures. Other than the sound of tires crunching gravel, the conversations of chattering birds and geese are the only interruptions to blissful silence.

While the lodge is new, it appears old, as if it had been nestled along the tranquil pond for a century or two. That’s because, in a way, it is old. “Whenever possible we reused old building materials,” says Baltimore designer Henry Johnson. “The exterior wood, interior walls and floors are antique chestnut instead of new wood. Interior walls are real chinked logs.

The wood ceiling is constructed of antique beams.”

Finding such high-quality recycled materials was a collaborative effort between the clients, the firm of Johnson-Berman and ILEX Builders. Conservation efforts continued throughout the entire project.

“The owners believe we should stop throwing things away, so we repaired and repainted furniture and reupholstered what we could. Everything didn’t have to be new,” says Johnson.

Thanks to a talented team assembled by Johnson, the lodge was completed in 18 months. Consultants included Matthew Mosca, an architectural historian and expert on historic colors. (His projects include the U.S. Capitol, Mount Vernon, and the Maryland State House.) He assisted with replicating authentic paint selections in the kitchen and on selected furniture.

There isn’t one word that sums up the architectural style here. “It’s really history unfolding in a gentle, progressive way. It reflects how a 200-year-old cabin would have evolved over a period of time,” adds Johnson. “We began in the 17th century and created a timeline that combines the charm and graciousness of the past with the comfort and efficiency of modern times.”

Doors and frames were hand-worked to reflect the woodwork of the early 18th century. Soft, subtle lighting was achieved by using contemporary wrought-iron fixtures with large cylinders that bounce light off the ceiling.

Furnishings are not of the “hands-off” variety. Quite the opposite. Everything here says, “Touch me, make yourself at home.” Collectibles from the owners’ travels and family treasures inhabit each room like old friends. “You don’t put beautiful things away as if your home is a museum, you put them out and use them. That’s the owners’ mantra,” says Johnson.

Fabrics mix styles and textures. Red velvet draperies may seem an odd choice for a log cabin, but the rich color and sumptuousness add warmth to the open space. Red mohair fireside chairs are strategically placed for building new friendships or rekindling old ones.

Since there is only one bedroom in an upstairs loft overlooking the two-story Great Hall and just one full bath, the lodge is primarily used as a cozy overnight or weekend retreat.

The Great Hall and the adjoining wraparound porch are ideal spaces for entertaining guests before or after a hunt or a hike.
Naturalness and a lack of pretense are the heart of this environmentally responsible retreat. There is no need for an official welcome sign. Once inside the simple entry gate, every aspect of the place says, “Welcome.”

Mary Ann Treger writes from a historic home in Annapolis.

Chicken with rosemary and garlic.
For about 10 years, whenever I needed to impress someone with my cooking, that’s what I made. I don’t remember where I found the recipe, but I first prepared it for my parents way back in high school. I’d whip it up on nights when Mom wasn’t up to cooking and my folks would rave. If I overcooked the chicken and the meat was dry, they never let on. 

Later, I’d make it for dates, purposely easing up on the garlic, just in case the aphrodisiac properties of the extra-virgin olive oil should succeed. (Note to younger self: Extra-virgin olive oil is not an aphrodisiac.) Again, my dining companions would “ooh” and “aah,” probably because no 25-year-old kid had ever cooked them anything with rosemary before.

Chicken with rosemary and garlic was like a trusted friend. But aren’t all favorite recipes? A good recipe can be something familiar and comfortable, like a well-worn pair of jeans but also something extraordinary, like a glitzy ball gown. In other words, you throw together your crab dip for an evening with the neighbors, but you save the paella for your boss and his wife.

I was curious to see what our 10 local party hosts would say when we asked them for their favorite go-to recipes. (See “What’s Your Specialty?” on page 32.) Many gave us family creations, passed down like heirlooms from mothers and grandmothers, who likely used them as their own reliable recipes. Others were concocted on the spot and became something to be re-created again and again. Recipes also make us think about those we’ve lost, like Renee Brooks Catacalos, who told us how her gregarious father-in-law passed on his recipe for moussaka not long before his death.
“Whenever we make it,” she said, “we think of him.”

Also in this food-themed issue, you’ll find my own story on training to become a barbecue competition judge. I find it amazing how Salisbury’s annual Pork in the Park has grown into the second-largest barbecue competition in the country in just seven years. The festival takes place in April, but if you want to be a judge, you’ll have to sign up for a class this winter.

On a completely different subject, contributing writer Mary Ann Treger takes a look at Annapolis Mayor Josh Cohen’s first year in office. Cohen took over at an extremely challenging time in the city’s history, and we hear from both his supporters and critics on his job thus far.

I have to admit that I haven’t made chicken with rosemary and garlic in years. Just as friends often do, we lost touch over the decades. But now that I write these words, I’m thinking it might be nice to reunite. Besides, I’m married now, and my wife likes garlic just as much as I do. 

Please don’t ring—just come in” reads the sign above the doorbell of the Cape Charles House. Savoring the considerable curb appeal of the handsome 1912 Colonial Revival, we cross the wraparound porch and obey. Inside, we find a rosy parlor, and antique furnishings of the make-yourself-at-home variety. Leather wing chairs and an overstuffed sofa beckon in the adjacent living room. In the modern kitchen (guests welcome), silver serving trays wait with wine glasses, crackers, and cheese.

Genial host Bruce Evans makes our welcome complete with a cordial greeting, an introduction to the supersized, fluffy white cat, Mr. Kitty, and an invitation to make ourselves at home. Relaxing with our cabernet sauvignon, we do.

Innkeepers Bruce and his wife, Carol Evans, run their B&B with five-star enthusiasm, even after 17 years in operation. “Special attention is what we’re all about,” says Bruce, beaming at the partner he calls “that gorgeous redhead.” The couple is happy to make dinner reservations, swap gardening stories, or discuss the attractions of their adopted hometown. Carol lends her artistry to breakfasts and décor, which includes a
10-foot Christmas tree and glossy magnolia-and-lemon swags for the holidays.

Rooms Our king-sized Julia Wilkins Suite, named for the daughter of the original owner, is resplendent in blue and white, its bay windows shaded by magnificent trees—and the bath sports its own mini-balcony. During renovations, Bruce and Carol discovered cards and keepsakes belonging to the family that had slipped behind a mantel. Their finds, commemorated in an episode of HGTV’s “If Walls Could Talk,” are displayed in a glass-topped shadowbox. Century-old accessories furnish this and the four other guest rooms, all christened for local notables. 

Special touches/diversions Cape Charles’ wide, walkable beach is just five blocks away—a fine destination for a sunset stroll or, on a mild day, a ride on the inn’s guest bikes. Follow the sandy sidewalks south and enjoy the laid-back vibe on Mason Avenue, which offers antiques and gift shops, and comfortable dining spots. (Two restored Pullman cars on waterside tracks recall the days when trains and rail ferries connected Cape Charles to the world.) The nearby Bay Marina Resort offers more restaurants and shops and boasts two golf courses for warmer days. On Dec. 3, you can join Cape Charles’ annual Holiday Sampler and Progressive Dinner Tour, featuring live music, luminaria, and local wines and food. Later that month, sing along with residents and visitors at the bayside New Year’s Eve bonfire.

What’s for breakfast Sweet or savory, Carol’s multicourse morning meals qualify as feasts. Fresh fruit and muffins with homemade fresh fig preserves—direct from the Evanses’ own tree—precede her salsa-topped scrambled eggs, herbed red potatoes, and sausage. The following morning, a “banana wrinkle”—a warm, custardy pastry puff—has us mopping up every syrupy crumb.

Romance Factor Small-town delights, starry nights, and a cozy nest—the rest is up to you.

Cost $140 to $200.

Cape Charles House
Bed and Breakfast
645 Tazewell Ave.
Cape Charles, Va.
757-331-4920
http://www.capecharleshouse.com

For 1 1/2 years. Oxford’s Robert Morric Inn has been an empty, lonely place. But no longer. In May 2010, chef Mark Salter and his friend and business partner, Ian Fleming, both formerly of The Inn at Perry Cabin, stepped in and revived the shuttered inn. Today, new trees dot the property, the car park has been regraded, and beer once again flows in the Morris’ cozy tavern.

Those looking for change since the new ownership will find it only in the menus and in the “crockery and cutlery,” as British-born Salter puts it. The tavern retains its gorgeous brick walls and dark wood warmth, and the formal dining room retains its staid, Colonial décor. At present, Salter plans to leave the dining room as is, though, the future may bring some tweaks. Many won’t mind, but the room’s distinct old- fashioned-ness feels tired and somewhat at odds with Salter’s food, which is a fresher and more modern take on classic.

On Salter’s formal dining room menu (which overlaps somewhat with the tavern menu), cream of Maryland crab soup shares space with tuna carpaccio, and quinoa and poppadoms accompany seared jumbo scallops. A Maryland crab spring roll appetizer is a play of delicate flavors and textures where toasted almonds provide the crunch, ripe avocado and crab give creaminess, and slivers of tart pink grapefruit prevent the whole dish from being too rich.

A Taste of the Chesapeake, another playful starter, samples seasonal favorites: a perfectly fried oyster accompanied by a demitasse of subtly spiced butternut squash soup and a generous dab of smoky bluefish paté, an underrated fish that’s showing up more and more on restaurant menus these days. (Am I happy about this? You betcha!)

Entrees also cull from what’s local and in season, like rockfish and duck breast, lamb shank and oysters (Salter plans to change the menu four times a year). Ask Salter what makes his crab cake so good, and he’ll tell you “love,” without missing a beat. But press him further about his award-winning recipe (in a recent contest, Salter bested chef Eric Ripert of Manhattan’s swank Le Bernadin with this crab cake), and he’ll admit that panko coating and local crabmeat, often hand-picked the same day it’s made into the cakes, are crucial parts of the recipe, too. And the crab cake is good—softball sized, but light as a balloon, served with carrot ginger puree and French beans. (It’s also a pricey $29.) Equally nice is the generous tenderloin of beef, which comes with dauphinoise potatoes and sautéed mushrooms begging to be sampled.

Just make sure you save room for dessert. All are made in-house, including a multi-layered Smith Island cake, but if you love chocolate, you can’t go wrong with the chocolate-enrobed Ailsa’s chocolate carrot cake with its ribbon of creamy filling between the layers.

Although Salter emphasizes that the inn offers “casual fine dining,” be aware that this is not inexpensive dining, with most entrees lying firmly in the upper-$20 range. The prices are a shade lower in the livelier tavern, which boasts a smaller and more casual menu, and I would definitely plan my next meal there. Besides, what’s better than reconnecting with an old friend?

Food writer Mary K. Zajac eats all over the Bay.

When cold weather comes, I naturally think of root vegetables. Nothing is more hearty—or sticks to your ribs on a cold winter’s day better—than some simply roasted veggies paired with braised meat. Roasting root vegetables is one of my favorite preparations, but there are myriad other ways to cook them. 

During winter, I also think of chestnuts—and what a great pair: celeriac and chestnuts pureed together in an elegant soup. My recipe makes the pairing even more decadent by adding rich, bacon-infused cream. The result is perfect for entertaining.

Another great starter is the parsnip and leek tart, which is simply delicious. No one will even recognize it as vegetarian! The roasted beet root-spiked risotto meets the unexpected but familiar goat cheese for a smooth and luscious culinary ride. Finally, my carrot ravioli, using wonton wrappers, is a restaurant-quality light course, but it’s actually super-easy to put together.

Start using all those nutritious root vegetables in creative ways, and you’ll be rewarded with some delicious comfort food this winter.

Celeriac and Chestnut Soup with Smoked Bacon Chantilly
Parsnip and Leek Tart with Wild Mushrooms
Carrot and Ginger Ravioli with Yellow Curry and Thai Basil
Risotto with Roasted Beets and Goat Cheese

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s The BBQ Joint.

Great Travel Ideas for Fall:

1. Bike Through Talbot County
2. Dredge for Oysters on a Skipjack
3. Take a Winery Tour—By Kayak
4. Go Natural at Pickering Creek
5. Get Fired Up at Schrader’s Bridgetown Manor

>Canoeing just feels normal and natural. When you’re out there stress leaks out of you like a bucket with holes in it.

>I came back [from a wilderness camp in Northern Idaho] in the summer of ’87 and I thought it would be interesting to either go to Antarctica or run for Congress. But the people had already signed up for the Antarctic. So I ran for Congress.

>I grew up in a Republican household, but it wasn’t a matter of ideology as much as it was economics. I was an independent, but it cost $300 to file as an independent. It cost $100 to file as a Democrat or Republican.

>Did I enjoy campaigning? Let me ask you something: Would you enjoy irritable bowel syndrome? Would you like kidney stones?...Crohn’s disease? That’s how I saw it. In ’08, when I lost the primary, the job was just alien to every fiber in my being. It was a big relief. It was just eating at the marrow of my bones. Not so much that I minded the travel or the work or the hours you had to put into it, what I minded was the lack of productivity. You’d have all this information, but no one was interested. ... You could ask experts from all over the world for information and you’d bring it to meetings or hearings and nobody was interested.

>It seems they were more interested in getting their name as being present at the hearing and then talking to the press about something and then scheduling a fundraiser or a campaign event. They were not focused on the issue of the hour. They were simply handed questions and statements by their staff or talking on their phones or Blackberries. I don’t think John Adams had a Blackberry.

>The Democrats were as bad as the Republicans. They just had a different constituency to please.

>Every Gulf Coast Republican is the biggest anti-environmentalist you can imagine. And these Gulf Coast Republicans—and to some extent Gulf Coast Democrats, too—these Gulf Coast Republicans voted to eliminate the Endangered Species Act. They voted for the ‘Dirty Water Act’ in 1995 [a bill to weaken the Clean Water Act]. Every time we tried to bring in some really good environmental policy—whether it was fisheries or clean air or preserving wetlands or managing the oceans or whatever it was—they voted against it. They brought in Big Oil and now they’re all crying foul: ‘All of the fishermen are out of work! The oil is killing our marshes!’ Well, no kiddin’. Look what you did for 30 years.

>Green on the outside and communist pink on the inside —that’s what I’ve been called on a number of occasions.

>To me, all you have to do is pretty logical. We’re on this little green planet in the midst of an infinite hostile environment where no human can live. We depend on the natural resources from nature’s design, developed over millions and millions of years in a co-evolutionary fashion, and here we are at this particular moment of Earth’s evolution and the human population is bulging, raping the resources and degrading the planet that we depend on with no thought, thinking that this is the way it is.

>You know for every one person trying to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, a thousand are degrading it. And the problem with that is, they either know they’re degrading it and they don’t care, or most of them don’t know they’re degrading it. It’s the fundamental pervasive ignorance of where you fit into nature’s design.

>When I came back from Vietnam I didn’t go to college right away. I ended up living in a boardinghouse in Maine for $9 a week slaughtering chickens. That was pretty cool. I sort of got run over by a chicken truck and broke my leg and that ended my chicken career.

>What does it feel like to get shot? It feels like you’ve just gotten run over by a big truck. ... I couldn’t breathe. The first thing I thought of was my older brother Clifford when we were 10 years old in the backyard playing stickball, and I got a little too close to the swing of the stick, and he hit me in the stomach and I couldn’t breathe. And Clifford said, ‘Relax and breathe through your nose.’ And that’s what I did. I got real calm. I relaxed. I took short breaths and I could breathe.

>What happens [with politicians] is that they give up their souls. And then they stop questioning what they’re doing. And then—boom!—before you know it, they’re living their life with no meaning or purpose other than to stay in office.

>What did I like about [Congress]? I think I liked sitting in an orphanage in Ethiopia run by German nuns, tragically as it is, with children dying of AIDS. ...And then you could appropriate money to that specific place.

>The war in Iraq, I would have voted against it, having found out that a couple years later that little we were told by the Administration was true.

>In ’05 we had a really good discussion with the CIA in Damascus. ... The station chief in Syria, head CIA guy, he just laid it out for us. The whole thing was a sham. The big question was, Where did all the weapons of mass destruction go? They all went to Syria, that was everybody’s assumption because that was what the Administration was saying because [they] were toying with the idea of invading Syria. The CIA station chief started out the conversation by saying, ‘There are no WMDs in Syria’. Just like that. You want to know why? Because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—and there hadn’t been since 1991, the first Persian Gulf War. We obliterated all of them. And we put sanctions against Iraq, so there was no money to build them back.

>Sometimes they [constituents] would poke me if they didn’t like my vote. Oh, yeah, they’d stick their finger in my chest—especially when I started turning against the war in Iraq. I started pokin’ back.

>The three most important things for [a new congressman] is to be informed, be competent, and have integrity. And think for yourself. Don’t become a lapdog for some lobby group because you need money for your campaign. Be bold about what you do because so many members are afraid that they’ll lose votes in the election and they become timid legislators. And timid legislators then become less informed, less competent, and they lose their integrity.

>There’s always been a certain amount of partisanship. It’s natural—you’re on one team. But there’s also been congeniality between rivals. ... But there’s been a gradual shift to partisanship with bitterness. And bitterness is not a good foundation for lucid thinking. It creates this barrier to emotional maturity and tolerance.

>I can tell you right now if [Sean] Hannity and [Rush] Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are taking over the Republican Party, you, in essence, have the perfect formula for ignorance, arrogance, and dogma, which has been the undoing of civilizations from the dawn of time.

>[In the end] I was thinking about becoming a Democrat. Or I would have stayed a Republican and retained my independent thought. I was becoming much less interested in party politics. Never had much interest in them anyway.

>I don’t think about being happy or unhappy. I grew up during a time when your parents weren’t concerned if you were happy or not, so you don’t have that inside of you. I think being curious and free to follow your curiosity is what gives you a sense of contentment.

>If I could go back, I wouldn’t have done it.

Drinking Traditions
Annapolitans (and visiting sailors) have long been known to enjoy a good tankard of ale. But for how long? Reynolds Tavern edges out Middleton Tavern as oldest “ordinary” in A-Town by a scant three years or so. Reynolds first started serving drinks in 1747 when William Reynolds, a hatter and dry goods salesman, opened The Beaver and Lac’d Hat in the circa-1737 building. In 1750, Horatio Middleton bought the building by City Dock and operated it as an “Inn for Seafaring Men.” Middleton can claim most notable patrons, however, as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin all enjoyed a belt of whiskey—or two—at the bar.

Lucky Duck
Lothrope Holmes, of Kingston, Mass., was a cemetery superintendent and avid duck hunter. If he had been alive in 2006, the amateur carver would have been shocked to have seen his red-breasted merganser hen— carved circa 1870—fetch $856,000 at a Christie’s auction co-organized by notable decoy auction house Guyette and Schmidt of St. Michaels. The merganser, one of six likely carved by Holmes in his lifetime, set the record for most expensive decoy ever sold at an auction. “I’d have been happier if it made a million because that would have been a milestone,” Gary Guyette noted after the sale. If it comes up for sale again, it may. The last time the merganser changed hands was in 1976, when it went for just $6,000.

Lower Than Low
There have been some real “lowlights” in Chesapeake history (the decline of crabs and oysters and Spiro T. Agnew to name a few), but the absolute lowest point in the Chesapeake itself can be found about 1 mile west-southwest of the southern tip of Kent Island in Queen Anne’s County. At 174 feet below sea level, the natural depression is known as Bloody Point Hole. The area is also known in angling circles for harboring some very big fish. (See “What a Catch!” below.)

High Rent
Looking to upsize your house? Then check out Queenstown’s 29-room Penderyn estate along the banks of the Wye River. The 32-acre property, which features a pool, a conservatory, and oodles of antique fixtures and chandeliers, is the highest-priced house for sale in the Chesapeake region at an asking price of $14.95 million. The house was built in the late 1980s by Maureen and Mario Boiardi, son of Hector Boiardi, creator of the Chef Boyardee line of canned pastas. In this economy, mansions over $10 million don’t move so quickly, but Talbot County’s Benson & Mangold is accepting offers.

Beer Here!
Thirty-six years is a long time to be doing anything, let alone running up and down the steps at a baseball game screaming at the top of your lungs. But that’s how long the Orioles’ longest-tenured beer vendor, “Fancy” Clancy Haskett, has been offering up the suds. What’s kept Haskett going are his crazy antics (he was the subject of the 2008 documentary film, “The Story of Fancy Clancy, the Beer Man”) and his rapport with fans. “I have a large clientele of customers and fans that I have accumulated over the years. It keeps me excited about going to work,” he says. “I’ve got to keep my customers satisfied.”

The Jurors
Turns out John Briant just had some tough luck. The Maryland settler was found dead one day and a jury was called on Jan. 31, 1637 in St. Mary’s County to deliberate what happened. His trial marked the earliest court jury of 12, whose members soon determined that foul play was not involved; poor John was felled by a falling tree.

Sunday Never Ends
Its cemetery is final resting place to a Maryland governor, President Lincoln’s “silent cabinet member,” Anna Ella Carroll, and veterans from every American war (including three from the Revolution). Old Trinity Church, in Church Creek, Md., is the country’s oldest operating Episcopalian church still in its original form. Though membership has ebbed and flowed over the years, church services are still held every Sunday as they were at its founding in 1671.

What a Catch!
This fish was almost as big as the fisherman. It took 97-pound, 12-year-old Devin Nolan an hour to haul in a 67-pound 8-ounce rockfish, setting a Maryland state record for biggest rockfish caught in Chesapeake waters. The Hampstead, Md., pre-teen caught the fish in waters above Bloody Point (see above) in Queen Anne’s County on May 13, 1995. The Nolan family later stuffed and mounted the fish and donated it to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, where it hangs in perpetuity ready to strike.

What a Catch, Part II
We’re always amazed at the prize money awarded for catching fish. Ocean City’s White Marlin Open, the world’s largest billfish tour-nament, regularly doles out millions in prize money every year. In 2005, angler Ken Coffer suddenly found him-self a millionaire when he caught a 78.5-pound white marlin, netting him $1,538,915 —the biggest prize ever awarded by the tournament.

Bet He Didn’t Pay a Toll
Maryland Gov. Theodore McKeldin made the first trip over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge when it was dedicated on July 30, 1952. He and former Gov. William Preston Lane led a procession of 24 chartered buses across the bridge. With all the sightseeing stops, backslapping, and handshaking along the way, their journey took more than 2 ½ hours—seemingly about the same time it takes to cross the bridge on a busy holiday weekend today. 

Some Like It Hot
For hot sauce aficionados, mecca is located in a Rehoboth Beach strip mall. That’s where you’ll find Peppers and the world’s largest collection of hot sauces. At 8,000 to 9,000 strong (“We gave up worrying about the exact number years ago,” says owner Chip Hearn), the collection ranges from one-of-kind Trinidadian tongue-burners to trial-size bottles of Tabasco. Hearn says he didn’t set out to establish the world record until attending a hot sauce show in the early 1990s. “We found out we had the third largest in the world and didn’t even know it,” he says. “So we made a concerted effort over that winter to be No. 1.” Thousands of bottles are for sale at his Rehoboth shop. 

You Again?
U.S. Census officials may still be sorting through the 2010 tallies, but according to 2000’s records, the smallest incorporated town in Maryland is Port Tobacco in Charles County. All 15 of its residents could fit around a generously sized dining room table.

Crab Caked
Jim Cupp, regional sales manager for Salisbury seafood processor Handy International, holds the record for cooking the world’s biggest crab cake—both officially and unofficially. He set the official Guinness World Record in 2008 when he and a team created a 235-pound behemoth, cooked over nine hours in a custom-built, $10,000 cooker with a three-foot diameter, at Dover Downs. The following year at Baltimore’s HonFest, he concocted a 253-pounder, made of 150 pounds of crab meat, plus breadcrumbs, mayonnaise, onions, pasteurized eggs, and spices. “You have to be careful because too much crabmeat and it won’t hold together,” advises Cupp, who says the cakes are about 55-60 percent backfin and lump. At press time, Cupp was attempting to break his own record at a benefit for a seafood processor in the Gulf. “It’s a big show but it’s also a great way to raise funds for charities,” says Cupp, who notes sales of sandwiches from his previous two colossal cakes helped raise funds for the United Way and Maryland Special Olympics. 

Crab Caked, Part II
They’re not quite the size of Cupp’s creations, but the area’s biggest crab cake sandwiches are created by G&M Restaurant in Linthicum. The softball-sized cakes weigh in at a hefty 8 ounces each.

Crab Caked, Part III
The record for eating the most crab cakes is held by 105-pound Sonya “Black Widow” Thomas of Alexandria, Va., who crammed 46 Phillips crab cakes down her gullet in 10 minutes at 2006’s Baltimore Waterfront Festival. (We’d like to see how she’d handle one of Jim Cupp’s crab cakes.)

Writer’s Best Friend
When Sophie Kerr bequeathed $500,000 to Washington College upon her death in 1965, it stunned college officials, and the literary prize that was established in her name is still stunning students who win it. In 2010 Hailey Reissman won the award—this year $64,243—the largest undergraduate literature prize in the country.

Among Friends
William Penn himself reportedly worshipped in Easton’s Third Haven Meeting House, the oldest Quaker meeting house in the United States. Construction of the building began in 1682 and its first meeting was held two years later. Among its builders was William Southeby, said to be the first native American to write against slavery.

A Real Naval Hero
At the 2006 groundbreaking for the Naval Academy field house which would bear his name, Wesley Brown, the Naval Academy’s first African-American graduate, told the crowd: “Somebody asked me once, did I ever think of quitting? I said, ‘Yes. Every day.’” Good thing he didn’t. Brown, who was subjected to relentless barbs from bigoted midshipmen throughout his time in Annapolis, paved the way for future minorities when he graduated in 1949. More than 1,600 African Americans have graduated since Brown, who retired from the Navy as a lieutenant commander. Barriers take time to fall, however; it wasn’t until 1980 that the academy graduated its first female officer, Elizabeth Anne Belzer.

Fit to Print
Who says newspapers are dead? The Maryland Gazette’s presses have been running since 1727 (albeit, with several lengthy stop pages along the way), making it one of the nation’s oldest newspapers. The paper, based in Glen Burnie and owned by Capital Gazette Communications, publishes semiweekly.

Shoulda Thrown in the Towel
There have been many close Army-Navy football games in the series’ 110-year tradition, dating to 1890—and also a few blowouts. The most lopsided game was Navy’s 51-0 shellacking of Army in 1973. The most points ever scored by one team occurred in 2002 when the mids took the cadets to school, 58-12. Makes us think the tradition should be renamed the Navy-Army game.

Army-Navy, Part II
One of our favorite tidbits of Army-Navy game trivia occurred in 1893 when Navy midshipman Joseph Mason Reeves purportedly wore the first football helmet during a game. He had been advised by a naval doctor that another blow to his head could cause death or “instant insanity,” so the football standout commissioned a local shoemaker to fashion a leather helmet. Reeves, who went on to become a decorated admiral, had a warship and two airfields named in his memory, but, as yet, no athletic equipment.

Wooly Pets
If you’ve ever wondered where you can find the area’s largest alpaca farm (really, who hasn’t?), just look up Angel Forbes Simmons, owner of Villa de Alpacas Farm in Southern Maryland. Simmons cares for 90 animals on 46 acres in St. Mary’s County, breeding and selling them for anywhere between $2,000 and $25,000 for top females. “Alpacas don’t eat much; you can have five to seven of them on just one acre of good pasture, and they’re great around kids,” she says. And in these uncertain economic times, alpacas also qualify for favorable tax breaks. Yet another reason to raise a herd.

In the Swim
The thought of swimming 4.4 miles across the Chesapeake from Sandy Point State Park to Hemingway’s on the Eastern Shore makes us gasp for breath. But not James Kegley, who holds the record for best time during the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim. In 1990, Kegley, who was 32 at the time, completed the swim in a smooth 1 hour 24 minutes and 28 seconds. “No one has beat that record yet,” race coordinator Vicki Saxon informs us. “Several have come close, but no one has ever beat that time.” Kegley also holds the record for most wins with six, the last one coming in 2003.

Poisoned Waters
Although the degradation of the Chesapeake’s waters can be considered an ongoing environmental disaster, the single worst incident in Bay history was discovered in 1975 when a Hopewell, Va., chemical plant was found to have been dumping waste from Kepone production, an insecticide, into the James River. More than 70 workers at the plant were poisoned and the James River was closed to commercial fishing for half-a-dozen years. Even today, Kepone is still detected in the majority of white perch and striped bass samples taken from the James.

Tall Tales
More than eight years after its demise in 2002, we’re still mourning the loss of the majestic Wye Oak, the largest white oak in the nation. So which Maryland tree is today’s champ? The state is home to approximately 23 national champion trees, including a recently crowned 136-foot-tall, 310-year-old Eastern hemlock along Broad Creek in Harford County that has been found to be the largest example of its species in the country. What’s more, according to scientists, it’s still growing.
 
Ferrying Along
Two superlatives for Maryland ferries: In November of 1683 Talbot County authorized the establishment of a ferry service for “horses and men” over the Tred Avon River, thus creating the Oxford-Bellevue ferry. The line is known as the oldest privately operated ferry service in the country. A few dozen miles south, the Whitehaven ferry has been plying the short hop over the Wicomico River between Wicomico and Somerset counties since 1685, and lays claim as the oldest publically operated ferry in the nation. 

Making Rounds
Built in 1902 and installed on the Ocean City Boardwalk in 1912, Trimper’s carousel is the country’s oldest continuously operating carousel—meaning riders get to participate in history with every spin.

Record Collection
There’s a reason folks researching their genealogy head to Eastville, Va.’s courthouse. That building holds the oldest continuous court records in the nation, dating back to 1632. Every few years, members of GHOTES (Genealogy and History on the Eastern Shore of Virginia) convene in the area to talk about the area’s history, family lineage, and ancestry on the Bay. 

Serious Sail
It’s the oldest and longest sailing race on the Bay. The annual Governor’s Cup race from Annapolis, Maryland’s modern-day capital, to St. Mary’s City, the colonial capital, runs 70 miles and was started in 1974 after two St. Mary’s College students and a recent graduate proposed the idea. Now 150 boats participate in seven classes every August. There’s more fun after the race ends: The post-party celebration was ranked one of the top 10 post-race soirées in the sailing world.

Aw, Shucks
Talk about some fast hands. Every year at the St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival, would-be shucking champs step up to a plate of 24 oysters with a blunt knife and a glove and get busy. In 1989 it took Duke Landry of Louisiana just 2 minutes and 20 seconds to cleanly shuck the two dozen bivalves, a record for fastest shucking that still stands. Virginia’s Deborah Pratt, the women’s champ 10 times over, is just 11 seconds behind, a record she set in 1992.

Shining Light
It’s becoming standard for hotels to offer eco-friendly practices such as recycling and water conservation, but Annapolis’ Spring Hill Suites gets extra green credit for being the area’s first hotel to go solar. Last June, the hotel switched on 189 rooftop solar panels, which should reduce energy costs between 15 and 20 percent. We still wonder what happens to all those barely used little soaps and shampoo bottles… 

Old Salt
At 89 years young, Capt. Art Daniels of Deal Island is the Chesapeake’s oldest waterman. He still goes out daily for oysters in winter and crabs in summer on his skipjack, City of Crisfield, which he purchased in 1951. “I fell in love right away,” he says of her. He’s also competed in just about every Deal Island Skipjack Race since its inception in 1959. 

1. What do you enjoy about racing?
I just love to race. The boat kind of comes alive. She don’t say nothing, but she’ll talk when the wind gets in the sails. She’ll obey everything that you want her to do. Over the years, you’ll learn just how she’ll react to certain breezes

2. You two have been through a lot together.
We’ve been in a lot of storms, but I never get scared. Couldn’t afford to get scared! Not when I was captain. You just have to get [the boat and everyone on it] out of the way.

3. What do you like about being a waterman?
You’re free. You go out in the morning and you used to be able to work as long as you liked. When I was a boy, I’d go out at sunrise and come back at sunset. I was my own man. Whatever I put into it I would get out it. It’s good, clean work. 

4. How’s your health? I don’t take no medication.
I take three vitamins a day—C with rose hips, B complex, and an aspirin tablet. Since 1972 I haven’t had a cold. 

5. So you’re not slowing down at all?
Not that I know of. I think you get old when you start thinking old.
If you think you can do it, just go ahead and try it. That’s what I do and I never get tired.

Postcard Central
Mary L. Martin Postcards, in Perryville, Md., offers a peek at history to all who visit the world’s largest postcard shop. After 47 years in business, the store has accumulated several million cards.

1. Why postcards?
Postcards are so unique because they appeal to such a wide array of people. Every topic in the world is on a postcard—whether it’s your home town or your favorite dog or a sport that you play.

2. What is the most valuable postcard you’ve sold?
Most of the postcards that people purchase are relatively inexpensive. You can buy an authentic postcard of Annapolis from 100 years ago for only $10 or $15. But sometimes a specific event, such as relating to the Titanic, can be quite valuable. There are cards that have sold for thousands of dollars.

3. Do you often read the backs of the cards?
If I read all the backs of the cards, I’d be in huge trouble because they are so interesting that I would never get anything done. One of the first things I usually have to tell my employees is not to read the messages on the cards.

4. Do you have a favorite from the Chesapeake area?
Well, I have a huge Maryland collection. Some favorites from the Eastern Shore show people crabbing in Crisfield, and I have some really nice ones from Baltimore that show people bringing in the oysters. A lot of old Naval Academy cards are cool, too.

5. Do you send postcards when you vacation?
Yes, I always send cards, and I always buy them because they are better than the pictures that I take. ... Everyone knows that I don’t write e-mails. If I’m sending a message, it will be handwritten with a pretty picture on the front.—Alexis Blair

Kathy Phillips pulls her skiff close to the shores of South Point Spoils, a tree-covered island in Sinepuxent Bay. The sun has just begun peeking through the canopy of clouds. Egrets glide across the sky, searching for breakfast. As she sits back and watches waves lap, Phillips could be mistaken for a conventioneer from nearby Ocean City out for a day cruise, or a youngish retiree.

But she’s not. Kathy Phillips is the little lady who started the Big Chicken War.

In March, Phillips and her organization, the Assateague Coastal Trust, filed a federal lawsuit against Perdue Farms Inc. and one of the company’s growers, Alan and Kristin Hudson, who have an 80,000-bird poultry farm just outside Berlin, Md. They accuse the farm of violating the Clean Water Act by illegally discharging pollutants into state waters—in this case, a branch of the Pocomoke River. Joining Phillips in the lawsuit are the Waterkeeper Alliance, which Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded a decade ago. The University of Maryland’s Environmental Law Clinic also assisted in the case and will serve as co-counsel. As of press time, a court date had not yet been set.

Lawsuits over pollution are not new. Nor is it a revelation that poultry manure is a significant problem in the Chesapeake Bay’s waterways. Manure is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, the bay’s two biggest pollutants, and chickens are mostly raised on the Delmarva Peninsula. Yet, the chicken lawsuit has rocked both the genial Eastern Shore and the sharper-elbow world of Annapolis politics.

At stake is the question of who is accountable for all that chicken manure. The chicken companies tightly control every aspect of how their contractors raise the birds, but they do not control—nor do they want to—the chickens’ waste.

Jim Perdue, whose grandfather founded the company 93 years ago, called the lawsuit “one of the largest threats to the family farm in the last 50 years” and noted that lawsuits like this one probably wouldn’t happen in Delaware. His remarks re-ignited a perennial panic in Annapolis that he could leave the state and jeopardize hundreds of jobs in the heat of the recession. Shore legislators sponsored a bill intended to strip the law clinic of state funding, though it was later amended to just require a report on its activities. Even other environmentalists were conflicted, especially those living on the Shore. Couldn’t the riverkeepers have simply called the Maryland Department of the Environment or paid the Hudsons a visit?

Phillips says she’s tried contacting the agency numerous times over the past four years, and gotten nowhere. And, she notes, you can’t just saunter up to a chicken farm, which has strict rules about visitors and isn’t likely to welcome a riverkeeper anyway.

“These are laws,” she says. “Laws are supposed to be enforced. Permits are supposed to be monitored. And that’s what I am going to do. MDE shirks their responsibility. They haven’t done their job—and people wonder why the Chesapeake Bay is in the shape it’s in.”

Phillips didn’t set out to sue Purdue. Originally, she just wanted to surf.

Phillips and her husband, a teacher, lived outside of Washington, D.C., and used to come to Ocean City on the weekends to catch the waves. They moved to the beach permanently 30 years ago. While her husband got a teaching job, Phillips eventually landed as executive director for a regional surfing association.

In 2006, Phillips ran for Worcester County commissioner. She lost. But the movers and shakers liked what she had to say, and suggested she apply for the job of Assateague Coastkeeper. The position was only a few years old; the first coastkeeper had just left for the West Coast.

Phillips got the job. She learned on the fly, literally—a pilot flew her around the Shore to show her the area. During the flight, she saw the piles of chicken manure that many farmers kept uncovered, despite government funding to help them build sheds to keep it from washing into the bay. She saw how close the farms were to crucial waterways, kept notes, took pictures. Together with the Waterkeeper Alliance, which had already taken on hog farms in North Carolina for some of the same pollution problems, Phillips pressed for stricter regulations on chicken operations, which she argued were more analogous to factories than the typical family farm. The EPA eventually agreed. Now the states are undertaking a permitting process for concentrated animal feeding operations, though they have not yet finished.

But last fall, while on a flight with a Wall Street Journal reporter and the Waterkeeper’s director of advocacy, Scott Edwards, Phillips spotted “multiple piles” of manure on the Hudson farm. She also noticed a trench from one pile that led to a drainage ditch leading to the Franklin Branch of the Pocomoke River, which empties into the Bay. The next day, Phillips took water samples from the ditch. The numbers for E.coli and fecal coliform bacteria were off the charts. Assateague Coastkeeper and the Waterkeepers filed a notice of intent to sue. 

The farmers refused to let MDE test the pile, but they did move and cover it at the agency’s insistence, says MDE spokeswoman Dawn Stolzfus. Five weeks later, based on documentation from Ocean City, MDE concluded the pile was biosolids, or treated human waste, from an Ocean City treatment plant, which farmers often use as a fertilizer to supplement manure. The state also found extremely high levels of contamination in the water but concluded it came from area wildlife. Nonetheless, they fined the farm $4,000.

Stolzfus says the fact that inspectors got the farmers to move the pile and then levied the fine shows that MDE is enforcing the law. “That is doing our job,” she says. “We took action that was appropriate.”

The riverkeepers have never been satisfied with the assertion that the original pile was biosolids, since it specifically was never tested. Perdue, for its part, maintains each farmer is an independent contractor, and it has nothing to do with an individual farmer’s decision to obtain more fertilizer, so it should not be held liable. But regardless of what was in the pile, its condition was a violation of the Clean Water Act. For that, Edwards puts the blame squarely at the feet of Perdue.

“This is a very sophisticated industry that understands very well what nutrient levels do to the Chesapeake Bay,” he says. “Every single step of the way, the industry has resisted doing the right thing.”

Perdue Vice President Luis A. Luna disagrees. He won’t comment on the lawsuit or any specifics relating to the Hudsons—and the Hudsons’ attorneys didn’t return calls for comment. But Luna points to the company’s efforts to help the Chesapeake. Nine years ago, it set up Perdue AgriRecycle, a pelletizing plant in Delaware that takes excess manure farmers don’t want and turns it into a fertilizer additive, which is sold commercially. Perdue has invested $33 million in the plant, Luna says, and this past year was the first that the plant made more money than it lost.

For no cost, Perdue will come to a farm and transport its manure to the plant, which handles about 50,000 tons of manure a year—about a tenth of the total manure produced on the peninsula.

The reason more farmers don’t take Perdue up on its offer is because the manure has value. It’s free fertilizer.

“People do want the manure. This idea that there’s tons and tons of it that is just sitting on the road and not being used is false,” says Virgil Shockley, a Worcester County commissioner who raises chickens for Tyson and saves thousands of dollars every year spreading manure on his 325 acres of cropland. “At the end of the day, manure can be recycled, and the best way is to put it back into the ground and grow a plant.”

The problem is there’s simply too much manure on the peninsula, where the amount of farmland has shrunk but the number of birds has increased. Besides, much of the soil has so much phosphorus in it already that scientists worry it can’t take much more.

Even Phillips would agree that many chicken farms are like Shockley’s—responsible stewards who follow best management practices. They keep pads on the ground to absorb any excess manure, a grass buffer between the houses to absorb pollution, and swales to direct storm water to retention ponds. And, they keep their manure in their sheds. In order to even acquire chickens from a major company, farmers are now required to have a nutrient management plan and manure and composting sheds. And they are subject to random state and federal inspections.

The devil is in the details of how each farmer manages beyond these requirements. Shockley says the farmers are trying to do the right thing—if they could only figure out what that is. Between the changing state and federal requirements, Shockley says, farmers “quite frankly don’t know what the hell to do.”

Perdue is trying to help, Luna says. Working with the EPA, the company started the Clean Waters Environmental Initiative, which uses flock supervisors to make sure the farmers are being good environmental stewards. Those programs were part of the reason Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley gave Jim Perdue the prestigious International Leadership Award this year, much to the riverkeepers’ consternation. But Luna argues the riverkeepers are blaming the wrong people.

“If there’s any blame to be laid at the plight of Chesapeake Bay, I wouldn’t go to the farmers first,” Luna says. “It makes no sense to me, except that it’s a lot easier to blame a couple thousand farmers than it is to blame 20 million people.”

Judith Stribling doesn’t entirely disagree. A longtime environmentalist, Salisbury University biology professor, and one of the founders of Friends of the Nanticoke, she says Perdue has evolved over the years to become better environmental stewards. To get them the rest of the way, she says cooperation—not a lawsuit—is the answer.

“When the Waterkeepers filed their lawsuit, [farmers] said, ‘That’s what the environmentalists are trying to do. They want to shut us all down.’ The truth is, we have different approaches. I just am not in favor of demonizing people, especially when you’re working with people and negotiating,” she says. “These are our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues.”

Don’t tell that to Fred Kelly. In 1974, the silver-haired Severn riverkeeper was a young attorney working for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. While there, he heard that PEPCO, the power company, was planning to build a nuclear power plant at Douglas Point along the Potomac River—the very spot where more than half of the East Coast’s striped bass spawn. Kelly knew that the plant would trap thousands of stripers, endangering one of the Chesapeake’s last productive fisheries.

He filed a petition before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to block the issuance of the permit. But before the matter could go before the three-judge panel, CBF balked, not wanting to appear too radical. So Kelly quit CBF and took the case on himself, representing a small watershed association. He was up against PEPCO’s team of a half-dozen attorneys. He couldn’t even afford the daily court transcript.

But he won. And several years later, the state bought the property, to be forever protected. Kelly netted just $300, but he got so much more, he says. If he hadn’t filed suit, that power plant would stand today.

“True environmental protection only comes from lawsuits, where an impartial judge looks at the action being taken by the polluter and says, ‘You’re in violation of the law. You have to stop,’” Kelly says. “I can understand those groups that want voluntary compliance, but how bad does the Chesapeake Bay have to get before they decide it isn’t working?”

These days, his former employer is inclined to agree. Since 2005, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has filed more than a dozen legal actions, thanks to a $1.25 million grant from the Philadelphia-based Lenfest Foundation specifically for litigation. It has sued regulators, municipalities, and even Philip Morris. Recently, it settled a lawsuit with the EPA after the agency agreed to meet strict deadlines and limits on its cleanup plan. It also helped kill the King William Reservoir, which would have diverted water from the Mattaponi River to create a water supply for manufacturing in Newport News.

“If we didn’t sue, that reservoir would have been built,” says Jon Mueller, CBF’s vice president of litigation. “That’s some 400 acres of forested wetlands that would be underwater.”

CBF is not part of the riverkeeper suit, but staffers are watching it closely. Obviously, Mueller says, if a chicken farmer violates the Clean Water Act, he is responsible. But whether Perdue is also liable, he says, is “a very interesting question.”

If the chicken companies were forced to also be responsible for chicken waste, Phillips and Edwards say, they would use their vast resources to look for ways to make money by turning manure into energy, and the Shore would likely be the site of many more innovations like the AgriRecycle plant. If that happened, the companies might even pay the farmers for the waste while also taking responsibility for it.

Not only would that change the way chicken companies did business on the Shore, Edwards says, but it could also help the Bay. Manure wouldn’t be piled up anymore, or at least not for long. And farmers wouldn’t have to worry they were polluting one of the state’s most precious resources.

“If we win, that is a victory for every small family farmer on the Eastern Shore,” Edwards says. “I don’t think I’ll get any thank-you notes from them, but that’s the reality.”

Contributor Rona Kobell also writes for the Bay Journal.

When it comes to apple recipes, I often prefer the simplest: a slice of Granny Smith paired with a chunk of aged cheddar. The Granny Smith’s tartness holds up wonderfully to the strong cheddar cheese, making for a perfect match. That said, apples are surprisingly versatile and sometimes I do like to get a little more creative with them.

The following recipes bump apples into the gourmet end of the spectrum. A fun presentation on an old favorite is the Waldorf salad nest that combines all the traditional ingredients but modernizes the presentation with “eggs” made from walnuts with a blue cheese center. The Granny Smith aged cheddar custard tart plays on the yin and yang of slightly sweet and savory. Pork chops and apples is a classic, but I update it by sautéing the apples in brown butter and finishing them with fresh-picked thyme leaves. One of my all-time favorite desserts is poaching apples with dried cherries then baking them off in a ramekin lined with thin buttered bread, essentially making a charlotte. Pistachio anglaise and cherry compote complete the dish. Using these recipes, everyday apples, treated with a little finesse, can be elevated to something even more special than Granny Smiths and cheddar.

Waldorf Salad Nest with Walnuts
Apple and Aged Cheddar Tart
Poached Apple and Sour Cherry Charlotte with Pistachio Anglaise
Center Pork Loin Chop with Brown Butter and Thyme-Sauteed Apples

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s The BBQ Joint.

I had never met Wayne Gilchrest before our interview over breakfast at Chestertown’s Village Bakery. He showed up wearing a worn T-shirt and jeans—not the expected uniform of a politician, whom we so often see in button-down shirts and suits. He had invited me to go canoeing before breakfast, and it looked as if he already had. 

In between bites of his eggs over light, rye toast, and home fries, Gilchrest proceeded to regale me with stories of his days in Vietnam, his work at a chicken processing plant in Maine, and his enjoyment of working with kids and canoeing—two things he does an awful lot of these days.

He also reminisced about his decision to enter politics in 1987, when he was working as a high school teacher/part-time house painter in Kent County. “I was reading the Star Democrat while painting the post office in Kennedyville, and the paper said the Republicans couldn’t find somebody to run against [Democrat incumbent] Roy Dyson,” he recalled. “I thought, there has to be a voice in opposition.”

So the independent Gilchrest, who grew up in a Republican household, registered to run as a Republican mainly because it cost only $100, instead of $300 to compete as an independent.

He lost that election by just 460 votes but decisively beat Dyson in a rematch in 1990.

The political landscape is a lot different than when Gilchrest was first elected. There are far fewer moderates, of course. And “partisanship with congeniality,” as he said, has been replaced by “partisanship with bitterness.” Losing the 2008 Republican primary, he said, was a big relief. By then, “the job was just alien to every fiber in my being,” he told me.

Gilchrest was never one afraid to speak his mind and, now that he’s been out of Washington for a few years, he doesn’t hold back. He takes full swings—particularly at his own party—and disses the opposition as well. He may be relatively at ease these days, but the Gulf oil spill, dogmatic politicians beholden to special interests, and the ongoing degradation of the Bay continue to gnaw at him. As we ate, I recalled thinking that it may have been the first time I had ever heard a politician—one of them—sound like one of us.

Not all of you will agree with our choice to put Mr. Gilchrest on the cover during this election season but, like him or not, he remains a unique character of the Chesapeake who happened to have won quite a few elections.

Again, that was a different time—a time when an underfunded teacher/part-time house painter could read a newspaper article, lay down his hundred bucks, and volunteer to help run the country.
 
Until next issue,

Joe Sugarman
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A woman who lives a few hundred yards across the road has a good view of the house my wife, Jane, and I built on Tilghman Island. She tells us that she monitored the construction closely. “I kept wondering when they’d put on the roof,” she says.

“They put in the windows and then the siding, and still no roof!” 

What she didn’t realize was that the house already had its roof—a flat one. Although flat roofs are not unheard of on Tilghman, ours, which is hidden by a parapet, draws the most comments from our curious neighbors. “What if there’s a heavy snow?” they ask.

Jane and I started planning this house when we were living in a 17-foot-wide, 1880s Italianate brownstone in Brooklyn, N.Y. We wanted something very different from that house, which had carved marble mantels, dark and narrow rooms, a lot of stairs, and ornate, hard-to-dust woodwork. We wanted something bright and modern—and we wanted to get out of New York.

I had spent the 1980s in Baltimore and visited the Eastern Shore a few times. I thought Jane would like it, too. I was right. It took only a few weekend visits before we found our Tilghman Island property, 6.19 acres on the east side of Black Walnut Cove. We bought the land in 2002 and started dreaming.

Mark Beck, of Beck, Powell & Parsons of Towson, Md., took our ideas and designed a house with almost everything we wanted. By happy coincidence, he lived and worked in Royal Oak, Md., about a half-hour from our property. We had sold the brownstone in 2005 and by August of 2007, with the plans all done, we moved full time to Talbot County, renting a house while Frank E. Daffin Inc. of Easton built our home. In October 2008, we moved in.

People often ask if we had trouble adjusting from New York to Tilghman, and the answer is always “no.” We’ve found friendly neighbors on Tilghman and other new friends elsewhere on the Shore. “The people here are so nice,” Jane often says, and she means it. After a career as a newspaper editor in New York, I’m working here as a freelance writer and communications consultant. Jane, who was a vice president at a magazine publisher, is a financial adviser with a major firm.

The house—we think of it as “Chesapeake Modern”—is a relatively modest 2,400 square feet with three bedrooms and two baths. Daffin allowed us to keep costs down by buying things ourselves, like most of the flooring from Lumber Liquidators and closet and pantry components from IKEA. We were so pleased with Daffin’s work and cooperative attitude that when metal columns for the main living area were shipped with the company’s name painted on them, we didn’t allow the names to be removed. We think of the house as a signed work of art.

Within our budget, we’ve tried to be as green as possible: cement-based siding, tankless water heaters, concrete countertops, Marmoleum (an all-natural alternative to vinyl) and bamboo floors, rain barrels, and a geothermal heating and cooling system. The house can be opened to the breezes that are almost constant on Tilghman thanks to a total of nine 8-foot-tall sliding glass doors, other large casement windows, and sliding glass panels between the main living area and a screened-in porch.

One friend compared the house to a boat because we’re always aware of the outdoor environment, which is alive with tundra swans and geese in winter, ospreys and egrets in summer, and great blue herons, bald eagles, and various hawks all year, not to mention wild turkeys, foxes, and deer. Coral-colored rays shoot through the clerestory windows at dawn, starting most days with a rosy glow. At sunset, the opposite side of the cove becomes a dark silhouette of trees sandwiched between the lilac sky and the lilac water.

A bunch of Tilghman’s 940-or-so residents visited the house during its construction, many of them puzzled by a room with no door to the rest of the house (it’s for the geothermal pumps), and the 17 chains that hang from the roof (no, they won’t hold the house down during a hurricane, but are supposed to transport roof runoff from scuppers to the ground). Oh, and for the record, the flat roof easily handled the big blizzards of 2010.

People always ask us if we miss New York. Sure, we miss friends, relatives, and ethnic restaurants. The city itself? No, not when we have everything we want here on Tilghman Island.

Steve Bailey, a former editor for The New York Times, teaches at Salisbury University.

Crow Farmstay B&B
12441 Vansants Corner Road
Kennedyville, Md.
410-648-5687
http://www.crowfarmmd.com

Shaky Betty is beginning to slobber. About a pint of milk into her 6-pint breakfast, the 4-month-old calf has a white beard of foam forming on her chin. Somehow I avoid getting any milk on my jeans as the calf, who suffers from a disorder that makes her unsteady on her legs, slurps down the rest of the milk in less than two minutes. Good thing, too, because my host, Judy Crow, is waiting for me to help feed the farm’s chickens and cats before she needs to move on to other farm chores.

At Crow Farm, Kent County’s first farm/bed and breakfast, guests can spend the night at a 365-acre working farm, complete with approximately 70 head of Angus cattle, chickens, dogs, cats, and a newly planted vineyard. And, like me, those so inclined can even earn their breakfasts with a little honest early morning labor.

Innkeepers
Judy’s husband, Roy, grew up on this farm, which his parents took over in the late 1940s. Originally a dairy farmer, Roy, who’s also a Kent County commissioner and agribusiness insurance agent, transitioned to beef cattle in 2001. (Guests may purchase cuts of the grass-fed beef directly from the farm.) Judy, a former educator and administrator, who grew up on a Cecil County farm, says she’s always wanted to run a B&B. “You have to do more than custom farming—soybeans and corn—to sustain a family farm these days,” she says. “You have to have a way to get young people involved, too.” Her 27-year-old son, Brandon, serves as vineyard manager for the 3½ acres of barbera and vidal blanc grapes, which will hopefully be made into wine by Cassinelli Winery & Vineyards in nearby Church Hill.

Rooms
The credo at Crow Farm is “staying original” and that applies to the decor in the 1847 farmhouse. While the main building has been completely renovated, most furnishings are family heirlooms and antiques. The largest room, Pasture View, sports the original—and remarkably clean—1950s floral wallpaper, in addition to Victorian-era chairs, a family photo album, and a needlepoint commemorating Roy’s parents’ 1948 wedding. It’s homey and comfortable and a definite contrast to the modern and surprisingly stylish bathrooms, which were added during the recent renovation. 

Special touches/diversions
In addition to helping with farm chores, guests can explore several trails, toss a tennis ball with Babe, a yellow Lab, or swim in the B&B’s pool. The farm also hosts   special wine and food events year-round, including three farm-to-table dinners the first weekend of October. Restaurants and shops of Galena and Chestertown are a short drive away. Kids would appreciate the farm stay experience, but unfortunately, Crow Farm does not allow children under 10 due to safety concerns. (This is a working farm, after all.)

What’s for breakfast
Judy promises “good farm breakfasts” of fresh-laid eggs and smoked sausage or ham, but I admit to feeling a little uncomfortable when she brings a sample of the farm’s beef for breakfast, which I eat overlooking the herd. For proponents of the farm-to-table movement, this is about as close as it gets. In addition to my helping of Crow Farm beef, I chow down on cranberry bread pudding and fluffy blueberry pancakes, a specialty of Roy’s. 

Romance Factor
Let’s just say that despite sleeping with my windows open, I couldn’t smell the cows or hear the rooster crow—two pluses when it comes to setting the mood.

Cost $145 double occupancy.

You’ve got a spot on your shirt,” I say, pointing at my husband.

“Hey, I do, too,” says our friend on the other side of the table.

I look down at my blouse. Me, three.

Such are the hazards of sipping margaritas and dipping into salsa on the rooftop deck of The Latin Quarter on a balmy night. Yet the reward of a brilliant sunset boosted by some chips and a bowl of chunky guacamole makes breaking out the spot remover seem a minor inconvenience.

The newest restaurant in the Kapow Group’s portfolio (they also own Tsunami and Lemongrass), The Latin Quarter replaces the former Metropolitan with a Cali-Mex, made-from-scratch, concept: everything from infusions for cocktails to tortilla chips is made in-house. But while menu offerings are consistent throughout all three floors of dining, each dining space will add a distinctly different flavor to your meal.

Each floor boasts a bar, but the similarities end there. The rooftop is über-cool casual. Techno music wafts through the loudspeakers over built-in couches buried in pillows and tables shaded by umbrellas bearing Dos Equis logos. You half expect your server to address you as, “Dude.” (Thankfully, he doesn’t.) The middle- floor dining room is more formal, with deep red walls and intricately woven wicker chairs, while the snug bottom floor sports acid green walls and a smattering of tables and booths.

It’s likely those interior rooms will fill up when the weather turns cooler, but for now, the rooftop is the place to be, mainly because of the pleasing view rather than any spectacular food. While none of the dishes we tried were objectionable, nothing was markedly better or different from any number of Mexican restaurants in the area either.

As is so often the case, the best items at The Latin Quarter remain the simplest ones: a bowl of chunky guacamole flavored with roasted garlic; lightly battered fish tacos served open face with a tangle of slaw; a side of black beans zesty from a generous squirt of lime. Pancake-like papusas are another pleasure, especially stuffed with a thin layer of roasted pork.

Other dishes fall short of expectations. A Cuban salad tempts with a combination of fresh jicama, mango, and cucumber, but its pineapple-rum vinaigrette is oddly bland, and a burrito pairing ahi tuna with chorizo somehow fails to enhance either ingredient. Instead, they both get lost in the cheese and beans and guacamole that covers every surface of the plate. A little more sauce could have saved a braised pork torta from dryness, though the accompanying yucca fries are a welcome substitute for potatoes.

The Latin Quarter offers a full selection of Mexican beers and a handful of fresh cocktails, including a very nice margarita and mojito, served by folks who are as laid-back as the setting, but still attentive and kind. They honestly seem to want you to have a good time, and who, on any given day, couldn’t use that?

Mary K. Zajac writes extensively about food.

A conch call, like a tropical trumpet, surprises us as we walk toward the pier on Chincoteague Island. Then we spot Capt. Barry Frishman, in his floppy hat and sandals, sounding our welcome on a large conch shell.

Who could resist a greeting like that?

Frishman, who offers three different water tours a day—from two-hour sea life tours to half-day “coastal encounters” on Chincoteague Bay—is pure energy. His 25-foot pontoon boat, Divine Guidance, is a floating classroom and Frishman, 55, an exuberant professor teaching hands-on lessons in ecology and history. He caps off the evening with a champagne sunset cruise so entertaining that even locals, he says, sign on.

If you’re 2 or 92, chances are you’ll learn something new from this man with the soul of an artist, the skills of a master mechanic, and the zeal of a missionary. He’s made his living weaving tapestries, fixing toilets, cooking gourmet meals, and captaining tug- boats. In his spare time he travels the world, teaching villagers in remote places how to drill and maintain sources for safe drinking water.

“Glad to have you here, son,” he booms as we board. On Chincoteague, he says, everyone is “son,” not “cuz” or “man.” So we all become “son” for the morning, including two other passengers, Richard Cahall, a retired school band director, and his wife, Kathleen, an elementary school librarian. From Georgetown, Ohio, they’re vacationing along the Eastern Shore.

“No pressures, no stress—it’s that easy. You talk, I talk, we all tell stories,” Frishman says, outlining our tour. “Son, everyone’s part of the show.”

He cues the music—the theme to “Pirates of the Caribbean”—and we motor under the vintage Chincoteague spin bridge, a drawbridge soon to be replaced, Frishman tells us, by a new span off Route 175.

We sight a great egret, a smaller, snowy egret, and several cormorants. Frishman identifies a scalloper, a tall masted boat with long outriggers, and points out stacks of lobster pots used farther offshore.

He talks about Chincoteague’s annual pony penning and the 50,000 people it draws, the local businessmen who bought land to help the island develop a new park, the old barbershop converted into a library, and how Chincoteague is a genuine community, not merely small town.

If he sounds like a one-man chamber of commerce, blame Frishman’s hitch on the chamber board and his familiarity with most of the island’s 4,000 residents.

“Arsenio!” he hollers to a man on a passing tug, shouts “Rocky!” to a workman on the pier of the local Hampton Inn and “Ahoy, matey” to a few Virginia Marine Resources folks tooling by in an open boat.

Frishman came to Chincoteague from Manhattan 22 years ago with a friend for a few days. When the friend went home, Frishman stayed. “I couldn’t even pronounce the name of the place, but I fell in love with the island,” he says.

He also fell in love with and married a “teaguer”—Aleda, the granddaughter of a Chincoteague lighthouse keeper.

He worked for free on fishing boats to learn the trade. He labored on clammers, on crabbers, and in shucking houses on his way to becoming a tug- boat captain.

“I had to pay my dues, but the locals finally filled me in because they were afraid they’d have to come out at night to rescue me if they didn’t,” he says, killing the engine to ease us into a shallow cove spiked with oyster-covered rocks.

He plucks a cluster of oysters, swishes them through the water to rinse off the mud and, with a shucking knife, pops one open and hands it to me.

“I use smell, sound, taste—all the senses to show people what’s here,” Frishman says. “This ain’t no Disneyland ride, no cyber trip. This is the real deal.”

The delicately briny oyster slides down easily as Frishman explains the life cycle of the Chincoteague salt oyster—from the tiny spat that grow sticking to the rocks to the full-grown beauties like the one I just downed.

“It’s beautiful, feels so fresh out here, and, um, how is that oyster?” a skeptical Kathleen Cahall asks.

But we’re on the move again—more to see and learn.

Frishman explains the tides, and posing as the moon, demonstrates how they rise and fall. Then he unrolls a navigational chart for an impromptu geography lesson. “Chincoteague is a 7-mile island and water’s spread thin, lots of it but only 1 to 6 feet deep,” he says. “Our beaches are growing as sand washes down from the Jersey shore and other beaches north.”

Pulling into another cove, Frishman goes overboard again, feeling along the bottom with his toes for clams.

He pulls up handfuls of green and brown seaweed, edible, he says, and useful in cosmetics and salad dressings. In the glistening nest of seaweed we discover a few tiny brown marsh snails that poke out of their shells in the warmth of my palm.

“The boat is a stage and I’m the emcee,” says Frishman. “The stars are the fish, crabs, and clams.”

Maybe so, but on this exceedingly entertaining tour, it’s Capt. Barry who adds the color.

Captain Barry’s Back Bay Cruises

6262 Marlin St.
The Chincoteague Inn Restaurant
Chincoteague Island, Va. 
757-336-6508, http://www.captainbarry.net

Tours depart daily from spring through fall and range from $30 to $50 per person. Reservations required.

Phyllis Speidell writes from Hampton Roads, Va.

Five great summer trips:

1. New shops and restaurants at the beach
2. Funky Route 50
3. Nine palatial rental houses
4. A scenic winery tour—by kayak
5. Play waterman for a day

> Party Time
“People have been calling us ‘Starboard North,’” says Conch Island Key West Bar and Grill general manager John Wallden, referring to the classic Dewey Beach bar. Indeed, since its springtime opening, Conch Island has become party central in Rehoboth Beach, with its three full bars, a small stage for bands and a dance floor as crowded as any Dewey dive on Saturday night. On Sunday afternoons, the party spills out onto the avenue with more live music and an all-day happy hour.

Partiers need sustenance, of course, and Conch Island provides ample support via crab cakes, Cuban sandwiches and a raw bar featuring four kinds of oysters and three varieties of shrimp. You also can find conch in the form of fritters, in chowder and served tempura-style with orange horseradish marmalade. Party on! 207 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach, 302-226-9378

> Who Dat?
Speed by too quickly on Milton’s Route 16 and you might just miss Po’ Boys Creole & Fresh Catch, but this tiny eatery, decorated with Mardi Gras beads aplenty, is worth a stop. What’s more, the cozy mom-and-pop is the area’s only Cajun restaurant. “These days you have to do something different,” says Amy Stewart, who runs the restaurant with her chef/husband, Lee. “You have to corner the market or you won’t be around.”

Lee honed his Cajun culinary chops working in several restaurants on the Florida Panhandle and knows his way around a roux. Definitely try his blackened scallops with spinach and lemon-caper butter and the shrimp creole with grits. “I turn people who don’t like grits into people who love ’em,” he says. Route 16, Milton, 302-684-0890, http://www.poboyscreole.com

> Fill ’er up!
You won’t be able to miss the shockingly bright yellow exterior of Lewes’ JD’s Filling Station, former home to Blue Plate restaurant and, long before that, a filling station. The restaurant’s interior is just as flashy, painted in bright blues, reds and yellows and studded with old license plates, a gas pump, framed road maps and a couple of old automobile grills. Even the waitresses sport Goodyear service shirts.

The J and the D in the name are for Joe Zuber and Darryl Ciarlante, who also run Rehoboth’s Dos Locos. There’s a smattering of quesadillas and tacos on this menu, but the real draw is JD’s big breakfasts— six varieties of eggs Benedict, a dozen different omelettes and a heart-stopping Frosted Flakes-encrusted French toast stuffed with cream cheese and fruit. (Yeah, it tastes “Grrrreat.”) 

Lunch and dinner means fat burgers, wraps, po’ boys and fresh fish and steaks. The bar menu lists drinks with names like Anti-Freeze, Windshield Washer and Transmission Fluid, but we appreciate the plain ol’ cans of Natty Boh, which you can add to any sandwich order for just a buck. 329 Savannah Road, Lewes, 302-644-8400

> Simple Things
The inspiration for the menu at Betty’s Pure and Simple is “everything that owner Matt Haley grew up with,” says general manager Joseph Ralph of his boss, an Eastern Shore native. “[The ingredients] are everything you can buy at a roadside farmer’s stand.”

Haley, whose burgeoning restaurant empire also includes Fish On, Bluecoast and three other area restaurants, decided to concentrate on something completely different this time: upscale comfort food. Here, you’ll find fried chicken topped with ham gravy and served on a savory waffle doctored up with garlic and fresh herbs, and even a modern take on an old-fashioned tuna noodle casserole with Ritz cracker crumbles. Bright, graphic paintings of women from the “Mad Men” era brighten the muted beige interior. So who is Betty, anyway? “Everybody’s Betty,” says Ralph. “It’s just someone you knew as a kid or an aunt. But she was loved.” 18585 Coastal Highway, Rehoboth Beach, 302-645-6160, http://www.bettyspureandsimple.com

> Rolling Out a Sequel
It only took 39 years but Rehoboth Beach’s legendary Nicola Pizza has finally opened a second location. The much larger space on Rehoboth’s main drag is really two different Nicolas in one: Its first floor looks like a casual Italian restaurant with faux Tiffany lamps and handsome blond wood tables; upstairs is The Upper Deck, a sports-themed loft with— count ’em— 20 televisions mounted throughout. Both floors boast full bars and similar menus, which include the pizzas and signature Nic-o-bolis, rolled dough stuffed with ground beef, cheese and pizza sauce. 71 Rehoboth Ave., Rehoboth Beach, 302-226-2654, http://www.nicolapizza.com

> On the Half Shell
Even before it opened at the end of May, the locals were buzzing about Rehoboth Beach’s Henlopen City Oyster House. Owned by veteran restaurateurs Chris Bisahi and Joe Baker, the restaurant, located in the space formerly occupied by longtime favorite Celsius, promises six to eight varieties of oysters from around the country and a long list of fresh seafood on its menu. Done up in oyster-y grays and whites and featuring huge windows overlooking Wilmington Avenue, Henlopen City accommodates 85, with four seats reserved for hard-core bivalve lovers at the sprawling, ice-covered oyster bar. “People just love to sit and watch the oysters get shucked,” notes Bisahi, who plans to split the shucking duties with his partner. Fresh fish and local produce dominates the rest of the menu. “We’ll probably try some different stuff, too, like skate and cockles,” says Bisahi. Wines from small, boutique wineries and eight craft beers on tap help diners quench their thirsts. 50 Wilmington Ave., Rehoboth Beach, 302-260-9193, http://www.hcoysterhouse.com

> Mixx it Up
Here’s one unique way to be immortalized: Suggest a martini recipe at Mixx and you might just get the concoction named after you. So far, the menu includes the Rachel (pear vodka, mango puree, triple sec) and the Alice (vodka, sour apple, triple sec, splash of pineapple) and 23 others. Martini flights also are available for those who can’t decide between, say, the Joey or the Chase. 

Most items on the menu of “upscale American fusion” cuisine can be had in large or small plate versions, and “there’s something for everyone’s palate,” says co-owner Ginger Breneman. Indeed, diners can choose from lobster and shrimp curry to a short rib burger with mushrooms and sautéed onions served with truffle oil fries. Come on a Wednesday and all burgers are 50 percent off. Keyboard virtuoso Matthew Kenworthy brightens up the basement space on weekend nights with his repertoire of show tunes to rock ’n’ roll. 26 Baltimore Ave., Rehoboth Beach, 302-226-8700

> Spahr-ing Partner
We’ve always liked the original clothing designs of Rehoboth Beach’s Scott Spahr. His colorful hand-stitched shirts and shorts for men and women feature the perfect patterns for summer. (And where else can you get a truly unique handmade shirt for around 75 bucks?) This season, Spahr has relocated to a bright, cheery space along Baltimore Avenue that better shows off his work. New this summer are graphic tees embroidered with funky patterns or Japanese characters and must-have women’s belts in pinks and greens. There’s also locally made jewelry by Susie Terry. 43 Baltimore Ave., Rehoboth Beach, 302-226-3804, http://www.scottspahr.com

> Dressing Up
Lewes’ Aquamarine may have occupied a basement space on Market Street, but that didn’t stop local fashionistas from finding it. The women’s boutique has grown quite a following since it opened four years ago. Now passers-by on busy 2nd Street can discover the relocated store’s funky mix of women’s fashions from strappy dresses to shoes to locally made jewelry, too. “I’ve got clothes in here for the super preppy to bohemian arty-types,” says owner Maureen Botti of her expanded offerings, “and you’ll never run into someone else wearing the same thing. I’m trying to bring the big city back to Lewes.”

Now known as Aquamarine at 114, the shop stocks designs by Cut Loose, Finley, Trina Turk and Yuvita, among many others. So what’s the must-have item for summer? “The perfect white blouse or that sundress you can wear out for cocktails or to the grocery store,” says Botti. “I love versatile beach wear.” 114 2nd St., Lewes, 302-644-4550

On the tee box of the 16th, I mutter something unprintable. Before me is a golf hole requiring the kind of precision I normally reserve for threading a needle. Peril lurks everywhere. Water is along the right and the fairway has more intimidating interruptions—massive marshlands, nerve-racking bunkers, menacing trees—than I care to count. While I love golf courses that make me think, right now I feel like a Ph.D. in this sport would come in handy.

My husband, Terry, and I are winding (battling?) our way around War Admiral, a state-of-the-art course at GlenRiddle Golf Club in Berlin, Md. It is part of a snazzy development of homes and townhomes that includes a stunning Ruth’s Chris Steak House and two championship golf courses—the private, parkland-style War Admiral and a daily-fee links course, Man O’ War. The courses are owned and developed by Thomas Ruark, owner of several award-winning courses in Ocean City including Rum Pointe, ranked one of Maryland’s top five by Golf Week magazine and The Links at Lighthouse Sound, often referred to as “The Pebble Beach of the East.”

GlenRiddle is as historic as it is beautiful. Built on what was once Riddle Farm, the famous horse farm that bred and raised two of the most famous thoroughbred racehorses in the world—“Horse of the Century” Man O’War and his son War Admiral—the land is so gorgeous that it is hard for me to concentrate on my game. At least that’s my excuse. Mature woods, sharp doglegs, narrow fairways, and plenty of wind complicate my every shot. Greens are tricky, too. I often feel like I’m putt-ing on top of one massive inverted bowl. From the extremely long first hole to the spine-tingling approach shot across water on the 18th, this course is filled with drama. And deceptions. Many shots look easier than they are because we think we can carry the preservation areas to safety but instead our balls wind up in the hazard.

Transforming a historic horse farm into two modern golf courses with two distinct personalities was the job of course architect Joel Weiman of McDonald Design Group in Jessup, Md., who consulted with U.S. Open champion Jim Furyk. “We wanted War Admiral to look more traditional and older, so we sculpted earth in a way that made the features appear to be excavated into the surrounding terrain, similar to how courses were created 80 years ago by the game’s greatest golf course designers,” says Weiman.

During course development, Furyk was on-site several times. Weiman says Furyk’s objective was to design a course that would challenge him and still be a course his mother would enjoy playing. Considering the difficult time I’m having, his mother must be a pretty good golfer. “You need strategy to get around this course,” adds Weiman. “If you get a little lazy and complacent, it will grab you and you’ll have a big number. You have to concentrate.”

The original stable where the famous horses were kept has been transformed into a sophisticated clubhouse and Ruth’s Chris restaurant. The main dining room is actually a series of several intimate rooms, each one with the feel of a classy, private club thanks to dark woods, earth-toned fabrics, leather chairs, mustard-colored walls, and dim lighting. Handsome paintings commissioned by a local artist that depict the famous racehorses and scenes from the farm as it would have looked during its heyday are dotted about.

The loft above the dining room—ideal for a private party—uses the stable’s original beam and timber framework. All stall doors and hardware were preserved. Some are placed in a “stable wall,” depicting the look of the original stable, and others are used as tabletops in the bar where large murals of farm life embellish the walls. The menu is hearty Ruth’s Chris fare—steaks, chops, and seafood.

After dinner we gravitate to the museum-like hallway filled with fascinating memorabilia that not only reflects equestrian history but is a snapshot of American life in the ’30s and ’40s. Photos of Man O’ War at various stages along with articles from the famous Seabiscuit/War Admiral match held at Pimlico Race Course in 1938 are everywhere. 

After a perfect day of great golf and a fine meal, we spend the night at the very Victorian, very charming Atlantic Hotel, a five-minute drive from GlenRiddle.

Count us among those who don’t expect to find extraordinary golf so close to our Annapolis home. We enjoy traveling the country to test our mettle on famous courses—Bandon Dunes in Oregon, The Blue Monster in Miami and Pebble Beach in California are notches on our drivers. We never thought our evening would be spent comparing a course in Berlin, Md., to our famous favorites, but we are doing just that as we turn out the lights. “Didn’t the 16th remind you of the ocean course at Kiawah?” Terry asks.

And such is the pillow talk of golf lovers.

PLAY
GlenRiddle Golf Club
11501 Maid at Arms Way, Berlin, Md.
410-213-2325, http://www.glenriddlegolf.com

STAY
The Atlantic Hotel
2 N. Main St., Berlin, Md.
410-641-3589, http://www.atlantichotel.com

Mary Ann Treger blogs ‘The Annapolis Insider’ on http://www.chesapeakelifemag.com.

It’s still dark at 5:45 a.m. as George Pigge, walking with a cane, makes his way up a sloping sidewalk and up a flight of steps to the drawbridge tender’s house at Knapps Narrows. At the top of the stairs, he throws open the door and shouts “Wake up!” at Jim Rhine, whose 6 p.m.-to-6 a.m. shift is ending. Rhine, who was wide awake, gets out of a lounge chair and starts collecting his things. The movie “Erin Brockovich” is on satellite TV.

It had been a “pretty quiet” night, Rhine says, meaning he didn’t have to raise the bridge very many times. In a minute or two, he’s heading up Route 33 to his home in Claiborne. Pigge puts down the books and containers of food that will keep him going for his 12-hour shift and surveys the room from which the drawbridge, the busiest in the country, is operated. In 2009, it was raised 10,276 times, nearly double the number of No. 2, Seattle’s Freemont Bridge. When the moveable span is down, the bridge is a 71-foot-8-inch link between Tilghman Island and the southern tip of the Bay Hundred Peninsula in Talbot County. When it’s up, there’s a navigable channel about 42 feet wide for sailboats and other craft.

The room is about 200 square feet. Its windows on three walls overlook the road, the bridge, and both east and west on Knapps Narrows. The bridge control panel, full of buttons, switches and lights, is beneath the north-facing windows. There are a large television, a microwave, a toaster oven, two coffeemakers, a sofa, a table, a reclining lounge chair, and a couple of other chairs. It feels like a really, really nice treehouse.  Unlike the tender’s house at the Miles River Bridge on Unionville Road, this one has an indoor toilet. All this and $8.81 an hour, too.

“I enjoy the job here, I really do,” Pigge says, “but you couldn’t live off it unless you were retired.”

Pigge, 69, was a dispatcher for a large construction company in Northern Virginia before he retired and moved to Hurlock on the Eastern Shore. He began his bridge-tending career on April Fools’ Day 2008, at the Miles River Bridge. Since September 2009, he has been commuting 38 miles each way on the two or three days he works at Knapps Narrows every week.

At 6:28 a.m., a voice on the radio asks for a lift. Pigge first presses a button that changes the bridge’s traffic lights to red and sets off clanging bells. Another button lowers the wooden gates, and another lowers the metal barrier on the side where the gap will be when the bridge is up. A fourth button raises the bridge itself. The boat, High Hopes II, makes its way through, going toward the Bay.

The eastern sky starts brightening, but on this overcast day there is no brilliant sunrise over the broad waters where Harris Creek meets the Choptank River. Pigge settles into the lounge chair, rising with each boat that wants the bridge raised. The Terrapin, which carries workers as well as the visiting public between the Poplar Island restoration project and the project’s land base on Tilghman, goes out and back a couple of times during the morning and may very well spur more lifts than any other single boat.

By 11:15 a.m., the TV has changed to the Fox News Channel—“Thank God for television and air conditioning,” Pigge says of the job—and the bridge already has been raised 18 times, but only once for a sailboat.“We have some weather coming in,” Pigge says. A day with fewer dark clouds would see more sailboats. “Rag haulers, I call them.”

The bridge tender keeps a log of all the boats that ask for a lift as well as the direction each is traveling. The tender also has to keep a count of the cars that wait on each side every time the bridge is up. “It’s not a lot of work,” says Carole V. Wood, the lone woman working at the Tilghman bridge. “I saw the job advertised in the Star Democrat and told my husband,” she says. “He got the job and came home and says, ‘It’s so easy, you can do it,’ so after a few months I applied.”

She did work two days a week, but lately she works only one. Her husband, Sam, a former vice president of a bank in New York, works three overnight shifts.

The job may be simple and low paying, but it holds an attraction for the half-dozen retirees who cover the 14 shifts each week. “We don’t live on the water,” she says, “so we get our water views here. I really enjoy it in the winter.”

“It’s home,” says her husband, Sam, “a great waterfront location. I’ve gotten to know many of the boaters in terms of recognizing the boat names or their voices.”

Sam points out that a big diesel generator, which is beneath the tender’s house and keeps the bridge operating during power failures, means that “it’s sometimes the only place you can watch TV.”

“What’s your clearance?” a boater asks at 11:33 a.m., his voice loud over the radio. “Looks like 11 foot,” Pigge replies after looking across the Narrows to the gauge on the other side.

“Don’t think I can make it,” the boater comes back. “Can I have an opening, please?” The boat, a sport fishing boat from Leesburg, Va., called We Did It Again, passes through toward the Choptank.

“I’m a 40-foot sailboat westbound, approaching the Narrows,” another boater radios. It’s a Hinckley with a blue hull. “Pretty,” Pigge says. 

Clouds on the western horizon are getting darker and the wind is picking up, but the boats still come. The trawler Kismet from Kent Island also goes through toward the Chesapeake.

During a quiet spell, Pigge turns away from the TV to tell a story. “All the monkeys ain’t in the zoo,” he says.  “One day I was closing the bridge, had it almost down, and a dirt biker from the north ran the gate and—the bridge was still up about a foot—jumped it, somehow got the bike up and over the barricade and then slid it under the gate, all without getting off the bike. He was gone down the island. As soon as the gates were up, a state trooper raced through, trying to catch him. He hid somewhere,” Pigge says. “Everybody down here knew who it was.”

Pigge’s second story is simpler: “Had one boat coming through; had a guy and three girls. They stopped near the bridge and waved. I waved back and the girls all raised their tops. I waved back again. What could I do?”

The bridge—called a bascule bridge, meaning that a counterweight is used to balance the weight of the bridge itself—opened in 1998 and replaced a smaller and lower 1934 bascule bridge that was just to the west of the current one. That earlier bridge, which now marks the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, had replaced a different type of operable bridge. One bridge or another has spanned Knapps Narrows since the 1840s.

The current bridge is one of 18 state-maintained drawbridges in Maryland; all are operated by contractors hired by the state. The three bridges in Talbot County—Tilghman, the Miles River Bridge, and the Dover Road Bridge over the Choptank that connects Talbot and Caroline Counties— are all operated by M and R Manage-ment in Kennedyville. Mike Lesniowski, a co-owner of M and R, says that when the company recently advertised an opening for a bridge tender, applications were sent out to only the first 50 of more than 100 callers.

Glenn Beck is on TV, but Pigge isn’t paying much attention as his day winds down. He says that 40 lifts and 58 boats make it a fairly active day, especially considering the wet weather. In fact, it’s coming down pretty hard when Sam Wood, wearing a rain poncho, shows up at 5:45 p.m. for his overnight shift.  Pigge gathers his stuff, which doesn’t include an umbrella, and is preparing to leave when Wood offers him his rain poncho. The loan won’t be for long; Pigge will bring it back in 12 hours when Wood ends his shift and Pigge starts another.

Steve Bailey, a former editor with The New York Times, lives on Tilghman Island.

He came to Washington with a canoe, looking for a lake. What he found instead was the Chesapeake Bay.

During the next 25 years, J. Charles “Chuck” Fox would upgrade to a kayak, and eventually a sailboat. And the Bay would become not just his playground but his career focus.

As the Chicago native moved from small nonprofits to big head-of-agency jobs, Fox never took his eyes off the Bay. How could a waterway that practically flowed past the federal government’s doorstep be allowed to suffer? Why, despite billions of dollars, significant laws and the best of intentions, was the Bay still struggling?

Fox has been in a good position to answer these questions over the years: as a high-level staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, an administrator with the Maryland Department of the Environment, and secretary of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

But he has never had a more influential perch than the one he has now. Last May, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson selected Fox to become her senior adviser on the Chesapeake Bay and the Anacostia River. Jackson created the position, Fox said, because she wanted greater accountability in the effort to clean up the Bay.

Fox’s promotion came on the heels of President Obama’s executive order, which declared the Bay a national treasure and assigned the federal government with devising a plan to clean it up. Fox along with representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are devising the cleanup strategy.

Fox works out of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, the multi-agency effort based in Annapolis charged with implementing the past Bay agreements. He sat down in December to talk with Chesapeake Life about what’s different this time around.

Q: You came here in 1984, just as the first Chesapeake Bay cleanup agreement was signed. Did you ever think that 25 years later we would still be talking about cleaning up the Bay?

A: I remember in 1984 working on the Hughes Laws. [Named for Gov. Harry Hughes, it included Maryland’s landmark Critical Areas legislation and the phosphate ban.] It was a very huge deal. All of us, at the time, really thought it would greatly improve the quality of the Chesapeake Bay. There was this sense of ego; you were working on these big important things to save the Bay, and it was going to work! But we didn’t appreciate at the time how complicated the Chesapeake Bay was. We’ve come to learn that the Chesapeake is a bay, not an aquarium.

Q: If you had to point to one thing that has slowed or stopped the Chesapeake’s cleanup, what would it be?

A: First and foremost, the accountability to pollution control in our watershed. Our progress in controlling pollution has been woefully inadequate. There has always been regulation. It is a little bit of a misnomer that the Bay Program has been a voluntary program. The cleanup agreements were voluntary agreements, but the Clean Water Act has been around since 1972. The challenge today is using a lot of the science that we know and the voluntary spirit we had in the past and moving forward in a much more accountable way.

Q: One of your major initiatives is dealing with climate change, which is a big national issue but not one we hear a lot about when it comes to the Chesapeake. Why is that now a priority?

A: Imagine you spend all this time restoring wetlands, only to find them submerged. Climate change affects storms, the dead zone, the kinds of algae we have, the crabs. We really came to the conclusion that, as a federal family, we needed to assume a leadership role to adapt to the reality of climate change.

Q: We’ve had 25 years of agreements and promises to clean up the Bay. How is the Obama Executive Order different?

A: We’re seeing ideas and actions by the federal government that we haven’t seen—ever. EPA is trying to improve pollution control programs. NOAA is dealing with climate change. Fish and Wildlife is expanding land conservation programs like never before.

Q: A year ago, there was a debate about whether or not the Bay needed a regulatory limit placed on the pollution that a river or stream could accept (known as Total Maximum Daily Load or TMDL). Now that the TMDL is coming, how do you think it will change Bay cleanup?

A: The TMDL is the primary means of increasing accountability, increasing specificity. It is how we will achieve progress. The power of the TMDL is that it will quantify limits for all point sources of pollution, from urban stormwater to concentrated animal feeding operations. Now, we have to make sure that this TMDL yields a different result for the future than the agreements of the past.

Rona Kobell, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, is now a staff writer for the Bay Journal.

I love amusement parks. I don’t like amusement rides. Never did. I just don’t see the point of purposely making myself nauseated or dizzy. I don’t enjoy the sensation of my stomach migrating north. I prefer it where it is, thank you very much.

But I do love the colors, the smells, the excitement of amusement parks and county fairs. I can spend hours wandering the midway, eating funnel cake and futilely tossing darts at balloons. When I do go on a ride, it’s usually the bumper cars or merry-go-round. I can also stomach the kiddie rides. Most of them.

All this leads me to our article by Mary K. Zajac about historic amusement parks on the Chesapeake Bay. Now these were the kinds of parks I could appreciate! They were civilized resorts with grand hotels, dance halls, roller skating rinks, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. They had live alligators at Mago Vista in Anne Arundel County. At Tolchester Beach, ladies could have afternoon tea—in the carpeted carcass of a whale! If you got hot, you went for a swim in the Bay. Who needs
a nauseating log flume? 

Traveling to a park on the Eastern Shore was an adventure in itself. Forget about dealing with traffic—you took a steamer across the Bay. To reach Chesapeake Beach in Calvert County, you boarded a special train. How cool is that?

Oh, sure, they had rides: Ferris wheels, beautiful merry-go-rounds, rickety wooden roller coasters. (The one at Mago Vista even traveled 120 feet over the Magothy River.) There were “thrill” rides with names like The Whip or Racer Dip, miniature steam trains, and carts led by ponies or goats.

Tens of thousands visited these parks every summer weekend, which makes it so incredible that virtually nothing remains of any of them. Throughout the years, all were done in by a host of misfortunes from the construction of the Bay Bridge and failure of the steamship lines to natural or man-made disasters to the rise of Ocean City. You’d think at least one bayside amusement park could make a comeback today. Doesn’t anybody appreciate a good ride on goat-drawn cart anymore?

You’ll notice the water theme runs throughout this issue. From bayside amusements, we travel to Calvert County’s beautiful waterside nature parks to a lighthouse tour with Tilghman Island boat captain Mike Richards. In “Ups & Downs” writer Steve Bailey shadows a tender at Knapps Narrows, home of the busiest drawbridge in the United States. Who knew? 

I hope you enjoy this issue. And if I see you at an amusement park this summer, I’ll be happy to join you on the bumper cars.

Until September,
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Inn at Huntingfield Creek
4928 Eastern Neck Road
Rock Hall, Md.
410-639-7779
http://www.huntingfield.com

When Joanne Rich was in third grade, her teacher showed the class a geode. Rich was amazed that such an ordinary-looking rock could contain such surprising sparkle within. Years later, she uses the geode analogy to describe the design philosophy behind her inn. “I like the idea of using the element of surprise, the idea of revealing something within you might not otherwise expect,” says Rich, who runs the property with her husband, Jim.

Rich isn’t kidding. She has populated her inn with serendipitous “little environments,” as she calls them—lush vegetable and flower gardens, a wooded trail that leads to a scenic inlet, and a peaceful pond whose shoreline has seen its share of weddings.

Personally, I love the “birdhouse tree,” a collection of 20 birdhouses mounted onto an old tree stump, but my favorite “little environment” may be our accommodation itself—a contemporary cottage that, like a geode, is somewhat ordinary on the outside but positively radiant within. Even more surprising is that at this B&B, my wife and I are able to bring along our 3-year-old toddler and 6-month-old infant—a nicety since we didn’t have to bother with a babysitter. But still, we’re at a romantic B&B with, um, kids.

Innkeepers
Jim, an executive with Mobil Oil for 23 years, and Joanne, a caterer, had stayed in their share of inns before purchasing Huntingfield Creek and its 70 rural acres in 2004. They knew what sort of laid-back accommodation they wanted for their peace-seeking guests. “We see an awful lot of crabby people arriving on Friday,” says Joanne. “Our way of dealing with that is to give them a glass of wine and point them toward the sunset [over the inlet]. By Monday, they’re completely different people.” 

Rooms
The telescoping main house, which was rebuilt in 2003 after a fire, contains four guest rooms done up in antiques and contemporary furniture, refreshingly bereft of clutter. My recommendation, however, is to book one of the four private cottages. Our three-room Zen Cottage sports a clean, West Elm look, with a kitchenette, gas fireplace, and whirlpool tub—a favorite of the 3-year-old. “Why don’t we have bath gels at home, Daddy?” she asks repeatedly.

Diversions
The inn is located about two miles from downtown Rock Hall, but there’s plenty to do on-site. We spend our day swimming in the saltwater pool (no chlorine!), sampling blackberries from the garden, and lounging on a hammock. Java, the inn’s energetic chocolate lab, accompanies us on the short walk past the soybean and sunflower fields through the woods to Huntingfield Inlet, where two Adirondack chairs await at the end of a wooden dock. The view of the inlet and Chesapeake beyond is both peaceful and stunningly beautiful, and we could have sat there for hours. But not with a toddler and an infant.

What’s for breakfast
Breakfasts, served in the main dining room at a 12-seat, glass-topped table, “are always a big deal,” Jim tells us, and indeed, we are not disappointed in Joanne’s cheesy scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, and an unusual peach cobbler, made with basil, lemon, and almonds.

Romance Factor
A private cottage with a whirlpool tub and fireplace is just the thing to spark a little romance. Note to self: Next time, just get a babysitter.

Cost
$175 to $279 per night.

The last time I boarded a boat, it was a windy summer day. It was a sailboat, and I was joining its crew for what was to be a spectacular race from the Severn River to the Bay Bridge.

But a few minutes in, the waves looked ominous. A weather advisory crackled over the radio. I reached for my Dramamine. Just trust me when I say things did not end well.

So, when the opportunity arose to spend 10 hours touring 10 historic lighthouses deep in the Chesapeake Bay, I was torn. On the one hand, these beautiful beacons are in the midst of a major restoration project, and the only way to see them is from a boat. On the other hand, some experiences don’t need to be repeated.

But Capt. Mike Richards set me at ease. A former naval officer and proprietor of Tilghman Island’s Lazyjack Inn, the 71-year-old has sailed the Chesapeake for three decades. The M/V Sharps Island, a 36-foot former naval vessel, is the same kind of boat used in both the Somali pirate and U.S.S. Cole rescue efforts. And though he concedes that the journey can get a bit rough—“they don’t put lighthouses in safe places,” he deadpans—he thinks the worst that will happen is that we’ll get a bit wet.

As we set out from Knapps Narrows at 8:30 a.m., I study the 11 other passengers’ faces for a fellow traveler, so to speak. Not in this crowd.  Most of them are members of the IMF/World Bank’s photography club, which means they travel the world taking pictures when they’re not traveling the world trying to straighten out the economies of war-torn nations. Another passenger, John Anderson, had his leg amputated a few years ago and swung onto the boat with the help of his wife and his crutches. Then there’s Keith Edwards, a semi-professional photographer who has visited lighthouses all over the world. Lighthouse people, Richards explains, are not fair-weather fans. In seven years, he’s canceled only one tour, and that was because of a tropical storm.

Our first stop is the boat’s namesake, the Sharps Island Light—the Bay’s very own Leaning Tower. Since 1976, when an ice storm battered its crimson caisson, the solar-powered light has listed, resembling a giant buoy. It’s one of the few lights on the tour that is no longer used for navigation, according to Richards’ daughter, Kate, the vessel’s first mate, guide and Jill-of-all-trades.

The Coast Guard once owned and maintained all of the nation’s lighthouses, but after Sept. 11, when the agency’s mission shifted to homeland security, it had neither the funds nor the inclination to keep up these weather-beaten structures. So it began selling them. Most of the lighthouses on Richards’ tour are privately owned, though Coast Guard officers can stop by any time. Sharps Island, bought just a year ago, hasn’t gotten its facelift yet.

But the next one, Thomas Point, is ready for its close-up. Restored a few years ago through a partnership with the city of Annapolis, the Annapolis Maritime Museum, and the local chapter of the U.S. Lighthouse Society, the Bay’s most photographed symbol pops against the blue sky and lapping waves. As Kate tells the group that Thomas Point is the only screwpile light left in its original location, the World Bankers attach their telephoto lenses and focus. I zoom in with my Canon PowerShot and hope for the best.

We glide under the Bay Bridge. On the bow, I get soaked. It feels good, but I soon realize my fleece is around my waist. There go my dry clothes. Fortunately, Capt. Mike lends me his “foul-weather gear,” a comfy orange parka.

We head for the Baltimore Light, near the Magothy’s mouth (nearly all the lights sit where the Bay meets its rivers). The aptly named tower resembles a Federal Hill rowhouse, with its wrought-iron accents and painted brick. (Formstone would have been a nice touch, but probably couldn’t withstand the elements.) Kate tells us four families bought the light; most summer weekends, somebody is out there working on the restoration project.

After lunch at Tolchester Marina, we head north to the Pooles Island Light, Maryland’s oldest lighthouse that is still standing. At 38 feet, this one is not the grandest, but, Kate says, its beauty is in its simplicity: just a whitewashed cone tower made with Port Deposit granite and topped with a cupcake-like cupola. Oh, and it plays hard to get, as it is surrounded by unexploded bombs and stands completely inaccessible to the public as part of the Aberdeen Proving Ground complex. Though some of the privately owned lighthouses will open for tours, Kate jokes that she’ll never get inside Pooles Light unless, somehow, she gets in good with the Army.

Before long, we’re at Sparrows Point, looking at the towers that make up the Craighill family of lighthouses. These four towers lead the way from the Patapsco River into Baltimore’s harbor. They are not as impressive as the earlier lights, but there is still plenty to see here as the rusty remnants of Baltimore’s past meet the gleaming shoreline homes that portend its future.

As I step off the boat into the sunset, I take a brochure and ponder a return trip. I’m not a lighthouse buff—maybe lighthouse-lite?—but I’ve had a lovely day. And, thanks to Capt. Mike, I’ve got my sea legs back.

Lighthouse Tours
Lighthouse tours depart from Tilghman Island from May through September. Cost is $145 for 10-light tour, $70 for five-light tour, and $60 for tri-light sunset tour. The two-day tour is $250. The Lazyjack Inn offers a 10 percent discount on lodging for tour-goers. 800-690-5080, http://www.chesapeakelights.com, http://www.lazyjackinn.com

Baltimore writer Rona Kobell looks forward to more adventures at sea.

Are those sweet potatoes?” I half-jokingly ask my husband, as I point to the hundreds of vaguely hairy, tuber-like knobs jutting up under the trees in Calvert County’s Battle Creek Cypress Swamp Sanctuary.

I know the knobs aren’t really tubers, of course. They’re actually the roots of the bald cypress trees that populate the swamp, one of the northernmost stands of bald cypress trees on the East Coast. Properly called “knees,” the roots contribute to the otherworldliness of this arrestingly beautiful park, creating an atmosphere that’s surreal and just a bit spooky.

Slashes of sunlight sneak in through the trees punctuating the dim, green atmosphere. Vines encased in brownish fuzz grow up from the floor, and there’s a bewitching quiet and stillness. It’s so quiet it makes me want to tiptoe and whisper as we meander along the boardwalk through the shade.

We take our time, listening to birds we can’t see, spying small rivulets of water—portions of Battle Creek that ebb and flow according to the season—that run over the ground. Placards tell us that “swamps are wetlands with trees” and that “bald cypress are conifers [trees with cones and needles] related to redwoods.” Most of the trees on this trail are 75 to 100 years old, but cypress trees have been documented at 1,000 years old. Their presence helps control runoff and protects the Bay. They also keep the swamp smelling fresh and piney, not rank or rotting, like I expected.

I scan the trees for evidence of birds’ nests—like the sack-like structure of the Baltimore Oriole or the woven home of the tiny chipping sparrow—which I saw on display in the sanctuary’s nature center (definitely worth a stop). Turtles, snakes, frogs, muskrats, deer, and barred owls also call the swamp home, as did a rogue bobcat, which was last spotted in 1945. If there’s a chance of seeing another, I’m primed.

Acquired by the Nature Conservancy in 1957 and located just off of Route 4, near Prince Frederick, Battle Creek Cypress Swamp Sanctuary is the smallest of Calvert County’s three nature parks. Measuring in at a tidy 100 acres, it’s not even half the size of the 260-acre King’s Landing Park to the north or the generous 545 acres of Flag Ponds Nature Park to the south. Each park has its own personality, however, and I’m taking an afternoon or two to discover the charms of each.

From Battle Creek, we drive north to King’s Landing Park, which borders the Patuxent River. If Battle Creek lives up to its name as a sanctuary, King’s Landing Park speaks to its history as a former farm and YMCA camp. It’s full of activity. There’s a riding ring for budding equestrians and a swimming pool with tubular slides that my inner kid is itching to try, a fishing pier, and even an orienteering course. We decide to park by a cluster of picnic tables under evergreens and set out to explore the several miles of footpaths that run through the park.

In the middle of one tree-lined path, I see my husband stop dead in his tracks ahead of me and look curiously at an oak leaf that seems to be hanging in midair. I catch up and we move closer for inspection. The leaf is in front of our noses before we see the thin filament of a spider web holding it in place. We walk a little farther along the Marsh Trail, skirting the Cocktown Creek, and stand silently to hear the white noise: the buzz of insects, a snort or two made by something we can’t identify, squirrels braying, the caw of a crow.

We circle back and take another path that drops us down to a small shoreline at the river’s edge. The Patuxent is wide here, and we see groves of trees, the towers of Chalk Point Power Plant on the horizon, and a great blue heron keeping its distance. A woman tosses a stick to her Chesapeake Bay Retriever, who ignores it in favor of what turns out to be a sizeable deer bone. The dog, who we learn is named Chessie, lopes on the narrow strip of sand (no swimming here) before running into the water to bark at a group of canoeists approaching from around a bend. “It’s so beautiful,” says the woman. “I just like to hear the birds in the trees and the quiet and the leaves and the trees and the branches talking to each other.” We nod our heads in agreement before walking back up the trail, past a meadow dotted with bluebird boxes, to our car.

Although you could visit all three nature parks in one day—they are less than 20 miles apart—we decide to visit Flag Ponds Nature Park another afternoon. This park hugs the Chesapeake Bay shoreline 10 miles south of Prince Frederick and feels like many parks in one. It has a swimming beach, wooded trails, a fishing pier, and a historic fishermen’s shanty, aka, “The Buoy Hotel,” a reminder of when a pound net fishery occupied the land between 1900 and 1955. But most folks know Flag Ponds best for the fossils that draw intrepid hunters to scour a stretch of rocky beach.

On a warm afternoon, my husband and I walk down a wooded path toward the beach and fishing pier with several families toting beach chairs and small children. While my husband walks the beach,  I ditch my shorts and shoes and wade up to my thighs in my bathing suit, sand squishing between my toes with each step.

Nearby, a little girl scoops wet sand into a pink plastic bucket as a small terrier loops around her. I catch up with my husband again and wrestle shoes onto my wet, sandy feet because the next portion of beach— blindingly white with stones and shells (and maybe sharks’ teeth?) in the rich afternoon sun—is not so easy on the feet. We scour the beach, scooping up handfuls of sand and stones (while simultaneously counting herons), but we don’t find a fossil. Still, we think, a day spent in nature is a reward in itself. And as we turn to leave along the wooded path, we find ourselves taking the leisurely route back to the car.

http://www.calvertparks.org

When asparagus starts pushing its way up through the ground, spring has definitely arrived. Depending on the weather, asparagus reaches its peak sweetness and tenderness between late April and early May. When choosing asparagus, look for smooth, purple-hued spears with tight heads. My best advice is to pass on supermarket asparagus and shop your local farmers market. You will be amazed at the difference.

One of my favorite dishes to cook—and which is largely overlooked—is asparagus puree. I highlight the soup, which can be served either warm or cold, with whipped crème fraîche and chanterelle powder. Grilled asparagus served with olive oil and tarragon aioli is oh so simple but incredibly delicious and perfect with warm crusty bread. Easily prepared at home, the egg yolk ravioli and steamed asparagus is a three- or four-star dish that will dazzle your family or guests. Finally, who would have thought white asparagus paired with Pinot Noir risotto and truffle oil could look so elegant and be so easy to make? Enjoy!

Recipes:

• Steamed Asparagus with Egg Yolk Ravioli, Parmesan, and Lemon Oil
• Asparagus Puree with Whipped Crème Fraîche and Chanterelle Powder
• White Asparagus with Pinot Noir Risotto, Truffle Oil, and Fresh Thyme
• Grilled Asparagus with Tarragon Aioli

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s The BBQ Joint.

From the moment you enter Level, John Hogan and John Miller’s chic new West Street eatery, and spot the large chalkboard listing more than a dozen local farms that provide the restaurant with everything from cheese to beef, you begin to realize you’re in the hands of an establishment that takes buzzwords like “local” and “farm-to-table” seriously. And if the list of purveyors doesn’t convince you, look closely at the right side of that board; it includes an equally long list of cocktails made with ingredients like house-made tonic, ginger beer, and sour mix.

Level, dear readers, is on the level.

If the restaurant’s raison d’etre—small plates and drinks made from products from local farmers—is a familiar one these days, the execution of the mission shows that it’s more than mere lip service.

All of these could be just gimmicks if the food and drink weren’t very fine. But luckily, it is. Level’s small plates include dips and soups, “leafy plates” and flatbreads, and clever takes on classic bar food. And with the exception of a plate of stuffed grape leaves filled with rice two shades too firm, each dish we sampled bore evidence of a creative hand and clear flavors.

Grilled bison satay (from Monkton’s Gunpowder Bison and Trading) melted in the mouth, and was such a table favorite that we bartered over the last skewer. But the loser (or maybe winner) of the deal got the last of the Cuban pork spring rolls: crispy outside, rich inside and served with an addictive sweet habanero sauce. Pork made another appearance in the crumbly nuggets of chorizo that dotted a heaping bowl of clams steamed in Pernod, white wine, and butter. The only thing that would have made the dish better was a hunk of bread to scoop up the crumbles of feta that floated in the unctuous broth. (Oddly, the restaurant doesn’t serve bread, and instead, our server suggested we order a flatbread, which topped with cheese and other pizza-like toppings, would not have served the same purpose.)

Not every dish at Level is meat-centric. Rockfish nuggets, dipped in cornmeal and flash-fried, were surprisingly light, and seared scallops wowed with their sweet-savory garnish of honey and garlic-infused olive oil. Vegetables, too, shone in their simplicity: an eggplant pancake that was actually just slices of the vegetable, grilled and topped with the same terrific feta, and crunchy steamed Brussels sprouts, vibrantly green and served “edamame style” with an earthy house-made tamari.

Our final two dishes fell on opposite sides of the cleverness line. A grilled cheese on house-made challah and tomato soup brought back cozy kitchen lunch memories, though Mom sure didn’t include grilled lamb in her sandwich.

(You don’t have to either; the lamb is optional.) And although the milk and cookies dessert also sounded comforting, it fell short of expectations with uninspiring chocolate-chunk cookies (heating them might have helped) and a tasteless cup of chocolate soy milk complete with “cookie dough foam.” It’s healthy, for sure, but wouldn’t real hot chocolate be a little more tempting?

Still, with its polished staff, warm space, and inventive dishes, Level is drawing in dines, even midweek. And it should. The restaurant is a fine example of the eat local theory put into practice.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

For city dwellers in the early half of the last century, urban amusement parks offered cheap escapism. For a small fee and a streetcar ride across town, you could test your luck on the midway, kiss your sweetheart in the Tunnel of Love, or scream away your troubles as you rode the Racer Dip. Shore parks, however, did one better. Clustered along the eastern and western beaches of the Chesapeake Bay and along Maryland’s rivers, these parks boasted the same amusements as their urban brethren, plus the lure of surf and sand. From Mago Vista and Chesapeake Beach on the western shore to Tolchester in Kent County, parks and resorts offered a day (or week) of blissful respite from urban life.

Tolchester Beach Amusement Park, Kent County
Tolchester opened in 1877, and like other parks of the Victorian era, saw most of its visitors in the first 40 years of its existence. Getting there was half the fun. “Bring your lunch and forget your troubles out on the deep blue sea. Wonderful tonic and salt air for the babies,” read the slogan for the Tolchester Steamboat Co.

Up through the early 1950s, it remained a popular excursion for families and church groups. A 1948 Sun article, for example, heralded the opening of the new park season with the arrival of 1,800 Catholic schoolchildren from Baltimore in “rented swimsuits … eating hot dogs and soda.”

The park offered a plethora of amusements from goat-drawn carts to Shoot the Chute, on which patrons whooshed down a steep track in a boat-shaped car. Rides cost anywhere between 10 and 20 cents, and the entrance fee in the 1950s was a quarter. A sign, now on display in the Tolchester Revisited Museum, requests patrons to “Pay as you leave,” a remnant, says museum curator Bill Betts, of “an era when people trusted each other,” and offered small tokens of kindness—like the engineer of the Little Jumbo train who, as a service to young mothers, heated baby bottles on the train’s engine.

Betts’ museum is full of memorabilia that captures the spirit of Tolchester. Most interesting might be the advertisement urging folks to “Go see the whale at Tolchester,” which was an enormous carcass of a whale whose mouth cavity was carpeted and used for ladies’ teas and men’s oyster dinners, according to Betts.

Although it received state subsidies, Tolchester was “always in debt,” says Betts, and the park often failed to turn a profit. It was finally purchased for development in 1962.

Mago Vista, Anne Arundel County
Mago Vista (its name meant “large view”) was one of several parks on Anne Arundel County’s waterways. But unlike Kurtz’s Beach on the Patapsco or Crystal Beach on the Magothy, Mago Vista disallowed alcohol and gambling, making it a valued spot for families and church groups. “A small Disneyland on the Magothy,” one publication called it.

“We always went to Mago Vista,” remembers Harry Greenwell, a member of the Ann Arrundell County Historical Society’s board of trustees. “Every year St. Alban’s had a picnic there.”

Founded by builder Robert Benson, Mago Vista began offering amusements, in addition to the beach, picnic, and dance pavilion, in 1938. There was a carousel, pint-sized burros for children to ride, kiddie jeeps, the Toonerville Trolley, and the loping Little Dipper roller coaster, whose U-shaped track extended 120 feet over the water.

One of the park’s oddest attractions was its alligator pond, a concrete pool surrounded by an 8-foot fence, that held the live alligators that Robert Benson’s son, Harold, bought from the Baltimore Zoo.

In an article in The Capital, Harold Benson’s son, Robert, recalls: “When his pair of gators reached 7 feet long, becoming more difficult to manage, Dad would go up there [to Baltimore] and trade them in for a smaller set.” While the alligators were an exciting attraction for children who would catch fish and toss them to the gators, the reptiles took on a more sinister role during the ’60s when Harold Benson would leash a pair to intimidate groups who protested Mago Vista’s “Gentiles Only. No Negroes” policy. The park eventually became known as the Mago Vista Beach Club Association and sold park passes only to those who passed inspection by the clerk at the front gate.

In 1964, Harold Benson sold the park’s 14 acres to developers for $300,000.

Brown’s Grove, Anne Arundel County
Brown’s Grove, near Rock Creek, was one of the earliest waterfront amusement parks run by and for African-Americans. Founded by Capt. George Brown, who would become the first African-American member of the Master Mates and Pilots Association, the park billed itself as “the black community’s first, last, and only seaside resort with its own to-and-from excursion boat,” according to
a Sun article.

Folks would take Brown’s boat, the Starlight, from the pier at the foot of Broadway in Fells Point to the park where they could ride the merry-go-round, brave the Racer Dip, try their luck on the midway, or enjoy a simple picnic. Brown’s Grove flourished during the ’20s, but was consumed by fire in 1938.

Betterton Beach, Kent County
By the time it was incorporated in 1906, Betterton was already a bustling resort complete with hotels, restaurants and saloons, and amusements. Its location, just above the confluence of the Sassafras, Elk, and Susquehanna rivers, made it easy to reach by steamers, like the Bay Belle. Folks of means came from Philadelphia, as well as day trippers from Baltimore and Annapolis, to spend time away from the city.

There was plenty to occupy them. A postcard of the beach shows the long amusement pier that held a bowling alley and a room of pocket billiards stretching over the water. In the foreground, men in suits with hats and women in white dresses and parasols or thigh-length bathing suits rest on the beach. Other amusements included a skating rink, bumper cars, and a movie house.

Dot Wright, now a volunteer at the Historical Society of Kent County, worked as a waitress at the Betterton Restaurant in the mid-1940s when she was 13. She recalls Saturday night dance parties held in an open-air dance hall above the bowling alley and the three colorful cooks at the restaurant who whipped up everything from fried chicken to “the most marvelous dinner rolls and pies.” She says that someone at the restaurant would call daily to find out how many people were on the excursion line from Baltimore. “Somehow they always knew how many dinners to prepare.” 

By the 1950s, the beach resort had begun to fade due to the opening of the Bay Bridge, which took visitors farther afield to Ocean City. Today, it’s a public beach.

Chesapeake Beach, Calvert County
Chesapeake Beach embodied the classic “if you build it, they will come” philosophy of development. Otto Mears, a Russian immigrant and railroad tycoon living in Colorado, moved east in 1895 specifically with the idea of opening a resort on the shores of the Chesapeake and a railroad connecting it to Washington, D.C.
The first train arrived at the new resort on June 9, 1900, and by the 1920s, more than 10,000 people would make the trip on busy weekends.

The resort’s 1,600-foot boardwalk was built over the water and boasted a crab house, casino, dance hall, bowling alley, band shell, and the Great Derby, an enormous roller coaster that ran over the water.

Many day trippers took the 50-cent, 60-minute express train from D.C., but overnight guests could stay at the luxurious Belvedere Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in 1923. “It was a terrible fire,” recalls resident Elizabeth Stinnett in one of the Chesapeake Beach Railway Museum’s oral history interviews, “and we didn’t have no fire engines—no equipment at all. So they had a bucket brigade and everybody in Chesapeake Beach had a bucket and carried water, trying to put that fire out.” 

The hotel was never rebuilt, and the park was relaunched as Seaside Park in 1930. By 1935, facing competition from the automobile and the continuing Great Depression, the railroad stopped operating. The park, under new management, was reinvented again in the 1940s as the Chesapeake Beach Amusement Park, which finally closed in 1972. Eventually the land was developed into what is now Chesapeake Station, a residential community. The only vestiges of Otto Mears’ dream can be found at the railway museum, located, fittingly, at 4155 Mears Ave.             

Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beaches, Anne Arundel County
Opened in 1927 by two African-American sisters, Elizabeth Carr Smith and Florence Carr Sparrow, Carr’s and Sparrow’s Beaches, just south of Annapolis, were the destination spots for African-Americans from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., looking for sun, surf, music, and amusements.

The beaches drew huge crowds for church outings, bay swimming, beauty contests, rides, and music concerts featuring popular entertainers, from Billy “Mr. B” Eckstine and Dizzy Gillespie to James Brown and Chuck Berry. (Similar concerts were held at Henry’s Beach in Somerset County.) During the late 1950s, it was not unusual for up to 50,000 people to drive to Carr’s and Sparrow’s and pay $1.50 before noon and $2 after for a 3 o’clock Sunday performance.

“Carr’s was kind of groovy, be-boppy,” says National Public Radio commentator, writer, and social activist Daphne Muse. “Beaches were a real novel concept for us [urban African-Americans]. You saw them [beaches] in magazines. You saw them in National Geographic.” But to actually go to a beach, she explains, was a tremendous coup.

Life in the city could be tough, but the beach, says Muse, “was a place you could go and be relieved of the burdens and everyday droning of black life.” Frank Zappa played the final concert at Carr’s Beach in 1974. The property was sold in the 1980s and today is the site of Chesapeake Harbour Condominiums.

Public Landing, Worcester County
A merry-go-round and a bowling alley. A movie theater and a penny arcade. Billiards, food concessions, and a whopper of a waterslide, taller than any other buildings around it. This was Public Landing, a resort community just 6 miles east of Snow Hill. Located on Chincoteague Bay, Public Landing was an amusement hub from the late 19th century through the 1930s. But unlike other parks that were built along water, Public Landing was built on a series of piers and boardwalks that extended out over the water. One can imagine that the combination of sea spray and bay breezes acted as natural air conditioning on the walks, making the boast, “where it’s always cool,” in a 1929 advertisement for the park, a truthful claim. The park was destroyed by hurricane in 1933.

Colonial Beach, Va.
Colonial Beach on Virginia’s Northern Neck has a long history of luring tourists by steamer to its shores, earning the nickname of the “Playground on the Potomac” not long after its inception, in the late 19th century. Initially, the attractions were bathing beaches, fishing, and boating. Later, in the 1950s, Washingtonians and Baltimoreans flocked to the town’s casinos which were located on a pier that extended into the Maryland waters of the Potomac where gambling was legal. But throughout the years, there were always amusements. “Back in ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, there was a skating rink,” remembers Jackie Shinn of her hometown, “and dance parlors like the Joyland and Palm Gardens where, in earlier years, folks would dress up to hear the big bands play.”

But if 20th-century Colonial Beach had its charms, it also had its fair share of challenges. Its location—on a flood plain surrounded on three sides by water—made it a ripe target for hurricanes (one in 1933 wiped out the Ferris wheel), and a tremendous fire in the 1960s destroyed the town’s casinos. Still, some of its Victorian buildings—like the Alexander Graham Bell House—remain. And the town has since reinvented itself by offering off-track riverboat gambling as well as the beach and easy access to historical sites, like the birthplace of James Monroe. It’s also adopted golf carts as a legal means of transportation throughout its streets.

Still, says Shinn, the town’s amusement park holds the most memories. “There was a beautiful merry-go-round, a whip, a bullet [which] looked like a capsule on top and bottom. It rotated and made you very sick.” She adds that she knows this from experience.

Freelance writer Mary K. Zajac loves a good amusement park.

Five ideas for spring road trips:

1. Eastern Shore Winery Tour
2. Adventures along Va. Route 13
3. Play in St. Mary’s County
4. Queen Anne’s County Outdoors
5. James River Plantations

You’ve likely heard of Patricia Schultz’s best-selling book, “1,000 Places to See Before You Die.” It’s a “traveler’s life list” of monuments, must-see events, and natural and manmade wonders from the Taj Mahal to Niagara Falls. One of those thousand places just happens to be the Chesapeake Bay, to which she devotes a couple paragraphs on crabs and oy-sters, and mentions a few Eastern Shore towns, including St. Michaels. (We’ll just ignore the fact that she misspells the town’s name with an apostrophe, as in St. Michael’s.)

Here, at Chesapeake Life, we decided to get a little more specific. So we created our own list of “25 (Chesapeake) Things to Do Before You Die.” From visiting Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge to reciting the “Pledge of Allegiance” at Chick and Ruth’s Delly, it’s a fun and varied compilation of must-dos for any area resident. We’ve also included a separate sidebar of must-see events. (Believe me, you haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed pumpkins catapulted the length of five football fields during Delaware’s annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin.)

One of the places we include in our list is the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. This depository for all things Chesapeake boasts a stash of more than 10,000 objects but, as curator Pete Lesher told me on a behind-the-scenes tour, the vast majority aren’t on display at any given time. So we asked Lesher to pick some of the museum’s more interesting pieces hidden from view and to tell us the stories behind them.

See the results of Lesher’s diggings in “Mining the Museum.”

Another place worth exploring is the African American Schoolhouse Museum, originally a one-room school for Kent County students between 1890 and the 1950s. What’s fascinating is that many of its former pupils remain in the area, and a half dozen were generous enough to share their experiences with us in “School Days.”

And now for some housekeeping: As I mentioned in my previous editor’s letter, we’ve decided to cut back on the frequency of Chesapeake Life in 2010. After this issue, you can expect magazines in May, September, and November. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll receive the same number of issues you signed on for, but they’ll be stretched out over a longer period of time. So if your seven-issue subscription started with this issue, you’ll get four issues this year and the first three next year.

While we’ve reduced the quantity of issues to save costs during this difficult time, we will not compromise on the magazine’s quality. You still can count on the same incredible photography and interesting stories from around the Bay.

Until next issue,
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I Love fish. I love fish fried, baked, grilled, even raw.

I love watching fish jumping next to boats and swimming in aquariums. But normally, I don’t love to fish, and there’s a reason why. I’m a terrible fisherman. As a child, I would fidget while my father tried to show me how to place bait on a hook. As an adult, the last time I tried to actually cast a line, I hooked myself. The most successful fishing trip I’ve ever taken was avoiding injury while dangling a line over the side of a sailboat on the Bay, settling back with a beer or three…and catching nothing. So the idea of this rod-and-reel novice trying to actually fish from a kayak seemed a bit, well, dangerous.

But when Capt. Chris Dollar pulled his trailer full of kayaks up to the boat launch at Janes Island State Park, he instantly put me at ease. A longtime guide and outfitter, Dollar specializes in kayak fishing, but he has been sharing his knowledge of the Chesapeake for many years. A former field educator for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, he started his kayak guiding business, CD Outdoors, a few years ago and he’s never looked back.

“Every day is different, and that’s one of the challenges,” he says as he shows me some of his specialized gear. Dollar’s kayaks have special holes for fishing rods, boxes for tackle, and clips to keep you from losing your paddle in the heat of the moment when the fish bite. It’s not too much more complex than the average sit-on-top, but I’m fervently hoping that my lack of fishing talent won’t be one of his challenges.

Dollar also guides fly-fishing and light tackle trips up and down the Eastern Shore on his own larger boat, but he prefers the purer experience of kayak fishing. “A lot of folks like to get as close as they can to the water,” he explains as we lower two long green sea kayaks onto the floating dock. “In a kayak, there’s nothing there except for a piece of plastic. It’s you and the fish.”

As we launch our kayaks into the inlets surrounding Janes Island, I can see what he means. In the stable sea kayak, I have room to stretch out, and a comfortable seat, but my legs are hidden under a spray skirt in the bottom of the boat just beneath the waterline, my eyeline just below the top of the marsh grasses. I feel like a bobbling cork, ready to go where the current takes me, and at Janes Island, that could be any number of places.

The park is the perfect base for exploring the Chesapeake’s watery world. With 2,900 acres of marsh, beach, and highland, half of the area is only accessible by boat through a maze of waterways that lead out to the open bay. The park has created a 30-mile-long network of six paddle trails, complete with downloadable GPS waypoints to help plan trips. It would be easy to spend days here, and it’s even possible to spend the night on a camping platform out in the marsh, or in waterfront cabins on shore.

But it doesn’t take hours of paddling to sample the island’s beauty. Within five minutes of leaving the launch on Daugherty Creek, it feels like we’ve already left civilization behind. We’re the only ones paddling up the yellow trail, the only sounds the slap of water against the side of the kayaks, the soft plop of jumping fish, and the distant croaks of a startled heron. It would be easy to drift, just letting the current take the kayaks out toward open water, but Dollar has other ideas. These smaller inlets are great places to find hidden fish.

We paddle over to a quiet area of water near the edge of the marsh grasses, and another advantage of kayak fishing becomes clear—shallow water access—which starts to come in handy after trying my first cast. 

“Hold on, I’ll get it for you.” Dollar has to fish my first lure out of the weeds. At first, juggling the paddle and a rod (not to mention my nemesis, the sharp, barbed hook) is a little tricky. It takes a few minutes of patient instruction, but before long, I’m able to aim and cast smoothly, and enjoy being close to the creatures I’m attempting to catch—not only the Bay’s famous striped bass— but sea trout, croaker, crappie, or bluefish. But here the fish seem to be hard to find, so we decide to press farther on into the marsh.

We quickly settle into a quiet rhythm of paddling, pausing, and casting. Dollar has a sixth sense about when to jump in and help or explain something, and when to hang back and just let me float along and absorb our surroundings. “As a guide, you’re sort of like a bartender,” he explains. “You talk when you’re spoken to, and you know when not to open your mouth.”

After an hour paddling through the tall marsh grass, we emerge into a wide area of open water called Flatcap Basin, where five of the six water trails meet.

By now I can tell that Dollar really knows his fish. He points out areas where they like to hide or rest—under a nearby pier, in the quiet bends out through the marsh. Though I still haven’t caught anything, he’s achieving one of his other goals for his clients: an outdoor education.

“I try to do more than put fish in the boat,” he says “I’m helping people to understand more about why the fish are there at certain times of the year, what kind of tackle to use…It’s like problem solving.”

Unfortunately, however, I haven’t even come close to putting fish in my own boat. An unlucky cold snap the night before has driven them out into deeper water. I stop for one last cast, and then it happens. I become a fishing guide’s nightmare client—I drop my rod overboard. I lunge for it and miss and stare aghast as it sinks away toward the invisible bottom.

Despite all the new skills I’ve just learned, my fishing curse has struck again. Judging from Dollar’s patient reaction, I may not be the first client to make this kind of mistake.

For this trip, I guess that will be the one that got away.

CD Outdoors
Offers guided fishing trips on the Chesapeake and Atlantic coast as well as kayak rentals and sales. Fly- fishing and light tackle are available. Prices start at $150 for a half day, $400 for a full day of angling. 410-991-8468, http://www.cdollaroutdoors.com

Sara Edelson, a writer and television producer, lives in Washington, D.C.

make a date
These annual events are Chesapeake musts, too.

National Outdoor Show Feb. 26-27, Golden Hill, Md., 410-397-8535, http://www.nationaloutdoorshow.org

Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival May 22-23, Annapolis, 410-257-7413, http://www.bayblues.org

Blue Angels Fly-Over May 28, Annapolis, 410-293-1000, http://www.blueangels.navy.mil

Fair Hill Races, May 29, Elkton, Md., 410-398-6565, http://www.fairhillraces.org

Delmarva Chicken Festival June 18-19, Dover, Del., 302-856-9037, http://www.dpichicken.com

Chincoteague Pony Swim and Auction July 28-30, Chincoteague, Va., 757-336-6161, http://www.chincoteaguechamber.com

Renaissance Festival weekends, Aug. 28 through Oct. 24, Crownsville, Md., 410-266-7304, http://www.rennfest.com

Crisfield Hard Crab Derby Sept. 3-5, Crisfield, Md., 410-968-2500, http://www.crisfieldchamber.com

Maryland Seafood Festival Sept. 10-12, Annapolis, 410-268-1437, http://www.mdseafoodfestival.com

U.S. Sailboat Show Oct. 7-11, Annapolis, 410-268-8828, http://www.usboat.com

Sea Gull Century Bike Ride Oct. 9, Salisbury, Md., 410-548-2772, http://www.seagullcentury.org

U.S. Powerboat Show Oct. 14-17, Annapolis, 410-268-8828, http://www.usboat.com

St. Mary’s County Oyster Festival Oct. 16-17, Leonardtown, Md., 800-327-9023, http://www.usoysterfest.com

Downrigging Weekend Oct. 28-31, Chestertown, Md., 410-778-5954, http://www.sultanaprojects.org

Punkin Chunkin Nov. 5-7, Bridgeville, Del., http://www.punkinchunkin.com

Maritime Republic of Eastport Tug of War November, Eastport, Md., http://www.themre.org

Annapolis Christmas Lights Boat Parade Dec. 11, Annapolis, 410-267-9549, http://www.eastportyc.org

As landscape architect Barbara Paca read the two-page, handwritten letter from Bob Simmons, she crumbled. The letter explained that Simmons’ wife, Marcia, had terminal cancer and wanted to make a garden on their Maryland farm to leave for her daughters. “He said it might be the last thing she’d be able to do and that she wanted to do it with me,” recalls the Manhattan-based Paca. “I immediately canceled all of my appointments and went to the Eastern Shore the next day.”

When the Simmonses purchased Centreville’s Reed Creek Farm in 1996, their idea was to turn the main house, a brick Georgian mansion built in 1775, into a B&B. But when Marcia’s illness, which had been in remission, returned two years later, the couple decided to focus their energies on a more meaningful project: creating a formal Anglo-style garden that would honor both the house’s architectural vernacular and Marcia.

“I sent Barbara that letter without Marcia knowing,” confesses Bob, who knew his wife had admired Paca’s work in gardening magazines. “That way, she wouldn’t be disappointed if Barbara told us ‘no.’ Or it would be a happy surprise if she told us ‘yes.’”

Marcia, a master gardener and voracious reader of British gardening magazines, and Paca immediately formulated a plan for the entire 175-acre estate. Marcia sought Paca for her sophisticated approach to land planning and discussed with excitement the concept of a property possessing a heart (the flower garden) and a soul (the spiral mount, a feature south of the garden). 

Marcia knew precisely what she wanted: a garden with a saturated French Provencal color scheme of orange, burgundy, and denim blue. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow!’” says Paca. “It was so forward thinking. People wanted only white or pastel cottage gardens back then. And it was a bonus that she could write the script with me. She was a participant in what she was leaving behind.”

Paca’s ultimate challenge was combining appropriate horticultural symbolism with Marcia’s request for specific colors. “In my mind, I envisioned a garden of pale-blue lavender—an ancient cure for melancholia—and orange poppies, icons of peace and rest,” says Paca, whose Princeton doctoral dissertation was on the iconography of gardens. 

Before implementing the design, the Simmonses visited a dozen landscape parks and gardens in England handpicked by Paca, who suggested they take note of details they might want to incorporate into their private Eden.

It was in the gardens of Hadspen, a 17th-century Somerset estate, where Marcia found the muse for the project’s centerpiece: a meandering brick wall with an exedra-like recess that would create a theatrical backdrop along the rear of the garden, and, at the same time, provide a graceful barrier against the harsh prevailing winds that gust off the farm’s bordering creeks.

“That wall is the most exquisite souvenir that any client has ever brought back from their ‘grand tour’ of gardens,” says Paca, whose husband, architect Philip Logan, structured the wall and gates and detailed its design. “When it was being built, it looked like we were creating the Great Wall of China, but it fit the space perfectly. Things tend to shrink when they’re out of doors, and plantings scale down architectural features even more. Furthermore, it wasn’t precious—it was as honest and muscular as the land that it was built upon.”

For an unexpected, contemporary twist, Paca sited the garden at the south side of the house and not along the property’s rear acreage, as is custom in classical English designs. To give the space depth, she created a goose-foot shaped series of paths, which stretch from the main horizontal axis like three elegantly tapered fingers. A stroll toward the top of the garden is a lesson in the art of composition, as stocky English lavender gives way to taller emberglow montbretia and even lengthier Lord Baltimore hibiscus. The secondary paths merge with a curved path following the gentle arc of the garden wall.

While the wooden gate at the end of the center path opens to the multi-dimensional view of the encroaching cornfields and creeks beyond, the gate at the end of the horizontal axis leads to the garden’s folly, Bob’s boldest contribution to the project. “I decided to turn the 15-foot-tall mound of leftover soil and rock that we were going to pay someone to haul off into a viewing mount,” he says. “It was just my style to recycle a pile of junk instead of acquiring an obelisk or something like that.”

Paca loved this idea and dressed the spiral mount, nicknamed “Bob’s Folly,” with English lavender, orange potentilla, Oriental poppies, and miniature orange petunias and installed a winding brick walkway that leads to a bench at the top.

When the design was completed in 2002, Paca turned over the helm to Marcia, who devoted the last years of her life to planting, pruning, staking, and meditating in this, her living memorial.

Since Marcia passed away in 2006, it has continued its life under the guidance of Paca, who is instructing Bob and Marcia’s daughters, Catherine and Barrett, in the fine art of continuing Marcia’s vision. “Each time we are in the garden working, with Marcia’s funeral urn situated in the wall overlooking the beautiful setting,” says Bob, “I give thanks that we encouraged her to create this garden that means so much to all of us.”

You may think this odd, but I never really liked Italian food other than pizza. It was always just OK in my book. But I must not have eaten it in the right places. That all changed last year when I started cooking the take-home meals for the Piazza Italian Market in Easton. I began studying authentic Italian food cookbooks and using quality ingredients and—wow, what a difference! Suddenly, Italian food was delicious and bursting with flavor.

What I found so remarkable was how simple the food was to prepare. Just using the right ingredients made the ubiquitous meatball something extraordinary and the typical stuffed shell a melt-in-your-mouth treat. I made a minestrone soup full of vegetables and orzo that was good enough to be gobbled up by my kids, who came back for seconds. And my lasagna, layered with Bolognese sauce and ricotta will have your company asking for more.

Everyone has most likely tasted these dishes before—they are part of the standard canon of Italian-American food—but I entreat you to get back to the basics with these recipes and redefine how good they can taste.

Recipes:

• Lasagna with Bolognese Sauce and Fresh Ricotta
• Minestrone Soup
• Meatballs with Sweet Basil Tomato Sauce
• Stuffed Shells with Ricotta and Italian Herbs

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s The BBQ Joint.

Old Brick Inn
401 S. Talbot St.
St. Michael’s, Md.
410.745-3323
http://www.oldbrickinn.com

I’ve been married more than 15 years, but when my husband and I checked into the Old Brick Inn’s sprawling Chesapeake Suite, we felt like someone must have thought it was our wedding night. A fire roared in the room’s gas fireplace, silk flowers bloomed in the sleeping area and in the bath, and a wine bucket and cut crystal glasses awaited bottles of vino that could be ordered from the front desk. Between the creamy, oversized French Regency-style king bed piled high with pillows and turned down for the night to the enormous whirlpool bath built for two, an evening of romance seemed more than just a suggestion.

The next morning innkeeper Melissa Godfrey told me that not only is the Chesapeake the largest of the inn’s 20 rooms, spread across three separate buildings, it’s the one most often used for honeymoons. (And, in our case, unplanned second honeymoons.)

Innkeepers Although the faces of the inn belong to innkeepers Godfrey, Barbara Focht, and Linda Prince, who do everything from book rooms and cook breakfasts to make restaurant recommendations, the inn is owned by business partners George Wilson and Barbara Svenson.

Wilson, who lives in Charles County, is a hands-on owner, however, and makes regular visits to the inn to meet with his staff, and encourages them to periodically stay in one of the inn’s rooms to make sure they know what the guest experience is like and how it could be improved. “I want the Old Brick Inn to offer in-town elegance,” says Wilson of his centrally located inn. “My mission
is to provide people with an experience, not just a night’s lodging.”

The Rooms With so many different rooms to choose from, the Old Brick Inn offers a little something for everyone. Fans of the Renaissance Festival will appreciate the Lady Guinevere Room with its full-size suit of armor (and no, you can’t try it on) in the modern Carriage House, while folks who treasure the old-fashioned coziness of dormer windows and sloping ceilings will find comfort in the pretty, pale green Elizabeth’s Rose Garden Room in the Main House. But my favorite rooms are in the historic Kemp House, built in 1807 and a few blocks from the Main House. The elegant Silk Blossom Room boasts an original brick floor, and the tropical Bird of Paradise Cottage has its own private patio. The textiles and linens in each room are changed seasonally, so the rooms may look different over multiple visits.

Special Touches/diversions Located right on Talbot Street, St. Michaels’ main drag, the inn’s location is perfect for taking in the town’s shops and restaurants. Many rooms have fireplaces and whirlpool tubs (often built for two), and the Talbot Room in the Carriage House includes a front and back balcony, as well as a kitchenette. Free wi-fi is available throughout the inn, even in the pool area. And if pampering is your thing, the inn will also schedule in-room massages for guests.

What’s for breakfast Along with a choice of cereals and sweet breads, breakfasts may include ample plates of lemon ricotta soufflé with fruit sauce, bacon, and roasted sweet potatoes, served in the inn’s Victorian-styled dining room   of small tables set with lace cloths and small flower centerpieces.

Romance Factor A Jacuzzi or massage for two is always better than for just one.

Cost $99-$300, depending on room and season.

Mary K. Zajac was married in Baltimore.

As I climb the stairs to the Bartlett Pear Inn’s front porch, the door opens even before I can knock. Coats are smoothly whisked away to a cloakroom. Cocktails are proffered as I wait for the rest of my dining companions in the lounge, where a rousing fire burns in the marble fireplace. Greetings are warm, genuine; smiles are wide.

“Your comfort and enjoyment are our greatest pleasure,” reads the restaurant’s menu, and even before I’m seated in a pillow-strewn banquette in the inn’s snug dining room, I’m ready to believe this.

It’s no secret that the restaurant had large shoes to fill when it opened in the former Inn at Easton space in September 2009, but judging from only one visit, the staff here is doing its utmost and gracious best to fill them. And perhaps they do so well because natives Jordan and Alice Lloyd, chef and innkeeper, respectively, know Easton and know what locals and visitors want in a restaurant.

Jordan’s bistro-influenced menu is compact and reflects an emphasis on local ingredients and house-made components that feels nearly mandatory in new restaurants. The whole roasted shrimp in the saffron-pistachio risotto are from Marvesta Shrimp Farms in Dorchester County. The lavash cracker in the tuna tartare appetizer, the server tells us, is made in-house, as are the brandied cherries that garnish cocktails.

Obviously, the Maine lobster in my lobster bisque is from elsewhere, but that doesn’t prevent me from inhaling the sweet, tarragon-infused soup, which is rich and unctuous without being over the top. The small lobster cake that floats like an island in a sea of creamy broth is a welcome treat. In another appetizer, a subtle, savory cream sauce, made golden with saffron and Dijon mustard, complements fat and briny mussels. 

Entrees are slightly less satisfying. The seared duck magret breast is plump and well-prepared, but the small portion and modest sides of roasted fingerlings and haricots verts do little to justify its $34 price tag. A cooked-to-order flatiron steak ordered a la carte looks like more of a bargain at $19 until you add $6 steakhouse sides of addictive french fries and creamed spinach. And while short ribs braised in red wine are presented prettily on the plate with a sprinkle of pearl onions and small teardrop-shaped cuts of golden rutabaga and pale turnip, the meat errs on the side of fatty.

If you love chocolate, however, make sure to order the chocolate soufflé for dessert. It arrives piping hot with a side of brilliant green basil infused crème anglaise our server spooned into the warm, melting center. Our table was split about the aesthetic effect, but agreed that the sauce added more color than nuance.

As a new restaurant, the Bartlett Pear Inn could use a few small tweaks. The food shows promise, but menu prices could be lowered slightly, and tables in the dining room could be rearranged to be less claustrophobic (or maybe they could just remove a few pillows from the banquettes). But service is right where it should be. I have no doubt the rest will follow.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

For more than 50 years, African-Americans attended Kent County’s one-room Worton Point Colored School No. 2. Now a museum, its former students share memories of attending a segregated school without indoor plumbing or running water. Despite these shortcomings, many say it was the best education they ever received.

They sit around the long table in the old Worton Point Colored School No. 2, seven African-American men and women in their 60s and 70s, all but one former students of the school, sharing memories of their days here in the 1940s and ’50s. They mention teachers: Miss Taylor, Miss Turner, Miss Gibbs. They remember games of dodgeball and Annie-over, collecting ferns in the woods, a pot of soup set to simmer for lunch on the potbelly stove at the front of the room.

The green-shuttered, whitewashed building, built in 1890, looks much the same on the inside as it did when they were students, they say, except for the wood paneling that covers the walls, the drop ceiling, and the thick gold carpet on the floor. The old red water pump and green enamel sink where students washed out their cups are still in the same corner. The Lord’s Prayer is written across the blackboard in the front of the room, and you can still catch a glimpse of the coal house from the side window.

The large cross studded with small light bulbs hanging above the blackboard is a remnant of when the schoolhouse was used as a church in the 1980s while the current church, St. George Methodist, was being rebuilt nearby, they explain.

“I wasn’t fortunate enough to go to a one-room school,” says Kay Somerville, the one adult in the group who was not a student here. “But I’ve been in this community for 50-some years, and this building is very important to me because we have used it so spiritually.

“Every community needs a church,” she continues, “’cause when you go past it, even if you don’t attend, you know it’s there. The school is the same way.

All those precious memories.”

Under the guiding hand of Somerville’s daughter, the gospel and jazz singer Karen Somerville, the precious memories of the individuals who attended this more-than-a-century-old Kent County school are being preserved. Renamed the African American Schoolhouse Museum, the small building has become a repository for the Eastern Shore’s largest collection of 19th-century photographs of African-American life, according to Karen Somerville. It also contains pictures and memorabilia from the community, whose 70 members are direct descendants of freed slaves from the nearby Gale plantation, now known as Andelot Farm.

Somerville didn’t intend to establish a museum when in 1994 she put out a call for community photographs and artifacts to display at the former schoolhouse. Her effort was part of a fundraiser for the completion of St. George Methodist Church next door. She intended to dismantle the schoolhouse exhibit after the fundraiser, “but there was such a great following, I ended up having to leave the exhibit up,” she explains. “I never thought it would be long term, but once I realized what I really had, then I just decided that’s exactly what we need to do is turn this into a museum.”

Somerville has since added to the schoolhouse’s historical collection, and recently received a grant that will allow her to compile a CD of stories and songs gathered from people who attended school or church here.

Visiting the museum is a view into a community both typical and yet utterly particular of the African-American experience on the Eastern Shore. Inside, church pews and school desks speak to the building’s varied uses over the years. (After the school closed in 1958, the church purchased the building from the Kent County Department of Education and used it variously as a meeting hall, community center, and church.) On side displays, an old wooden ironing board and iron, a soup ladle, and a handsaw sit side by side with school report cards and diplomas. There are photos everywhere—of a female student, dated 1956, in a neat white blouse, her hair pulled back; of the Heavenly Echoes, a gospel group who performed in the five-county region. A hand-lettered sign sitting atop a glass case filled with undocumented photos, reads “Who are they?” and Karen Somerville admits that “occasionally people come in and recognize photos of their families.”

But it’s the stories of the former students who lived and learned in Worton Point that create a true portrait of life in this small community north of Chestertown. Says Somerville, matter-of-factly: “Before Hillary Clinton went to Africa and learned it takes a village, we lived that way.”

One-room schoolhouses were an integral part of the African-American educational experience on the Eastern Shore in the late-19th through the mid-20th century, and although exact numbers are tricky to pin down, records show that in 1927, there were 16 “colored public schools” in Kent County in historically African-American communities like Morgnec and Melitota. Although they eventually became part of the Kent County school system, schools like the one at Worton Point were established by the community, not by the local government. “The establishment did not really see a need to see us educated, but our ancestors did,” says Airlee Johnson, a retired real estate professional who attended Worton Point in the 1950s. “And I’m sure they worked very hard to have the schools in their own community. [It was] a grass-roots movement.”       

The Worton Point school served grades 1-6, after which students attended the all-black Garnett High School in Chestertown.

Karen Somerville’s father, Alton Somerville, was a student at Worton Point in the 1940s. A tall man with an engaging grin, he recalls how hearing the ringing of the morning bell on his way to school was his cue to start running. He’d fly down the wooded path dressed in knickerbockers and long stockings, passing through the old cemetery, past the boys and girls outhouses behind the school, to be in his seat at 9 o’clock in time to join the teacher and 30 or so students in singing “My Country ’tis of Thee” or another devotional song.

If you were late, remembers Joan Freeman, another former student, the teacher would recite a rhyme—“Dollar, dollar, 10 o’clock scholar/You used to come at 9 o’clock, but now you come at noon”—and you wouldn’t be allowed to come to school until noon the next day, a shameful situation you wouldn’t want to have to explain to your parents.

Absences from school were a matter of course; young men were needed to work the fields during harvest, and young women, like Irene Moore, the museum’s chief docent, whose mother kept her home every Monday to help with laundry, had household chores to attend to. But lateness was never tolerated, as an old report card in the museum suggests. Alice Phillips may have missed 51½ days in 1925, but she was never late, and her grades were more than acceptable.

School days, the former students remember, had a comfortable routine. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the latter said outside while one of the boys raised the flag to the top of the flagpole if the weather was good, followed devotions. Roll call came next, and then the teacher opened the windows for some fresh air to accompany morning calisthenics before lessons began.

The students in each grade sat together, explains Alton Somerville, and while the teacher worked with the handful of students who made up each grade (there were eight in his class), students in other grades would read their lessons or study. Basic subjects like reading, arithmetic, and spelling were taught by grade, but sciences and social studies were taught to the whole school. This arrangement “worked well,” says Airlee Johnson, “because we could learn from each other.”

Interspersed with lessons were music and art appreciation. Emma Lively, a classmate of Alton Somerville, remembers a song the class learned to help them identify ferns in the woods.

Johnson, who attended the school a decade after Lively, recalls the teachers the county sent in for weekly art lessons. “They were the only white teachers we had,” she says. “We did finger painting and clay, but we used real clay. None of that Play-Doh. And that was fun because we had a chance to play in real dirt.”

Discipline was ingrained from the start. “There was none of that speaking out, you know,” says Alton Somerville. “You had to ask. You had to raise your hand to say something.”

Punishments ranged from being hit with a switch that students would fetch themselves to standing in the corner to a ruler’s smack across the palm of the hand. Irene Moore recalls having to write “I must be quiet in class” over and over on the chalkboard—but only once. “I learned my lesson,” she says. Greater transgressions might result in a letter home to parents or the ultimate shaming, a public dressing down in church on Sunday by your teacher.

“There was an awful lot of order in class,” says Johnson. “Teachers didn’t lose control. Because then your parents would hear about it and that was the worst thing.”

School discipline involved physical work as well. Students were assigned chores, from cleaning the outhouses to bringing in coal from the coal house to keep the potbelly stove burning to patrolling the cloakroom to make sure all the coats and hats were hung up tidily. “We had to sweep the floors every day,” recalls Rudolph Black, a student at the school in the 1950s.

“The only thing we didn’t do was cut the grass.”

Local students often went home for lunch, but during the winter months, explains Lively, each child could bring their own bowl to have a hot lunch that the teacher had simmering on the coal stove at the front of the room. It was beans or soup, often thick with hominy, and its smell filled the classroom. When the coal stove was replaced with gas heat, Rudolph Black remembers, the teacher would go to Irene Moore’s family home next door to cook the soup.

The school day ended at 3 o’clock when students heard the bus rumbling over the hill and lined up orderly for dismissal. “You’d go home, and you couldn’t wait until the next day to go back,” says Alton Somerville. “School was fun to me [then].”

What is most clear in conversations with former students is that in the era of segregation, this closed, intimate community of the classroom was a boon, rather than a burden. “A lot of children now, they don’t like to go to school, but it was like family here,” says Moore. “We sang together, we learned together, we prayed together. And I just loved it.”

School was less engaging, the former students say, when they moved on to Garnett High School. Despite the fact that it was a treat to go to a school with running water and indoor bathrooms, larger classes and less attention from teachers made students treasure their one-room schoolhouse experience even more. “I learned more out here than I learned at other schools,” says Alton Somerville, echoing what other former students express. “When [the teacher] taught you something here, you knew it.”

“When I see other classmates that were here, it’s like [seeing] an old family member,” says Airlee Johnson with a smile. “It’s like our own little private school—with a lot of love.”

Freelance writer Mary K. Zajac wrote about historic Chesapeake cookbooks in our last issue.

Paul Reed Smith has come a long way from tinkering on guitars and amplifiers as a teenager in his Bowie, Md., home. His eponymous company, now in its 25th year, employs 230 people at a Stevensville, Md., factory, and his instruments are played by guitar virtuosos from Al Di Meola to Carlos Santana. Guitar World magazine credits Smith’s high-quality instruments with spawning “a full-blown American guitar renaissance.” CL interviewed Smith in January and learned that his passion for making guitars is rivaled only by his passion for playing them—and also for fishing in the Chesapeake Bay.

> My father wanted me to be what he was, a mathematician. That’s what my son wants to be. It must skip a generation.

> [When I was starting out] I’d say, ‘Here, play my guitar. What do you think?’ I didn’t have anything to lose.

> I always thought I had a lot to offer. Initially, no one really thought so. There are other people in the world who think they have a lot to offer and everybody says, ‘You do. You do.’ I was on the other side. I thought I had a lot to offer and people were saying, ‘No you don’t. No you don’t. No you don’t.’ It’s courage. It’s not confidence. Confidence is something that’s earned.

> I wasn’t going to survive in a one- or three-person shop anymore. [When we started the company], the goal was survival. There was no way I was going to be able to raise a family or send kids to college or anything like that on the income I was making. We wanted to do well while we did well, if you know what I mean. To take care of our employees while they took care of us. A symbiotic relationship. I think it’s gone pretty well.

> There are really good people here. Salt-of-the-earth people in this area. And I mean that in a very positive way.

> You just don’t hear people say the word ‘terrific’ anymore.

> Getting older sucks. What you get is a much better view of the world, and you gain confidence in the heat of battle. But your body just doesn’t continue to work the same way.

> I like snooping around in estuaries.

> I grew up fishing on the Patuxent River five days a week as a kid. My father owned a boat and we were always out on the Chesapeake Bay.

> I’ll tell you one thing that’s disturbing. I went fishing off the Bay Bridge last year and I got my quota of rockfish quickly and they were all sick. There’s something really wrong. When I was a kid they weren’t that sick.

> It’s been a very, very difficult economy. I’m not sure if we’ve had our best year or the worst year. It would be the best year if we should have gone out of business and we didn’t. And it would be the worst year because we’re just breaking even.

> Two-hundred and thirty people work here. That’s a lot of responsibility. You know what it feels like to have a fire at the door. Got to protect what’s inside.

> M. Scott Peck, who wrote “The Road Less Traveled,” said that life is difficult, and when you finally accept that life is difficult, then it becomes way less difficult. I’m trying to absorb that one.

> I don’t like making a defining moment on a journey.

> Is my journey a success? I don’t know. I’m not done yet.

> I get a rush out of good performances—whether they’re playing my guitars or not. I get a rush out of wonderful instruments. I still get goose bumps.

> What’s it like to have Carlos Santana play an instrument with my name on it? Awesome.

> The industry is split into three sections. The people who are working hard to [produce] the best they can. The people who are just [coasting] along. And the people who believe you can buy something for a tenth the cost of something old and it sounds just as good.

> I walk down to the factory constantly. I was down there this morning. I was down there this past weekend carving necks. I like making guitars.

> I get more of a rush from playing guitars than making them. But it would probably be the other way around if I spent more time playing them than making them. I really enjoy playing guitar. Really enjoy it. You can’t get the smile off my face.

> Do I feel like a success? The only way I can answer that question is that on my 40th birthday and my 50th birthday, I felt like celebrating.

> It’s the American dream come true.

Five ideas for winter getaways:

1. Take a Latin food tour
2. Visit Europe (on the Bay)
3. Visit an art gallery
4. Stay at a booklover’s B&B
5. Go (discount) shopping!

Chef David Clark
Julia’s, Centreville, Md.
“I like Joss Café & Sushi Bar in Annapolis. I pretty much let the chef decide what to prepare for me. And I’ll pretty much eat anything there—the sushi, rolls, sashimi; there’s nothing that I don’t like. One of my favorites is the Stop Light Roll, with red, yellow, and green caviar. It’s kind of loud and kind of a crowded place, but I like the electricity of the restaurant itself. I get energized when I’m there.” Joss, 195 Main St., Annapolis. 410-263-4688, http://www.josscafe-sushibar.com


Chef Kevin McKinney
Brooks Tavern, Chestertown, Md.
“If I go out during the weekend, I like Procolino Pizzeria in Chestertown. This is pizza heaven for me. It’s owned and run by two brothers, Sal and Vinny, who have been doing it for 28 years. I usually get the Roll Up—it’s like a calzone—and either a slice of the margarita or garden pizza, with tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, and spinach. They don’t use fancy ingredients, but it’s done right with quality ingredients. The atmosphere is modern and clean, with paintings by Chestertown artist Jimmy Reynolds on the walls and some scenes from Italy. I went around the country for a year and couldn’t wait to get back home to eat their food. I think it’s some of the best pizza going. If I could bring one food with me to a desert island, it might be this pizza.Procolino Pizzeria, 711 Washington Ave., Chestertown, Md. 410-778-5900.


Chef Ian Campbell
Bistro Poplar, Cambridge, Md.
“I like going to Ocean Odyssey Seafood Deli [in Cambridge]. It’s a great place to drink a beer at the bar and get some appetizers. I always get the crab tater tots. They pick all their own crabmeat, and they also sell steamed crabs. I also really like the burger—it’s big and juicy. It’s like going over to my friend’s house, welcoming and not pretentious at all. My wife and I also like to go to Thai Ki in Easton. I get the spicy turmeric beef; she likes to get the red duck curry. I know how well chef Andrew Evans knows Thai food, and I like the flavors he creates.” Ocean Odyssey, 2829 Gypsy Hill Road, Cambridge, Md. 410-228-8633; Thai Ki, 216 Dover St., Easton, Md., 410-690-3641, http://www.thai-ki.com


Chef David McCallum
Tilghman Island Inn, Tilghman, Md.
“What’s so great about [Annapolis’] Jalapenos is that the food is very, very different from the food I do at my inn. I like ethnic food in general, and Spanish food is something that lends itself to conviviality. I really like the chili rellenos, but I eat all over the menu, which is nice because if you’re with a group of friends, you can order lots of things and share. My favorite way to eat is to get as many tastes into the meal as you possibly can. It’s not brightly lit, but you also don’t feel like you have to get out a flashlight to read the menu. You also don’t feel like it’s too formal or that you have to be quiet while you’re there.” Jalapenos, 85 Forest Plaza, Annapolis. 410-266-7580, http://www.jalapenosonline.com


Chef Giancarlo Tondin
Scossa, Easton, Md. 
“One of my favorites is Bistro Poplar. It has a very nice wine list, and the food is appealing. I like the high ceilings, and the bar is a very comfortable place for cocktails before dining. Each table has its own privacy, so it’s a good place for conversation. I like chef Ian Campbell’s duck and gnocchi. He has some good experience having worked at French Laundry in California. And I definitely like Mason’s for lunch. They have a good selection of dishes. I love the crab cakes and the mussels. The atmosphere is so relaxing—it makes you feel like you are on
vacation. Being a restaurant owner myself, I look up to the Mason family for what they’ve been able to deliver for such a long time.” Bistro Poplar, 535 Poplar St., Cambridge, Md. 410-228-4884, bistropoplar. com; Mason’s, 22 S. Harrison St., Easton, Md. 410-822-3204, http://www.masonsgourmet.com


Chef Keith McCord
O’Leary’s Restaurant, Annapolis
“I work all the time, but when I go out, I go to Tsunami. The ambience of eating outside is nice. I usually go with the fresh fish special. I also like the sashimi, the toro or the spider roll. I like the quality of the ingredients and the consistent, good quality of the food. The flavors are not too heavy, and everything’s clean and precise. There’s always something new and inventive on the menu that I haven’t seen before, and as chefs, we’re always looking for something new.” Tsunami, 51 West St., Annapolis. 410-990-9868


Chef Chris Fazio
Ava’s Pizzeria & Wine Bar, St. Michaels, Md.
“I’m one of those guys who likes to belly up to the bar and drink a couple of beers. That’s why I like Legal Spirits. The cream of crab soup is amazing. If I could have that hooked up intravenously, I would. It’s nice and quiet there, dimly lit, and just very comfortable. It’s a great place to unwind. I also like the Washington Street Pub. I always order the Chuck Mangold sandwich [roast beef and onions on sourdough with melted provolone]. It’s greasy and absorbs all the alcohol. There’s just something about sitting at a bar that makes it happen for me.” Legal Spirits, 42 E. Dover St., Easton, Md. 410-820-0765; Washington Street Pub, 20 N. Washington St., Easton, Md. 410-822-9011  


Chef Michael Hollywood
Paul’s Homewood Café, Annapolis
“After I’m through with 12 hours of cooking, I don’t feel like getting dressed up and going to a formal restaurant, so quick and easy food is the theme. With the economy the way it is, I end up getting pizza a lot. On occasion, I go to Rocco’s Pizzeria. I usually get a pie with pepperoni, onions, and mushrooms. I also like the gyros at Chris’ Charcoal Pit. It’s convenient, and they have the traditional Greek gyro with the meat cooked on a stick. It’s a little down-home restaurant with good food.” Rocco’s Pizzeria, 954 Bay Ridge Road, Annapolis. 410-263-9444; Chris’ Charcoal Pit, 1946 West St., Annapolis. 410-266-5200, http://www.chrischarcoalpit.com


Chef Chris DeLaurentiis
Mitchum’s Steakhouse, Trappe, Md.
“I really like Marlin Moon Grille in Ocean City. I like chef Gary Beach’s style—seafood with an eclectic flair. I always order Freddy’s seafood pasta, which has great shrimp, scallops, and crabmeat in a pesto cream sauce. They also have a really good appetizer called Matt’s buffalo shrimp; it’s a spinoff on chicken wings but not heavy on the batter and pretty spicy. You can eat in the fine dining section, but I like to sit at the bar where it’s more casual. It takes an hour to get there from where I live, but it’s worth it. My girlfriend and I make a day of it. We hit the beach and then stop at the restaurant on the way home.” Marlin Moon Grille, 12806 Ocean Gateway, Ocean City, Md. 410-213-1618, http://www.marlinmoongrille.com


Chef Daniel Pochron
Mason’s, Easton, Md.
“I’m only off on Sunday and Monday, which are the two days when most restaurants on the Shore are closed, so it’s hard to eat out. But if I’m going to spend the money, I eat at Bistro St. Michaels. I trust chef David Stein, and I think he’s talented. I like his entree cote steak and spicy wine and garlic broth mussels. And the service is great. When I’m there, I know I’m going to get a good meal, have a good time, and have a great experience. It’s a western shore-caliber restaurant on the Eastern Shore. It’s an intimate place, but when you’re there, you can fly under the radar.” Bistro St. Michaels, 403 S. Talbot St. St Michaels, Md. 410-745-9111, http://www.bistrostmichaels.com

Chocolate is easy to love but can be tricky to work with. Chefs study and work with it for years and still do not get it right. Luckily, these recipes bypass some of the more complicated techniques to minimize your frustration and time.

Before you start, there are some basics you should know: Store chocolate in an airtight container at 60 to 70 degrees. (If you store it in a place that’s too warm, the cocoa butter rises to the surface and gives the chocolate a gray haze; too damp, and the chocolate forms gray sugar crystals on the surface.) If, when melting chocolate, it gets lumpy and hardens, add some vegetable oil and stir the chocolate until smooth.

Bittersweet, semisweet, sweet, milk, and white all refer to chocolate’s makeup. The higher the percentage of cocoa mass, the more intense the chocolate flavor and the least amount of added sugar.

Let’s start with a good old standby recipe that anyone can tackle—chocolate truffles, an after-dinner treat that will even impress the mother-in-law. The little white chocolate tarts with candied lemon rinds are super easy and elegant. The layered mousse cake can be made large or as individual servings for dinner parties. The self-saucing puddings are great because the batter can be made in advance then simply baked for 15 minutes.

So gather up all the bowl- and spoon-licking volunteers you can find. It’ll make cleanup that much easier.

Recipes:

• Self-Saucing Chocolate Pudding with Double Devon Cream
• Layered Chocolate Mousse Cake with Chocolate Sauce and Crème Chantilly
• Chocolate Truffles
• White Chocolate and Lemon Cheese Cake with Candied Lemon Rind

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s Thai Ki.

It’s not easy for a Manhattanite to trade the rapid pulse of the city for the gentle rhythm of the Eastern Shore. But that’s exactly what veteran interior designer Don Wooters did. After being away from his native Easton for 20 years, he returned for an extended visit. While home, former clients began requesting his services, and Wooters soon realized that the Shore potentially held just as much for him as the Big Apple.

Now all that was left was to select a homestead, which he and his partner, Clay Railey, dean of a college in Pennsylvania, found in a cozy, 2,200-square-foot contemporary house in Oxford, filled with light and plenty of room. The pair spent the next four years transforming it into their ideal residence, a space that integrates sophisticated aesthetics with the Shore’s natural beauty. “Our imaginations sold us on the place,” says Railey. “The floor plan wasn’t anything like it is now, but we could imagine how to make it happen.”

Out went the pine-paneled walls, built-in china hutches, and clunky woodstove; in went ebonized floors, a fireplace with black granite surround, and linen-white walls. “When I was in New York, I had
a tiny apartment that was painted in lacquered aubergine,” recalls Wooters, co-owner of Dwelling & Design, an Easton-based interior design boutique. “It was a night time place. But here I have so much light and space that I wanted everything to be white.”

The couple’s art collection was also a driving factor behind Wooters’ choice of wall color. “Clay and I are both enthusiastic about abstract artists, so we created a clean palette for our collection,” says Wooters. “We also put in a lot of key lighting above the paintings, which makes the art come alive. Most winter evenings, the only lights we use in the house are the ones above the paintings and the fireplace.”

Balancing the bold art in the living room are graceful, white Lee Jofa sofas that border the fireplace, which, come Christmastime, is draped with a simple strand of fresh greens. To break up the rectangular shapes that dominate the room, Wooters chose a circular, silver-leaf mirror from McLain Wiesand Custom Built Furniture in Baltimore to occupy the place of honor above the fireplace. The mirror permanently holds the reflection of the ponds and weeping willow trees that sweep over the surrounding grounds.

“Wherever you sit in the living room, you can see outside,” says Railey. “It’s just like you’re sitting in the middle of it all—like living in a glass house.”

To combat clutter in the diminutive kitchen, Wooters designed a wall of well-camouflaged white storage cabinets. He also created an island with a façade of faux, pear wood cabinets and false top, which hides the sink and appliances. To accommodate a dinner party for up to 10 friends, Wooters found a round, glass-top Peter Dudley table. “Seating at round tables is the best way to have conversation,” he says, “that way, everybody’s included.”

“I like the whole open space of the living room, dining room, and kitchen,” adds Railey. “It’s all very fluid and easy, and you’re never away from your guests.”

The living room and kitchen double as a hallway, dividing the guest bedroom wing from the master bedroom wing. It’s in the guestroom where Wooters introduced the whimsy of color to the house. Here apple-green walls, inspired by the Lee Jofa English linen print drapery, bring to life crisp, white linens and artwork ablaze in pastel colors. “I wanted a room where people could see an intense color that they wouldn’t have chosen in their home,” says Wooters. “I wanted to make it an experience.”

In the study, neutral tones once again gently dominate. The room’s icy hues and luxe textures were inspired by a floor-to-ceiling abstract landscape painting that covers the west wall. A Swedish day bed dressed in linen velvet graces the center of the space, where the pair relax for evening cocktails and Clay’s daily exercise of completing The New York Times crossword puzzle. Says Railey: “We can look out on the pond and across to the neighboring fields and pine forests. It’s such a beautiful view of the natural landscape. Between the artwork and the visual space outside, we have all the color in the world.”

Don’t look down—look into my eyes,” says Mark Landers of Segway of Hampton Roads, hovering his Segway PT in front of mine. “You’ll need your horizon.”

Photographer John Sheally and I have never set foot on Segways before, but we’re game to tour Freemason, one of Norfolk’s oldest and most charming neighborhoods, via the battery-powered rolling platforms.

Tucked along the busy Elizabeth River, Freemason was the city’s first suburb, home to some of Norfolk’s most prominent and prosperous citizens dating back into the 18th century.

A Segway tour—a fun experience anytime of the year in usually balmy Norfolk—is a great way to get an up-close look at today’s Freemason, a vibrant neighborhood with new townhouses and condos blending into the vintage architecture along the working waterfront. Museums, restaurants, and bars, many within walking distance of the restored Victorian Freemason Inn, an elegant British-flavored bed and breakfast, make it a uniquely walkable weekend getaway.

Landers wants to assure we survive our turtle-paced (6 mph) trek so he drills us on safety. Hands on the handlebars, lean forward to go, backward to stop, and steer left and right with your body. Seems simple enough. My gaze locks onto Landers’ eyes, and I make a few turns around the parking lot while his assistant, David Sinclair, coaches John through the same basics. And we’re off.

In 10 minutes we’re feeling at one with our rides, gliding along cobblestone streets and brick sidewalks, past 19th-century townhouses overlooking the Elizabeth River, and down quaint side streets of manicured mini-lawns and wrought-iron fences.

We’re following the Cannonball Trail, a heritage walking tour highlighting Norfolk’s history. Since the mid-17th century the city has survived marauding pirates, Revolutionary War bombardments, yellow fever, Civil War occupations, and a persistent reputation as a rowdy sailor hangout.

We ease up our Segways to our first stop, a large Chinese pagoda, a gift from the Taiwan provincial governor in 1989, set amid year-round gardens on the riverfront. The pagoda houses an art gallery and a tearoom serving Pacific Rim cuisine.

On the river we watch the tall-masted American Rover sail on one of its harbor cruises and see the sleek Spirit of Norfolk that combines dining and dancing with river tours of the city and the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet. Pleasure boats mix with tugs, barges, Navy vessels, and an occasional ocean-going cruise ship.

We’re next to one of the riverfront’s largest landmarks, the battleship USS Wisconsin, veteran of World War II and the Korean and Persian Gulf wars. Part of the Navy’s inactive fleet, the ship is open for free tours.

The Wisconsin, connected to the Hampton Roads Naval Museum, is one of a dozen U.S. Navy-operated museums, and features 233 years of naval history. The free museum, displaying uniforms, weaponry, underwater artifacts, and ship models, is on the second floor of Nauticus, the National Maritime Center. Nauticus is a find for families, an interactive museum showcasing all things nautical from shipbuilding to environmental issues as well as a “petting lagoon” and simulated submarine and aircraft carrier experiences.

One of our favorites among Norfolk’s historic sites is the nearby MacArthur Square, a quartet of buildings honoring the legendary Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The admission-free museum, housed in the former city hall, holds thousands of World War II artifacts and MacArthur memorabilia including his corncob pipe and his staff car, a 1950 Chrysler Crown Imperial in mint condition. The general and his wife, Jean, are buried in the museum’s rotunda.

Off our Segways, we thank Landers and head for the Chrysler Museum on the Hague inlet of the Elizabeth, just outside the Freemason section but worth the longer walk. Renowned for its expansive glass collection, the Chrysler is named for automotive heir Walter P. Chrysler, whose art collection is the foundation of the museum’s inventory of 30,000 artworks. Recently, generous benefactors enabled the museum to remove admission fees to its general collection. Special exhibits, such as one on ancient Egyptian art and artifacts, running through early January, will still carry a charge.

Time to shop? In the Freemason area the MacArthur Center, a 1-million-square-foot, three-story mall, boasts shops, theaters, and restaurants. But for a real treat, walk the couple blocks to the D’Art Center in the splendidly restored 1930s Selden Arcade. Dozens of resident artists have studios here—with works for sale—and are happy to chat as they create.

If museums and shopping stir up an appetite, we suggest you try one of Freemason’s numerous restaurants. Options range from casual French (Voila) to Spanish paella (Todd Jurich’s Bistro) to T-bone steaks (Byrd and Baldwin Bros. Steakhouse). Freemason Abbey offers a unique dining experience, mezzanine seating in an 1873 brownstone Victorian church building.

Wherever you end up in Freemason, remember to wear comfy shoes. The charming cobblestone streets, constructed from ballast rocks from colonial sailing ships, can be challenging to walk on in the wrong footwear. Segways, however, glide right over them. 

Phyllis Speidell wrote about Annapolis’ kit homes in our November issue.

Gary Jobson has made a living as sailing’s most dedicated advocate. He won an America’s Cup alongside skipper Ted Turner in 1977, bagged two Emmys for coverage of sailing at the 1988 Olympic Games and the 2006 Volvo Ocean Race, and was honored with US Sailing’s most prestigious award, the Nathanael G. Herreshoff Trophy, for outstanding lifetime contribution to the sport. More recently, he won his toughest competition yet: a two-year battle with lymphoma. In October, CL caught up with Jobson on a rare morning in his Annapolis office to talk about his first sailboat race, a lesson from Ted, and overcoming cancer.

> Sailors have a unique ability to get along with each other. On a boat, those are your brothers and sisters; you’re close.

> Sailors can also be cliquish and often über-competitive —on the water, on land, and in everything they do. As I get older, I am slowly learning that winning at all costs isn’t everything and that what you learn is more important than how you do.

> I’ve been in more than 5,200 races, sailed 62,000 miles, written 16 books, produced 720 television shows, written 900 articles, had 2,350 speaking engagements, and visited 370 out of 1,000 yacht clubs [throughout the world]. 

> My first sailboat race was when I was 6. I crewed on a sneakbox, a 15-foot wooden, gaff-rigged catboat, on Barnegat Bay. I was given three jobs: keep the boat dry with a bucket and sponge, hold the course chart, and don’t ask dumb questions. So it was the first race, and all the boats were behind us. I hadn’t said a peep, the boat was bone dry, and the skipper asked me to point out our next mark, but I didn’t know because the course chart had fallen out of my pocket. We went to the wrong buoy and lost the race. I learned a lesson from that, and for the rest of my life, I’ve always known what the course was and had a goal. 

> It was 2004, and I was lying in the hospital in Baltimore after my stem cell transplant. I was 145 pounds. (I’m now 210.) I was really feeling bad for myself. I started thinking about the sneakbox race and how bad it was to lose the chart. I thought that if I could get out of that jam, maybe I could get out of this jam, too. I then realized I needed a goal. I said to myself, ‘I’m going to get up, and get out of this bed.’ I resolved that if I got out of the jam of being sick, I was going to help people and be more service-oriented. Since then, I’ve helped raise more than $32 million for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

> I’ve lived in Annapolis for 32 years. Annapolis is a town that’s very accepting to newcomers. You don’t have to be born here to be accepted.

> Besides my parents, the person who has most influenced me is Ted Turner. He’s got this incredible work ethic, but what really sets him apart is that he’s a visionary. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from him is that the most successful people are those who do something that hasn’t been done before.

> My scariest moment sailing was in 1964. I was sailing an 111/2-foot Penguin on Barnegat Bay, and this unbelievable storm welled up. This thing was racing across the water—thick, black clouds—and the wind started to build. I was going really fast, and suddenly I lost control and the boat just exploded and capsized. I landed in the water under the sail. Thank goodness I had my life jacket on. The whole thing was over in 10 minutes. As a result, over the years I have erred on the side of caution.

> The first time I did a show for ESPN I had an on-camera with 30 seconds of copy to read. It took 30 takes to get it right. I suddenly realized this wasn’t so easy…

> I never pushed my daughters to sail. All of them were in sailing programs when they were young, but they suffered from the opinion of others that said, ‘You have a famous father, you should be winning.’ It was hard for them to excel because of that. They’ll go cruising anytime, but none of them race.

> The very best sailors are calm in the heat of battle, and I’m sure that translates to their personal lives. It’s the second-tier sailors who scream and yell. I wonder about their character. Great sailors—Dennis Conner,
Ted Hood, Buddy Melges—none of them yell.

> It was 1969, and I wanted to go to a concert with a friend of mine, but the 420 Nationals [a dinghy regatta] was in town. I couldn’t decide what to do, so I asked my dad. He said to go to the regatta, that I could go to a concert anytime. I still can’t believe I chose the 420 Nationals over Woodstock.

When the former owners of piccola Roma, Annapolis’ beloved Main Street Italian restaurant, declared bankruptcy last December, Maureen Lucas, the building’s owner, was in a quandary. Finding someone to reopen the restaurant in this economy was becoming a challenge, yet she needed the income and didn’t want the storefront to sit empty. Lucas’ solution was to reopen Piccola Roma herself, and in August, she became the third owner of this classic restaurant.

Under Lucas’ hand, Piccola Roma has become an example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. Chefs (and brothers) Jose and Ulices Ayala remain in charge of the kitchen, as they have been for nearly 20 years. The Giolitti family, the restaurant’s original owners, now own a deli in town and provide the restaurant with bread.

Lucas has added a few dishes and lowered prices and freshened up the dining room, which now boasts punchy persimmon upholstery and creamier yellow walls than before. But, all in all, it’s the same cozy, slightly old-fashioned dining room, featuring the equivalent of Italian comfort food: bruschetta and grilled calamari, penne a la Bolognese, and spaghetti carbonara (the latter by request), and lots of seafood-spiked pastas, albeit with a revamped, all-Italian wine list.

Lucas also has added carpaccio, sautéed mussels, and crabmeat-stuffed mushrooms to the antipasti menu, and while the mushrooms aren’t particularly Italian, they are particularly tasty. Stuffed with decent lumps of crab, little crumb, and a touch of garlic, they are reminiscent of something you’d find on the appetizer plate at a gourmet hostess’ party. Another appetizer, grilled radicchio, looked a little tired (grilling it chars the limp leaves), but its flavor was nicely bitter and a fine match for the salty, lumpy gorgonzola sauce that accompanied it. 

We passed on Piccola Roma’s pasta choices and instead debated among the grilled beef fillet stuffed with prosciutto, spinach, and goat cheese, the veal scaloppine, and a sautéed chicken with prosciutto and mozzarella before deciding on the pesce di giorno al cartoccio, the catch of the day. In this case, the fish was halibut, cooked in parchment with mussels, scallops, tomatoes, olives, and herbs. It’s a simple dish, fresh tasting and uncomplicated but perhaps slightly overpriced at $32, given its modest size. Lobster ravioli stuffed with the shellfish and mascarpone cheese, on the other hand, was rich and unctuous in its vodka cream sauce.

The night we dined, desserts included cheesecake and apple tart, but when I asked if it was possible to order just one or two of the biscotti that decorated the dessert tray to go with my espresso, I was warmly assured it was no problem. This was representative of the restaurant’s service—courtly and professional. When I asked about an unfamiliar wine, our server insisted on bringing a sample to the table. And although this same server seemed to be taking care of the entire dining room, we never felt rushed or neglected.

Piccola Roma is not going to impress with innovation or modern takes on traditional food. It still borders on being expensive, and nothing will bowl you over with originality, but it’s comfortable and old school in the best sense, and there’s not a thing wrong with that. Welcome back to Main Street.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

Cookbooks are much more than simply collections of recipes. They are a cultural archive of the times, a reflection of tastes and trends. Here are 10 regional cookbooks, published between the 1930s and the present day. Their authors include a former first lady of Maryland, the vice president of a defunct piano company, a couple of restaurateurs, members of a local junior league, and a guy who tests his recipes in something called a ‘crab lab.’ All reflect the time and place in which they were written and include recipes inspired by the bounty of the Bay.

Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland

Compiled by Frederick Philip Stieff, 1932

THE SKINNY: “Eat, Drink and Be Merry in Maryland” is Frederick Philip Stieff’s love letter to Maryland’s gastronomic traditions. Compiled in 1932 when Stieff was vice president of the piano company that bore his family’s name, Stieff mines the state’s culinarians, including home cooks, restaurant managers, and many African-American domestics, for their local specialties.

QUOTABLE: In order to capture the spirit of both the cook and the recipe, instructions are written in conversational and often frank language without a separate list of ingredients. A recipe for frogs legs from W.T. Emory, manager of the Log Inn on the Chesapeake in Annapolis, advises that, “Frogs should be served right after they are killed.” Stieff’s headnotes for the recipes reflect his devotion to the state’s local bounty: “Maryland seafood properly cooked is all that the most exacting palate can demand. The pleasure it gives can be augmented only by indulgence within the sight of its famous origin—the great Chesapeake Bay.”

RECIPES HIGHLIGHTS: Oysters have their own chapter, as does a section devoted to “The Cooking and Stuffing of Hams and the Curing of Meats,” but it’s the “Jellies, Preserves, and Pickles” chapter that offers such long-forgotten comestibles as calves’ foot or isinglass jellies and cucumber catsup.

A Cook’s Tour of the Eastern Shore

Prepared by the Junior Auxiliary of Memorial Hospital of Easton, Md., 1948 (first printing)

THE SKINNY: This quintessential community cookbook captures an era when hostesses served punch and women used their husband’s first and last names prefaced by “Mrs.” as their own. The charm of the cookbook lies in trying to identify how many hands transcribed the book’s handwritten recipes and numbered pages, or the artist behind the sweet pen-and-ink drawings like a rabbit relaxing in a frying pan.

QUOTABLE: The game section fascinates with recipes for rabbit, dove, muskrat “tred avon,” and a short discourse on the difference between wild ducks you eat and so-called “trash ducks.” (The text admits, “you eat trash ducks too, but there is some difference in the cooking process,” namely, a soaking in salted water “to remove the strong-
tasting blood.”)

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Mrs. Kenneth B. Millett offers an easy refrigerator cake that through the magic of gelatine [sic] and separated, thickly beaten egg whites and yolks, requires no baking. Just as unusual—but perhaps more appealing—is Mrs. William T. Hammond’s white potato pie spiced with brandy and nutmeg.

My Favorite Maryland Recipes

Mrs. J Millard Tawes, 1964

THE SKINNY: Written during her tenure as Maryland’s first lady (1959-1967), Helen Avalynne Tawes’ “My Favorite Maryland Recipes” simultaneously invokes the traditional food of her Crisfield upbringing and the days of formal dinner parties—like the one she and the governor hosted in honor of then Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960—that began with a fresh fruit cup and ended with mints. The cookbook was no mere side project for a governor’s wife; Tawes loved cooking. In her introduction, she calls it her “avocation.” She was committed to preserving old Maryland recipes she learned from her mother and mother-in-law and spoke to her readers as fellow cooks.

QUOTABLE: The most endearing quality of this cookbook is Tawes’ voice, which reveals itself in homespun language, like, “A girl just wasn’t worth her cooking salt unless she knew how to make terrapin soup” or “Crab cannot be enhanced, only complemented” and the small descriptive asides she adds to her recipes (kidney bean salad is described as “sounds very plebian but really delicious!”).

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Although Mrs. Tawes includes detailed instructions for Maryland-cooked muskrat, most of her recipes reflect a less rustic, though thoroughly Eastern Shore sensibility (see pink rhubarb sherbet, sweet pickled watermelon, fried cucumbers).

Maryland Seafood Cookbook volumes I-III

From the Maryland Department of Seafood and Aquaculture (formerly the Office of Seafood Marketing), 1980s

THE SKINNY: You don’t necessarily associate the Maryland state government with culinary prowess, but in the early 1980s, the state’s Office of Seafood Marketing published three paperback volumes of seafood recipes that became popular enough to be reissued in the mid-’90s. (All three volumes are available for sale at marylandseafood.org/cookbooks.) Volume I covered “traditional tidewater recipes,” featuring Maryland favorites like crabs and oysters. Volume II tapped into the restaurant community with 93 recipes from Maryland chefs, while Volume III ventured into 1980s “contemporary cooking techniques,” offering microwave-friendly seafood preparations.

QUOTABLE: Volume II, in particular, is a snapshot of Maryland seafood restaurant history with recipe contributions from venerable spots like Oxford’s Robert Morris Inn (oysters a la Gino) and now closed favorites like Busch’s Chesapeake Inn in Annapolis or the Quarterdeck Restaurant in Ocean City, accompanied by pen and ink sketches of the old buildings.

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Volume I’s six recipes for crab imperial invite a week of recipe tasting with one day off for rest!

Mrs. Kitching’s Smith Island Cookbook

Frances Kitching and Susan Stiles Dowell, 1981

THE SKINNY: An intimate glimpse into the rhythm of Smith Islanders’ daily lives that’s part social history, part cookbook. Arranged by season, the book offers the basics on cleaning bluefish and shucking oysters to the difference between clams and manos or soft-shell clams. It is less about Mrs. Kitching herself than of the community in which her (now-closed) restaurant flourished, but it is through her homey recipes and Susan Stiles Dowell’s lyrical prose that we come to know Mrs. Kitching and Smith Island itself.

QUOTABLE: The book is peppered with local tales like “Eddie’s famous shark story,” in which Eddie Evans caught a huge shark when the fishermen from Crisfield told him what he’d been seeing in the water was really a stingray.

RECIPES HIGHLIGHTS: While the recipe for Mrs. Kitching’s 10-Layer Smith Island cake (possibly the original recipe made without the now-common Duncan Hines cake mix) is not in the cookbook (it can be found on the Smith Island website, smithisland.org), you can find recipes for Eastern Shore comfort food like stewed crabmeat and dumplings and homemade scrapple made from pork liver and lean salt pork. Mrs. Kitching’s fig cake makes use of homemade fig preserves, a result of the island’s bounty of fresh fruit in the summer.

From a Lighthouse Window: Recipes and Recollections

From the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland, 1989

THE SKINNY: The use of “recollections” in the subtitle is apt, as this volume is as much a history lesson as it is a cookbook. Divided roughly into two halves, the first part is a compendium of historic photos, stories, and recipes like the (non-edible) mast glop, a combination of varnish, boiled linseed oil, and turpentine used to coat boat masts. The second half of the book reflects the culinary evolution of the Eastern Shore, with mostly contemporary recipes that include ingredients like tamari soy sauce and capers interspersed with regional recipes, such as Southern Maryland stuffed ham or ones featuring local ingredients like silver queen corn in a corn souffle.

QUOTABLE: The book relates the famous story of when little Mary Jane Haddaway spilled peas down Harry S. Truman’s back at a lodge on Jefferson (Poplar) Island, and the president quipped: “Aw, hell, honey, don’t worry about it. You’ll have a story to tell your grandchildren.”

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Some of the historic recipes are associated with families who have lived on the Eastern Shore since the 19th century, like Mildred Kemp’s secret ingredient crab soup (the secret ingredient is a pinch of sugar), created at Wade’s Point Farm, today known as Wade’s Point Inn.

Chesapeake Bay Cooking

John Shields, 1990

THE SKINNY: With his boyish good looks and easy charm, it’s no wonder chef John Shields garnered an audience for his Chesapeake Bay Cooking television show on PBS. But it was his “Chesapeake Bay Cooking,” the show’s inspiration, that launched regional Eastern Shore cooking into a national spotlight in the early ’90s.

QUOTABLE: Narrated with folksy good humor, Shields takes readers on a tour of maritime Maryland, introducing them to local cooks like St. Mary’s native Joanne Pritchett, who admits that when she’s preparing to make authentic beaten biscuits, she gets herself “good and mad” by thinking about her sister-in-law who ran off with her husband after her grandmother’s funeral, a thought that “galls [her] into making some of the tenderest biscuits around.”

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Shields ranges all over the region for his recipes, including instructions for peppery South of the Mason Dixon greens and a mace cake whose flavor is so addictive, Shields concludes, that mace must be a drug. Alva Crockett, the three-term former mayor of Tangier Island, dictates a recipe for Tangier Island clam chowder that calls for 50—count ’em—clams.

Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen

The Episcopal Church Women of St. Paul’s Parish, 1993, 3rd edition

THE SKINNY: The original 1962 edition of “Queen Anne Goes to the Kitchen,” bound in cardboard covers and held together with metal rings, was created as a fundraiser and contained recipes contributed by families in this historic parish, originally founded in the 17th century as Chester Church, just outside of Centreville. The 1993 edition celebrates the parish’s 300th anniversary of its official establishment by the Vestry Act of 1692. It’s a thoughtful volume, divided into sensible chapters like Seafood, Bread, Pickles and Jams, Poultry, and Game, and the pages are interspersed with snippets of prayer, information about the church, and drawn renderings of parish architecture or church symbols.

QUOTABLE: In a recipe for Maryland beaten biscuits from the first edition, a line instructs: “beat batter hard for 20 minutes with the back end of an axe.”

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: As would be expected, the third edition reflects a more contemporary cooking sensibility, listing taco pie and golden nuggets, aka, chicken fingers, as well as more formal recipes, like the one for “real paté,” and the very old-fashioned and traditional Truitt family recipe for sweet pone. You can even find recipes for the date bars and peanut blossoms from the annual St. Paul’s Cookie Exchange.

The Chesapeake Bay Crabbiest Cookbook

Whitey Schmidt, 2000

THE SKINNY: When you’re a self-proclaimed “blue crab guru” and “crustacean sage,” one of your 10 Chesapeake Bay-based cookbooks has to be dedicated to crabs, right? Whitey Schmidt’s “The Chesapeake Bay Crabbiest Cookbook” is just that and more. Schmidt includes traditional preparations like Eastern Shore crab fritters and 19(!) recipes for the crispy soft shells whose photo graces the book’s dust jacket.

QUOTABLE: Schmidt peppers his book with crab-related photos (check out the shot of his son’s crab tattoo) and colorful tidbits and opinions about Chesapeake crab culture, including this nugget of crustacean logic:?“If Maryland is for crabs and Virginia is for lovers, then the Chesapeake Bay must be for crab lovers.”?

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: Schmidt tests all of his recipes in his Crisfield kitchen “crab lab,” so you can trust his instructions from avocado soup with lump crab to crab-stuffed zucchini bowlers wharf. Bohemia River crab stew calls for leeks, crab roe, crab meat, sherry, cream, and egg yolks. Tile Bridge crab casserole includes cooked lobster and artichoke hearts as well as crab. What’s not to like?

A Thyme to Entertain: Menus and Traditions of Annapolis

The Junior League of Annapolis, 2007

THE SKINNY: Compiled by members of Annapolis’ Junior League, the book’s menus are designed around entertaining, from a steeplechase picnic to a graduation celebration to a football tailgate.

QUOTABLE: Hostess tips for various events appear throughout. “When entertaining for a racing event make sure your table decor is upscale. Use your best linens, china, and silver…Ladies, don’t forget your finest hats. Men should wear seersucker suits and leave their socks at home.”

RECIPE HIGHLIGHTS: The recipes themselves aren’t entirely regional, though, you will find Eastern Shore chicken salad and some locally named recipes, like Kent Island Dessert Cheese Ball and St. Michaels Fruit Delight. Many recipes are quick and use shortcuts. The ever-popular whiskey cake, for example, calls for vanilla instant pudding mix and a generous amount of whiskey to doctor up a yellow cake mix base—a reflection, perhaps, of the busy life of today’s hostesses.

Mary K. Zajac treasures her small library of regional cookbooks.
All cookbooks are still available through local libraries or online retailers.

Tucked away on a winding country road midway between Chestertown and Rock Hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore lies St. Paul’s Episcopal Parish, more than 300 years old, with its picture-perfect, cozy brick church and surrounding 19-acre graveyard. One late afternoon when I visited, the serenity of the place was broken only by the chorus of ducks and geese enjoying the adjacent millpond. I was wandering the graveyard and having trouble finding a particular tombstone—the final resting spot of the turbulent, talented, and scandalous Tallulah Bankhead, star of stage, film, radio, and television from the 1920s until her death in 1968.

That the denizen of the Stork Club and other Manhattan watering holes who boasted “I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess” should end up in a quiet country churchyard in Kent County seems ironic; but her sister, Eugenia, who lived on a nearby farm, insisted. The pair, who had a contentious love/hate relationship during their lives, now lie side by side in the graveyard.

I was not the first person to look for Tallulah’s grave. Far from it. Sue Reep, the church secretary at St. Paul’s, laughed as she told me, “If I had a nickel for everyone who asked me where she was I’d be rich. You wouldn’t believe how many come.” According to Reep there’s a steady stream of visitors to the churchyard who venerate the once-great actress as a kind of cult figure and often leave bottles of bourbon (her favorite drink) or flowers atop her flat stone.

The celebrity’s grave is at the very edge of the churchyard, next to a stretch of woods and beneath a spreading tulip poplar—and about as far as you can
get from the church itself. Small wonder: The occupant of the grave supposedly never set foot in the church during her lifetime. 

And what a lifetime it was. The whole world knew her by her first name—“Tallulah”—a celebrity of the brightest magnitude and the highest paid actress of her day. She had a deep, smoky voice immediately recognizable to millions—a voice, in the words of a fellow actor, “steeped as deep in sex as the human voice can go without drowning.” She talked nonstop. One stunned listener said memorably: “I’ve just spent an hour talking to Tallulah for a few minutes.”

The actress famously doffed her clothes at parties, swore like a longshoreman, and was rarely seen without a cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other. And then there were the drugs. “Cocaine isn’t habit-forming,” she once said. “I should know. I’ve been using it for years.” She laughed with abandon but was heartbreakingly lonesome, despite the entourage she surrounded herself with—as the years went on, mainly handsome, young gay men (she referred to them as her “caddies”), who fetishized her campy, over-the-top style.

Family life drew her to the Eastern Shore. Her nephew Billy, now in his late 60s, still runs a sheep farm in Rock Hall with his wife, Cindy. Both are regulars at Chestertown’s farmers market on Saturday mornings and I’ve enjoyed their delicious lamb chops and lamb sausage.

Billy has long since given up talking publicly about his famous aunt, but Cindy still speaks fondly of Tallulah. Though “diva-ish,” Cindy says, “she was very sweet and kind. Quirky. And demanding. I remember when she was trying to quit smoking, she insisted that someone sit next to her and blow smoke in her face.” (She never was able to break the habit.)

Cindy told me that blue-eyed Tallulah gave her permission to name her newborn daughter after the actress, with one proviso: “If her eyes turn brown, I have to rename her.” She was, of course, immediately smitten with the baby and referred to her thereafter as “my darling namesake Tallulah.”

Locals still recall the celebrity with affection. When Jim Messersmith and Barry Barr used to visit Rock Hall by boat, they’d hear stories of Tallulah’s exploits from the owner of the local marina. They were instantly hooked—so much so that when they established a hotel in 1999, they named it in her honor, Tallulah’s on Main. Its “Bankhead Suite,” appropriately enough, sports a queen-sized brass bed. (They didn’t come any brassier than Tallulah.) And a reproduction of Augustus John’s well-known painting of the actress (the original is at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery) hangs in the hotel’s parlor. Dressed in pale pink and pearls, her arms demurely folded, her heavy-lidded blue eyes looking downward, the young Tallulah appears both beautiful and sad.

Messersmith regaled me with stories about the actress in Rock Hall. She was known to do her food shopping at Myers Brothers, a small grocery store long since closed, that was next to the hotel.The grocers happily catered to Tallulah’s needs. If she placed an order by 9 a.m., they promised that she’d get whatever specialty item she needed from Manhattan by 5 p.m.—the bus driver would hand-deliver it.Stories about her continue to make the rounds: Tallulah in a duck blind dressed in mink and pearls (no camo for her), and flying with Kent County’s Louisa Carpenter, a DuPont heiress and early aviatrix.

Cindy Bankhead is not entirely convinced by some of the tales, remembering instead how Tallulah “liked to be inside” where she’d play cards with her sister, Eugenia, and entertain friends. The biggest chunk of time Tallulah spent in Kent County was during the last summer of her life. She stayed for several months after the ceiling of her New York apartment collapsed in July 1968. Cindy recalls that the siblings spent much of the time arguing over childhood grievances, continuing a life-long rivalry over their father’s affections. (William Bankhead, a powerful U.S. congressman from Alabama and Speaker of the House from 1936-40, supposedly preferred Eugenia to Tallulah, and the latter never forgot it—nor forgave her sister.)

Not long after her return to New York, Tallulah contracted Asian flu; that combined with the emphysema that she suffered from proved fatal. She died in December at age 66, her sister at her side. Leaving the world in melodramatic style, Tallulah’s last words were “Codeine ... bourbon.” Wrapped in a favorite dressing gown, her coffin lined in baby blue silk, Tallulah was buried at St. Paul’s; Eugenia threw herself on her sister’s casket during the service. Tallulah wanted her favorite motto, “Press On!” inscribed on her tombstone, but her sister won that final battle: The flat stone simply states the star’s name and the dates of her life span.

Even in death Tallulah continues to mesmerize. At least seven biographies have been written about her since 1968, and she’s been portrayed onstage by both Kathleen Turner in “Tallulah,” and Valerie Harper in “Looped,” the latter earning accolades this past summer at Washington’s Arena Stage. The play may yet end up on Broadway this fall. Tallulah, no doubt, would be thrilled.

Donna M. Lucey is the author of “Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age.”

Really, who doesn’t like cheese? Silly question—everyone seems to in one form or another. Chefs often joke that if we want to sell a dish, just add cheese!

In my quest to come up with cheese-oriented dishes for this column, I decided to develop recipes in which cheese becomes the main focus of the dish, from appetizer to dessert, with proper accompaniments and flavor pairings.
 
The first recipe is a salad of greens, sliced pears, and crostini topped with a melted, Italian goat cheese called Nocetto di Capra. It’s a perfect example of a soft, ripened cheese, slightly sweet, with a velvety texture. Next is the sautéed gnocchi with a cheese sauce made from Fontina, a semi-soft, cow’s milk cheese that becomes more pungent as it ages. It’s an Italian favorite for its melting abilities. The cheese course is a little nontraditional, served with stewed fruit and oatmeal and hazelnut crisps—both perfect accompaniments to the Australian Roaring Forties Blue Cheese, which has honey notes, and is super creamy from being aged in wax.

Lastly, I picked a trifle of pound cake, caramelized peaches, and mascarpone cheese for dessert. Mascarpone is a cultured cheese, produced without aging or introducing bacteria. Sweet but tangy, it’s a great substitute for traditional pastry cream. So there you have it—four very different dishes but all with a chef’s best secret in common.

Recipes:

• Mixed Greens, Pears, Radishes, and Warm Goat Cheese Crostini
• Vanilla Poached Dried Fruits, Hazelnut Oatmeal Crisps, and Roaring Forties Blue Cheese
• Sautéed Gnocchi, Poached Egg, and Fontina Cheese Sauce
• Caramelized Peach Trifle with Crema di Mascarpone

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s Thai Ki.

I honestly remember being a better shot than this. In my mind’s eye, the last time I fired a gun, I picked off clay pigeons like a modern-day Daniel Boone. But now I feel as if I couldn’t hit the back end of a brontosaurus at 20 paces.

“Which is your dominant eye?” asks Ken Schrader, owner of Schrader’s Bridgetown Manor and my trapper, or “clay caddie,” for the afternoon.

“My left,” I reply, “but I’m right-handed.”

“There’s your problem,” he says. “You should be shooting lefty.”

The sensation of shouldering the Bereta .391 shotgun left-handed feels as awkward as following someone else’s lead on the dance floor, but I consent to give it a try.

“Pull,” I order feebly.

And wouldn’t you know it? I blast that clay—and the next three—to smithereens.

“Well, there you go,” says Schrader. “You’re a lefty.”

I have to give Schrader credit for his suggestion, but then, this is a guy who’s been guiding hunters and instructing greenhorns like me in marksmanship for 30 years. Now a boyish 45, at 16 years old he was already leading executives from McCormick Spice Co., Hardees, and other corporations on Eastern Shore hunting trips.

In 2004, he opened his own sportsmen’s retreat on 80 acres in Henderson in Caroline County. The massive 11-bedroom building itself, vaguely modeled after Mount Vernon, was built in 1989 as a private hunting club and literally appears to have been dropped among the cornfields. Schrader has been fixing up the exterior since he bought it but so far has left the decidedly motel-like guestrooms pretty much the same.

Of course, you don’t visit a hunting lodge to hang out inside, and Schrader provides guests with ample opportunity to get outdoors. He leases more than 25,000 acres on the Eastern Shore for hunting and offers guide services for a zoo of animals from upland birds (pheasant, chukar, quail, partridge) to waterfowl and whitetail deer. (The conservation-minded Schrader requires that hunters shoot only mature bucks with at least eight-point racks and no does.) He can also arrange fishing trips on the Bay and bass fishing in several nearby ponds. Also on the property is a 3-D archery course, in which archers shoot at foam, life-size targets of deer, wild boar, turkey, and other critters from varying distances and heights. It’s a unique experience, and at $12 per round of 30 targets, a very fun bargain. 

And then there’s the mile-long sporting clays course. “It’s like golf with a gun,” Schrader says as we make our way through the course’s 16 stations on a golf cart.

I continue my good luck on “Too Tall,” in which clays are triggered remotely from a 100-foot-tall tower and shooters must aim up at a 60-degree angle. But I return to my earlier futile ways at the next station where the clays fly low and quick from one edge of a wooded clearing to another. Throughout it all, the always upbeat Schrader offers his encouragement: “It’s a mind game. Don’t think about it. Follow the target, not the end of your gun. Follow through.” And finally, after another miss: “Hmm,
there must not have been any shot in that shell.”

It’s clear he’s instructed newbies before. “We take people who have never picked up a gun before to master shooters—some of the very best in the U.S. shoot here,” he says, noting that nearly a fifth of his clients are women. He also gets a lot of D.C. politicos, including a visit several years ago from the Joint Chiefs of Staff who went duck hunting. (No, there haven’t been any hunting incidents involving Dick Cheney.) Then there was the time one of his guides took Shaquille O’Neal goose hunting and the basketball star was too tall to keep his head from poking above the blind.

But everyone, Schrader says, no matter who they are, tends to leave with an appreciation for an Eastern Shore tradition. “They could be sitting out in a field and can’t believe they have all this [beauty] around them,” he says. “They love the atmosphere and love to live the Eastern Shore way.”

Schrader’s Bridgetown Manor offers a variety of packages involving sporting clays, hunting, and/or fishing. Most include accommodations and dinner at the manor house. See schradershunting.com or call 410-758-1824 for complete information.

The early november morning has turned from cold to downright bitter. The north wind whistles ominously, and boulders of gray clouds glower above us. But the hail pounding the deck of the Martha Lewis isn’t ice—it’s a torrent of native Chesapeake oysters, pouring from the jaws of a rusty dredge to the scuffed floorboards in front of us. My fellow sailors and I, new hands on an old skipjack, have a single task: to tear through the muddy load, locate the biggest shells, and earn some profit for our passage.

A half-century ago, this icy excursion would have been an average day on the Martha Lewis. Since her launch in 1955, the 82-foot-long skipjack has navigated the oyster beds of the Chesapeake, probing reefs increasingly ravaged by overfishing, parasites, and disease. Now one of Maryland’s few remaining working skipjacks, she survives as a living museum operated by the Chesapeake Heritage Conservancy, as a classroom for estuarine studies and environmental exploration.

Each autumn, the conservancy offers a rare window on the gritty reality of the waterman’s existence: half a dozen day trips for adventurers eager to experience a working skipjack. Unique among other Martha Lewis excursions, which also include educational tours for kids, Mother’s Day tea cruises, and “Margaritaville” sunset tours, the Discovery Dredge sails give participants a real-life lesson on how oysters are harvested from the Bay. The daunting list of passenger instructions—“Bring boots, brimmed and cold-weather hats, heavy-duty rain gear, gloves, and a change of clothes” —is our first hint that our day on the water might be more blue collar than bucolic.

We board the Martha lewis at Markel’s Boat Yard in South Baltimore (her permanent berth is in Havre de Grace) and find a knot of staffers prodding the motor that would pull the dredges from the water. With coaxing from Capt. Greg Shinn, volunteer crewman Gary High and executive director Cindi Beane, the engine eventually sputters and manages a phlegmy roar. Shinn slams the cover, bounds toward the ship’s wheel, and gives the order to cast off. Our destination is Seven Foot Knoll, a licensed oyster bed just a few miles east of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Beane, now in her 10th year with the Chesapeake Heritage Conservancy, remarks that Martha Lewis passengers always praise the flavor of the fresh-from-the-Bay catch. “You can’t get a better tasting oyster,” she affirms, and announces to applause that there will be hot oyster stew for all hands at lunch—and two dozen oysters for each of us to take home at the end of the day.

When we reach the Patapsco River, the crew hoists Martha’s mighty 65-foot-tall sail. As regulations stipulate, we will be taking our oyster catch under wind power alone, without any on-board propulsion. The expanse of canvas looks several centuries out of place against the industrial bulk of Sparrows Point, which looms darkly on the horizon.

Shinn directs our group of six below deck, where bins overflow with waterproof overalls, rubberized work gloves, and kneepads. Kneepads? “You’ll want those when you’re kneeling,” he advises. “Those oyster shells are sharp.”

The Martha Lewis takes in nine or 10 bushels during an average Discovery Dredge trip. Some go to restaurants in Havre de Grace for $70 each, to support the work of the conservancy. But catches are puny compared to those of experienced watermen, says High. “We worked all day once next to another skipjack,” he relates. “The day after, the captain asked me, ‘How’d you do yesterday?’ ‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Nine bushels.’ ‘Well, you tried,’ he replied. Turned out they’d gotten 150.”

In the cabin, I yank on well-worn rain pants and gloves and waddle back to the main deck, where Shinn is explaining the operation of the two large rakes, or dredges, that would soon be lowered to the Bay bottom.

The 5-foot-wide dredges, one on each side of the boat, drag the bottom as the skipjack moves across the reef, pushing the oysters into an attached rope basket. After a brief pass, the motorized winch raises the rake and basket, which opens, dumping the contents on the deck. That’s our cue. With our culling tools—rusty iron pokers with prongs at the 3-inch mark, the minimum size at which oysters can be harvested—we are to attack the heap, quickly sorting the largest oysters into bushel baskets and piling discards to be pushed back into the Bay.

“Remember—keep away from the ropes!” Shinn calls as the first haul emerges from the water. The jaws open, disgorging gallons of icy water and a load of blackened bivalves, which hit the deck like a fusillade.

The grimy pile is a far cry from restaurant oysters. These are rough hunks the size of bowling balls, studded with mussels, mud crabs, blennies, and other residents of the reef. We kneel down and dig in, hacking the clumps into single oysters. “Just scrape off the big stuff,” High urges. I quickly discover that most of the catch falls far short of the 3-inch minimum, and toss the rejects in the direction of Liz and Joelle, fellow watermen wannabes, who shovel them overboard. On the starboard side, another team is doing the same.

Within minutes, we’ve culled a dozen keepers from that first mountain of shell. They fill barely a quarter of a bushel basket. The rakes swing out and disappear into the waves for the next haul. Panting, we brush the muck from our gloves, wipe our dripping noses, and smile at each other with a shared realization: This is one tough way to make a living.

Writer Carol Denny will never swallow another oyster without an appreciation for the hard, cold effort it took to bring it to her plate.

It’s hard to be the second sibling. Parenting ismore casual, less neurotic. Folks are always comparing you to the older child. And you get the second choice of bedrooms. It’s been a little like that for Hell Point Seafood, Washington, D.C., restaurateur Bob Kinkead’s new restaurant in Annapolis. Expectations have run high and reaction—from local media to foodie chat boards—has been mixed since its opening in June. So it’s not Kinkead’s. Neither was Bobby, John, or Teddy, Bobby.

Hell Point occupies the former Phillips at the end of Dock Street, and while the menu is certainly more innovative, the interior still has a somewhat corporate feel. With its cocoa and sage walls and abundant glossy white trim, the upstairs dining room feels ready for a Pottery Barn photo shoot. Tables aside the long row of windows overlook a parking lot (and a bit of water, if you’re facing westward) where a parade of skateboarders, dog walkers, and tourists cross by. Several times someone looking familiar would enter the dining room, only for us to realize we had glimpsed them in the parking lot just minutes before.

Hell Point’s menu is full of familiar dishes (and a few new faces), too. Grilled salmon rubs fins with fresh Maine lobster roll, and the obligatory jumbo lump crab cake shares mention with spice-rubbed rare tuna. Unintentionally, almost everything we ordered turned out to be fried, though a more careful look at the menu could have avoided that. We could have chosen curried mussels instead of a rice flour-dusted Thai squid with lime-chile dipping sauce or grilled swordfish instead of soft-shell crabs. But we couldn’t pass up the prospect of fried clams and cornmeal-crusted flounder.

The fat clam bellies were juicy good and served nestled with thin slices of fried lemons in a linen napkin turned out like a blossom. I wish, however, they hadn’t been burdened with so much batter which sloughed off like a shell. And their $16 price tag towers over the other appetizers on the menu.

The flounder turned out to be more crunch than fish; it too got lost in its batter. But the last of the season’s softcrabs, crusted in masa, were as sweet and as good as they should be, and the dish’s accompaniments—a brightly flavored corn puree and a gorgeously light scallion spoon bread—made me want to reach across the table and eat from my companion’s plate.

Though we were tempted by several desserts—peach tarte tatin with pistachio ice cream, chocolate pot de crème—we chose a disappointingly dry hazelnut tart, more crust than filling, whose promised chocolate praline sauce, turned out to be three small dots of soft chocolate at the edge of the plate.

Hell Point has a young staff, but our server was eager to please, going out of her way to track down a specific bottle of beer the bartender thought was out of stock and graciously mixing a half decaf coffee on request. Behind us, another server treated older clients with care and very young ones with humor, offering high-fives as the preschoolers left with their parents. An Annapolis restaurant is going to need this kind of balance in order to make the wide range of guests the city hosts—from tourists to politicians to Naval Academy faculty—feel welcome and eat comfortably. And unlike its more refined older sibling, I think Hell Point has a chance to do that.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

Great Oak Manor
10568 Cliff Road
Chestertown, Md.
410-778-5943
GreatOak.com

Standing in front of the great oak manor, I feel downright Lilliputian next to the grand Georgian manor house, a celebration of symmetry and all things highbrow. Turning the slick brass handle of the massive front door, I find myself in the main parlor, where a delicious dose of quiet and Charlie, a golden retriever puppy, welcome me. Not far behind him is my hostess, Cassandra Fedas, who owns the inn with her husband, John. “This is a place where people come to rejuvenate,” she says. “You can be as busy as you want to be—you can get into all kinds of sports or you can vegetate on the hammock by the water. It’s also a romantic place. Lots of people come for anniversaries. We used to give out champagne for every guest’s birthday, but we stopped when we realized we were handing out eight bottles every night.”

It’s neither my birthday nor an anniversary, but the idea of sipping a little bubbly in front of a fireplace makes me think the Great Oak Manor will suit me just fine.

THE INNKEEPERS After 17 years as a TWA flight attendant, Cassandra decided to turn in her wings for nerves of steel and open an inn. “About 20 years ago, John and I became really interested in the B&B lifestyle,” says Cassandra. “It was a natural for us. I was used to taking care of 300 people on a 747 going across the ocean, and John’s family worked in the restaurant
industry. But this was more interesting.” 

In 2002, they purchased Great Oak Manor, a 1938 Georgian-style, 15,000-square-foot house that had been open as a B&B since the late ‘40s. “I deal with the guests and the employees,” says Cassandra, a native of Catonsville. “John handles the accounting, weddings, corporate guests—and the landscaping. Like most B&B owners, we do everything ourselves.”

THE ROOMS Of the inn’s 12 rooms (most named for former owners of the house), there are two roomy suites (the Roese and the Sterling suites), seven have water views, and five boast working fireplaces. Each is decorated in a period theme, dressed with Williamsburg paint colors, replica antiques, and private baths. The couple’s private collection of oil paintings hangs throughout the inn.

SPECIAL TOUCHES/DIVERSIONS Cassandra and John keep a fleet of bikes and kayaks at the inn, where a petite indoor pool is open year-round. Sports fans can play 18 holes at the nearby Chester River Golf Club, sail on the Bay, or kayak on the Chester River. During fall, guests need not go any farther than the fields surrounding the inn to see thousands of migratory birds en route southward. (Don’t miss the bald eagle that makes a daily appearance in the sky above the inn’s back lawn.) Shoppers can kill a few hours in downtown Chestertown, just 10 minutes away, where restaurants, clothing boutiques, art galleries, and the Prince Theatre dot High and Cross streets. 

WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST Cassandra serves as the inn’s head chef. Her morning menu includes fruit, homemade breads and pastries, yogurt, cereal, waffles, sausage, and crab quiche, her signature dish. “It’s a huge meal,” says Cassandra. “Most people don’t have room for lunch.”

ROMANCE FACTOR This is a sprawling country inn where kids aren’t allowed and cell phone reception is spotty, so use your imagination. 

COST $185 to $310. Throughout winter and early spring, guests can enjoy live jazz performances by Centreville musician Stefan Scaggiari, followed by a five-course dinner. Call for dates and rates.

In the early 20th century, do-it-yourself kit homes helped fuel the spread of suburbia. Now, with appreciation for the simple and sturdy houses on the rise, an expert tours Annapolis, searching for kit homes among the town’s Georgian- and Federal-style jewels.

Imagine building a home of your own, at half the market price, using top- quality materials and the latest architectural designs—and all from a kit engineered to be so simple that an amateur carpenter could assemble it in a few months.

Too good to believe? Not for the urban dwellers of the early 20th century who, by the thousands, ordered catalog homes from more than a dozen companies, including Sears Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, and Aladdin. The catalogs, written in often flowery prose, informed customers that they, too, could live the American dream by following a thick manual of step-by-step directions and build a house on their own land, often within a streetcar ride of the crowded downtowns.

It was the birth of suburbia, shipped in 30,000-piece kits, each packed in one or two railroad boxcars and delivered by train or even barge. Sears estimated that the average man could, in good weather, build a kit house in about 90 days. Prices ranged from $500 or so up to $5,000, while styles varied from simple cottages to grand, two-story Victorian mansions.

No one knows for sure how many of the kit houses were sold, but Rosemary Thornton, author and national expert on the kit home phenomenon, says that Sears Roebuck alone sold 75,000 in 370 different designs between 1908 and 1940 across the country, including the Chesapeake Bay area.

Annapolis may boast one of the greatest concentrations of Georgian-style buildings in the country, but it also has a little-known collection of kit houses tucked among its stately homes and brick townhouses. “Annapolis has a dazzling collection,” Thornton says. “And it’s unusual because so many of the homes were the finer kit homes with nice amenities, lots of space, and with prices over $2,000.” 

Last fall, photographer John Sheally and I tagged along with Thornton and Patricia Blick, chief of Annapolis’ Historic Planning Commission, on a “windshield survey,” an informal inventory of the city’s kit houses. We’ve toured with Thornton before so we weren’t surprised when she loaded Blick’s lime-green Volkswagen Beetle with cartons of well-thumbed vintage kit home catalogs, copies of the books she’s written, and binders of notes.

A decade of tracking kit houses and memorizing catalogs has evolved into a personal, almost mystic relationship between the 50-year-old author and the houses she loves. “The houses call out to me,” says Thornton, aka, “The House Whisperer.”

Kit homes have undergone sometimes massive renovations, making many of them nearly unrecognizable so Thornton ranks her finds on an authenticity scale of 1 to 10, a measure we’ve nicknamed the Rose Rating. Her evaluations are frank, sometimes melodramatically so. “Architectural train wreck” translates as a kit home that’s been neglected or “modernized” almost beyond recognition. We hear “Poor baby, this is a sin, I feel your pain,” and we know she’s commiserating with a kit house victimized by insensitive remodeling.

To authenticate a possible kit home, Thornton needs to get inside, exploring attics and basements, brushing cobwebs out of her dark hair to search for rafter markings. Wedging her tall frame behind commodes and bathtubs, she checks for manufacturer’s marks. She crawls under breakfast nook tables and scrutinizes doorknobs and hinges. She asks for any surviving original documents.
Often this all occurs while the bemused homeowners, who may never have heard of kit homes, nor suspected they were living in one, get an impromptu Thornton history lesson.

In 1906, two brothers, a lawyer and a newspaper reporter in Bay City, Mich., inherited a lumber company from their father. To boost sales they developed boat kits with pre-cut, numbered pieces for easy assembly and then moved up to offering kits for houses.

Ten years later their company, Aladdin, was offering a full-color catalog of kits for small bungalows up to large Foursquare and Colonial Revival styles.

Sears Roebuck had been selling building supplies in its catalogs since 1895, but not very profitably. In 1908, the company introduced its “Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans,” which featured new kits in seven revisions in just one year. The final version offered 44 home models (and one school). Houses ranged from $695 to $4,115. The school, priced at $11,500 for plans and materials, was the only commercial structure Sears ever offered, according to Thornton.

As other competing firms—Montgomery Ward, Harris, Gordon Van Tine—entered the kit house market, Sears bought up lumber and millwork firms to supply the kits. It sold furniture and accessories to duplicate the catalog illustrations of the home interiors. The company also offered mortgages to individual kit home buyers—one-stop shopping, catalog style.

But soon the Depression soured the housing industry—and kit house sales. In April 1933, Thornton says, Fortune magazine reported that the sales of Sears kit houses had decreased 40 percent from the previous year. As sales continued to fall, Sears followed the example of other struggling kit home manufacturers and published its last “Book of Modern Homes” catalog in 1940.

In the early 1990s, the vintage houses resurged in popularity as preservationists and home restorers rediscovered their nostalgic charm and solid durability. Thornton and a handful of other experts have identified hundreds of kit houses across the country, hoping to save them from inaccurate restoration or demolition.

And now she’s visiting Annapolis.

We’re following the green Beetle as Blick leads us through early 20th-century neighborhoods where she suspects kit houses might be found. Thornton’s radar must be working—we see the brake lights flash and Blick neatly swerves to the right curb of Bay Ridge Avenue in Eastport.

We’ve made a sighting.

The Wild Orchid Café, a well-known restaurant, bears a strong resemblance to Sears Model 126. As we step onto the wide, columned front porch, Thornton nods in approval; kit house vibes are in the air.

The earliest Sears homes were numbered rather than named. The 1909 catalog describes No. 126 as a “five-room bungalow in 20th-century Queen Anne style, light and airy with perfect ventilation.” The kit sold for $657.

Thornton explains that the catalog text was often more quixotic than architecturally accurate and she sees No. 126 as a prairie-style bungalow.

“No. 126 was a common plan used by several companies and appeared in plan books,” Thornton says, glancing around the open dining areas. “This does appear to be a kit house, but it could be from another company than Sears.”

The owners, Jim Wilder, an Annapolis native, and his wife, Karen, aren’t around, but I call them later and learn that they’d heard of the kit house connection before.

“I thought that meant it was something cheap,” Jim Wilder says, laughing when he realizes that the building is a rarity, offered only from 1909 to 1913. “I feel a lot better now then when I first heard about it.”

Leaving the Wild Orchid, we crisscross the city, randomly following Blick’s map and Thornton’s intuition. Together they find more than a dozen likely kit houses—some in pristine condition, a few sadly neglected. Since, Thornton estimates, 30 to 50 percent of the kit homes were modified or customized when they were built—and many more were modified over the years—identification takes an educated eye.

She looks for clues such as the curved dentil moulding over the door of a two-story Sears Newcastle on Chase Street in Murray Hill. The porch supports on a nearby bungalow on Smith Avenue indicate that it’s a Sears Osborne model. We notice a rounded door in an arch-shaped entryway on Archwood Avenue. “Got to be a Montgomery Ward Kenwood from the late 1920s,” she says.

Still in Murray Hill, the Beetle comes to a semi-screeching halt on Lafayette Avenue. Thornton jumps from the front seat and points to a sprawling stucco home with a casual Mediterranean charm.

“Looks like a Sears Osborne,” she says. 

We knock on the door and owner Angela Nikiforou takes a break from making baklava with her granddaughter to talk with us. She tells us that she immigrated to the United States in 1964, sailing from London on the Queen Mary to Ellis Island. When she and her husband bought the house it was painted pink and known in the neighborhood as the Pink Palace. The Nikiforous repainted and expanded it
as their family grew, never suspecting they were living in a kit house.

Looking around the house and basement, Thornton searches beyond the renovations and finds clues—original arched openings between rooms, an original column in what was once the dining room.

“It’s such a classic house and you don’t see this in other catalogs or plan books,” she says. “The unique arrangement of the oversize columns on the front porch and the unusual porch off the dining room—it’s all there.”

Taking everything into account, Thornton announces a 10 on the Rose Rating—this is a classic Sears Osborne.

Still layering the baklava, Nikiforou takes the news calmly. “How about that?” she says. “Nice to know.”

Back in the cars, we spot a Sears Lynnhaven, a two-story house with a steep gable over a recessed front door, on McKendree Street in Homewood-Germantown. Then, another possible Lynnhaven, supersized and customized, on Sixth Street in Eastport. And also in Eastport, a small bungalow with a balcony like second-floor dormer—a Sears Carlin.

But nowhere is Thornton more touched than when we walk along Bay Ridge Avenue in Eastport and find a 1916 Gordon Van Tine No. 575, empty and for sale. The small bungalow with the steeply pitched roof and wide front porch is, according to the original Gordon Van Tine catalog, “the biggest little house you can buy.”

This is a real find because even though it needs work, Thornton says “nobody has hurt this house.“She walks around the bungalow, peers in the window and, with her hand on the door frame, murmurs “I love you, little house.”

In two days we’ve covered much of Annapolis—and identified about 40 kit houses—but, Thornton says, this is only the beginning. Blick seems as excited as Thornton to discover kit houses in almost all wards of the city. She hopes to find additional funds for an official, in-depth survey and, she says, to work with the Maryland Historical Trust to evaluate the collection in the larger Maryland context of kit homes.

“The kit homes aren’t grandiose castles by the sea, but these were the workers’ homes and the middle-class homes, and they’re an important part of the city’s history, too,” Thornton says. “And sadly, it’s this niche in a community’s history that is most likely to get lost and forgotten through the decades.”

Phyllis Speidell writes from Hampton Roads, Va.

In the name of responsible journalism, I’d like to fully disclose something about this issue of Chesapeake Life: I attended first grade with the artist profiled in our Art Gallery department, Stephen J. Griffin. In fact, I grew up with the guy and graduated from high school with him. And wouldn’t you know it, he was voted ‘Most Artistic’ by our high school class. (Coincidentally, I was voted ‘Most Likely to Edit a Regional Lifestyle Magazine About An Estuary.’)

Growing up, there was never any doubt that Steve would become an artist. I remember the little submarines and battleships we used to draw in elementary school. Mine looked like the work of a kid who ate too much sugar; his looked like schematics from the operator’s manual. Decades later, whenever I try to draw something, it still looks like the work of a 6-year-old, and, well, Steve’s work is being featured in this magazine.

I’m not sure where talent comes from. Is it genes? God? Vitamin supplements? In Steve’s case, it was obvious he was born with it. And I give him credit for refining his gift to the point that he can make a living off of it. It’s not easy to work as a full-time artist these days, but somehow, I don’t think he could have been anything else.

It took a little while longer for another personality featured in this issue, photographer Anne Nielsen, to realize her talent. She worked for years as a photography stylist, but didn’t get behind a camera until her late 30s. Then, she says, something clicked. ‘I definitely took to it,’ she says. ‘It was a feeling of pure enjoyment. It just felt logical.’

I think you’ll find her photographs of Eastern Shore American Indians, which she captures with a 20-pound wooden camera and a lens from 1864, both beautiful and haunting.

Another talented personality, the early 20th-century starlet Tallulah Bankhead, receives some ink in this issue as well. Perhaps you know that the original bawdy Hollywood bad girl lies buried in a quiet Kent County churchyard. The actress, who called everyone ‘Dahling’ and gave us pithy quotes like ‘I’m the foe of moderation, the champion of excess’ and ‘If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner,’ often stayed with her sister, Eugenia, at her Eastern Shore home. Writer Donna M. Lucey visited Bankhead’s gravesite and interviewed locals, including Cindy Bankhead, Tallulah’s niece through marriage, who still lives in the area.

I hope you enjoy reading about the talented people we’ve featured in this issue. Oh, and remember
to take your vitamins.

Until next issue,
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Eggplant has a way of dividing people— either you love it or hate it. From a chef’s vantage point, eggplant offers up some real challenges. It can be dreadfully bland with a mushy texture if not handled correctly, but with some skill and effort it can be elevated to haute cuisine.

Eggplants come in several shapes and colors— white and round or long and skinny, as in the Asian variety. All share the characteristic that once cut, the soft spongy flesh discolors quickly. When buying eggplants, look for ones heavy for their size, with smooth unblemished skin and no brown spots.

In this column, I have included four very different eggplant preparations, but all burst with flavor. My passion for Asian flavors comes out in the sautéed Szechuan eggplant, with its minced ginger and rice wine. The roasted eggplant dip makes a great party dish that will be talked about— and you know it won’t be repeated at the same party. For a more elegant preparation, the caramelized eggplant Napoleon with tomato chili jam elevates eggplant into the sphere of fine dining. The eggplant burger is a change of pace for a trendy picnic or luncheon with friends— and you don’t have to be a vegetarian to like it.

Recipes:

• Szechuan Eggplant
• Aromatic Eggplant Burger with Mango Chutney Yogurt and Mint
• Roasted Eggplant Dip
• Caramelized Eggplant Napoleon

Andrew Evans is owner/chef of Thai Ki in Easton.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t flinch at the prospect of a 30-mile bike ride. Yet, considering I haven’t been on my bike in, oh, nine months, I’m a little hesitant—and a little out of shape. But sore muscles, be damned: My itch to ride from Oxford to St. Michaels, one of six trails outlined in the new Talbot County Bicycle Map, wins out. So, after stuffing myself into my padded shorts, I free my road bike off its hook on the laundry room wall and toss it and a backpack filled with toilet paper, sunscreen, and a banana into my Jeep.

The map, which came out late last spring, outlines a half-dozen routes, including a 28-mile “School Days” trail that takes bikers past a circa-1890 Little Red Schoolhouse; the 28-mile “Cemetery Quest” trail, which leads to nine historical cemeteries; and a longer Chesapeake Views trail that highlights sweeping waterfront vistas. The map outlines the road routes of each trail and includes places of interest (scenic places to take photos, restrooms, and parking) along the way.

The map suggests starting the Oxford/St. Michaels circuit in St. Mikes, so my biking buddy, photographer Kirsten Beckerman, and I meet at 7:30 a.m. at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s parking lot. The town is still sleepy and quaint and downright charming in the cool morning air.
We only pedal two blocks along Talbot Street when my nose is assaulted by the sweet, buttery aroma wafting out of Sugar Buns Bake Shop, purveyor of coffee, pastries (including 23 types of Smith Island cakes), and gourmet lunch offerings. I signal for Kirsten to pull over, and we ditch our bikes in the shop’s garden. We’re greeted by owner Susan Leonard, who hooks us up with two cappuccinos, a bagel (shipped in weekly from New York), and a sugar bun, her signature pastry (think sticky bun coated with a gooey, vanilla glaze). “A lot of bikers stop here,” Leonard mentions. “I started carrying Propel Fitness Water and Vitaminwater at their request. And they tend to like the healthier grains, which is why I also make sandwiches out of high-protein breads.”

After fueling up in the garden, we hop back on our bikes and pedal north. Although the map directs us toward Easton, we decide to detour to Royal Oak. After a short trip along tree-lined Bellevue Road, we arrive in the tiny village, home to Bella Luna restaurant and Oak Creek Sales Antiques. It’s too early for a roasted fig and cheese panini at Bella Luna—but never for shopping. We dismount to inspect Oak Creek Sales’ voluminous inventory, which spills into the parking lot and into the barn across the street. I consider a ceramic flowerpot in the form of a large sea turtle, while Kirsten studies a metal mermaid sculpture. Since neither item has a chance of fitting in my backpack, we wrap up our browsing and set our sights on the map’s next destin- ation: the even tinier watermen’s village of Bellevue.

I take the lead along this southern stretch of Bellevue Road, its curves long and subtle and its surroundings composed of forests and cornfields. This is primo biking territory. While there isn’t a shoulder on this leg of the trip, the road is smooth and well kempt, ideal for traveling at maximum speed.

Rolling into Bellevue, we stop to check out the art at The Gallery by the River, owned by Ulrika Leander, who we catch preparing for the next week’s exhibit. We persuade the Swedish-born textile artist to demonstrate how she works her 14-foot-long wooden loom. As her fingers deftly manipulate the yarn, I ask her if she gets any business from bicyclers passing through. “You bet I do!” she says. “They stop in for an initial visit and then come back after the trip to take a better look.”

We refill our water bottles and hustle down to the dock to catch the Oxford/Bellevue ferry. Capt. Tom Bixler waves us onboard and invites us up to the wheelhouse for a bird’s-eye view of the Tred Avon River and the mega mansions that dot its shoreline. We chug along at 6 knots, passing crabbers hard at work while Bixler explains that he welcomes hundreds of bikers each year. “This is such a great place to ride,” says Bixler. “What makes it one of the more unique spots to ride is that in the middle of the trail, there’s a ferryboat to hack around on. That’s a nice extra for people.”

One of the best parts about embarking on a nearly 30-mile bike trip is the countless calories burned that need to be replaced. Once in Oxford, we follow our stomachs’ cues and high-tail it to the Scottish Highland Creamery for a scoop of owner Victor Barlow’s homemade ice cream.

Before gearing up for the final 20-mile push back to St. Michaels (you can backtrack and take the ferry home for a shorter trip or continue along Oxford Road via Easton), we visit the incomparable Cutts &?Case Shipyard and have a picnic lunch in Oxford’s waterfront park with provisions purchased from the Oxford Convenience Market.

The ride home is slow but steady, with the wind to our backs and the sun soft in the mid-afternoon sky. Even though I’ve driven this same route hundreds of times, I’ve never noticed the countless hidden lanes that lead to historic homes, the way the land dips and rises, and the powerful wind that blows off the water and across the angular cornfields. I’m grateful for this insider’s view of Talbot County, best seen on two wheels, not four.

Find the bicycle map at the Talbot County Office of Tourism, 11 S. Harrison St., Easton, Md., 410-770-8000, or visit tourtalbot.org/PDFs/talbot_county_bicycle_map.pdf.

From pet psychics to mobile dog washes to acupuncture for cats, here are the area’s latest, greatest, and just plain unusual services for furry friends.

Sit, Stay, Smile

It’s not easy to photograph a pet. More often than not, most people end up with a blur of fur, a whisker, or the edge of one wing. But Stephen Bobb, 33, has put a new, unique face on pet photography.

Two years ago, Bobb, based in Takoma Park, Md., decided to branch out from wedding photography to something a bit ... furrier. Already using a more candid, documentary-style method in his wedding shots, Bobb was inspired to apply that same technique to pet photography and dubbed his business FidoJournalism.

Instead of posing bored little dogs on fluffy cushions, Bobb uses a photojournalistic approach to document pets in their own environment. “Photojournalists observe, watch, capture things that are happening,” says Bobb. “So I do the same with pets. I use more of a storytelling kind of approach.”

Shoots, done mainly at clients’ homes, are often eventful, with Bobb running or sprawling on the ground, looking for a unique angle. Somehow, despite the proximity of expensive equipment to claws and slobbery tongues, the photographer usually comes away with nothing worse than a few nose prints on his lenses. And the results are worth the risk. “I just enjoy the creativity that goes with it,” he says. “And I’m giving people some nice memories with their pets.” 202-329-1670, http://www.fidojournalism.com —L.S.

Good Sports

When a portuguese water dog fell 35 feet over a retaining wall onto a highway, its owner flew all the way from Greece to Maryland for treatment at the Veterinary Orthopedic Sports Medicine Group (VOSM). Then there was the dog flown in from South Korea, brought all the way to VOSM for stem cell therapy.

Hunting dogs, police canines, search and rescue dogs, bomb squad dogs— even Secret Service dogs—VOSM treats them all.

VOSM was founded in 2005 by Drs. Sherman and Debra Canapp to give pets a standard of care equal to that given to humans. “That was our vision,” says Sherman Canapp, who modeled the facility after the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “They do [these treatments] on the human side, so why not on the vet side? People want as good medical care for their dog as for their kids.”

The sleek, modern interior—with floors covered in rubber so the dogs don’t slip—includes everything from a canine gym to a rehabilitation pool to a state-of-the-art Gait Analysis System, which uses sensors to determine whether a dog is healing correctly.

Specialists also build custom braces, prosthetics, and can outfit paralyzed animals with custom-fitted carts to help them get around. And all equipment is human grade. “We do a lot of crazy things that no one else does,” says Canapp. 10975 Guilford Rd., Annapolis Junction, Md., 410-418-8446, http://www.vetsportsmedicine.com —L.S.

Creature Clairvoyant

Gena Wilson is not your ordinary psychic. Yes, she can sense desires and fears and decipher hidden pasts. So what makes her so unusual? Well, her clients aren’t exactly human.

Wilson, 56, has worked as an animal psychic in the Baltimore-D.C. area for the past 13 years. While she also sees human clients, “some people just know me as the pet psychic,”?she says with a laugh. “I have a lot of repeat customers.”?

Clients come to her for a plethora of reasons: to solve the mystery of their pet’s strange behavior, to discover health problems, to learn the creature’s likes and dislikes, or to understand an animal’s past.

According to Wilson, everything is made of energy that she can channel, including animals. “They’ll give me images, like on a screen, and I have to decipher what that means,” she explains.

So what sorts of things do they have to say? Plenty. For instance, she says, “They might tell me about their relationships with other pets in the house. This one dog was in love with a cat. It was a scream!”

Although Wilson works mainly with cats, dogs, and horses, she’s also dealt with fish, rats, monkeys, sheep, snakes, dolphins, and ducks. “Ducks might say, ‘Oh my god, the fox is coming every night, you need to make sure the fox doesn’t get me!’” she says. “Or, ‘I want to be in this cage with that chicken, not this one!’”

So far, Wilson, who charges $55 per half-hour for her services, says she has never met an animal she couldn’t channel. She currently sees approximately five human and five animal clients per week, and several local vets have even developed a habit of calling her for help.

Sometimes, however, Wilson will find an animal that doesn’t have a whole lot going on upstairs. “Maybe this horse doesn’t have a lot of ambition or a lot going on in there, and you just have to admit, this animal is dumb as mud.” 301-441-4526, http://www.inspiredbyangels.com —L.S.

Prayers for Pets

Since 1996, Annapolis’ St. Anne’s Episcopal Church has hosted a Blessings of the Animals service, when up to as many as 40 pets receive a personal touch from heaven. In recent years, the Rev. Gid Montjoy has conducted the service, which was begun to celebrate St. Francis of Assisi, patron saint of animals and the environment. This year’s service takes place on Sept. 26 at 10 a.m. “It’s typically held the first Saturday in October,” says Montjoy, “but that’s the day of the Navy-Air Force game, so we had to back it up. We felt we couldn’t compete with football.”

1. Who comes to get blessed?
We get everything: dogs, cats, guinea pigs, goats, white mice, parakeets, hedgehogs, gerbils, chinchillas, hermit crabs, turtles—even snakes. I bless the snakes from afar. One year, we tried to get Homestead Gardens to bring in one of its llamas, but it was too complicated.

2. What happens in the service?
The service centers on the creation story told in the book of Genesis. It’s held on the front lawn of the church. I lay my hands on each animal and explain to the congregation that they’re part of God’s creation; we also ask God to bless everyone else who lives in the pet’s household. We have music, and we add a twist by asking folks to remember the environment since humans were given authority over Earth.

3. Any special, pet-friendly accommodations for the service?
We have treats for everybody and poop bags, and obviously, all dogs are on leashes and cats are in carriers. Most of the time, the cats stay in their carriers, but some people will take them out and hold them. I always ask if it’s OK to put my finger in the cat carrier before I bless them.

4. What do you enjoy about the service?
I love seeing all the animals together, their charm, and their relationships with their owners.

5. Do people look forward to this service?
If we said we weren’t going to do it, there would be a revolt. People really look forward to it. It’s a hoot.
—Kessler Burnett

spotlight

Critical Care

By Carol Denny

It’s Sunday afternoon, and Emmie, the wobbly feline in Anne Arundel Veterinary Emergency Clinic’s exam room 9, looks like she’s been on the losing end of a fight. And, in fact, the long-haired calico has. Several days ago, a nasty run-in with a neighborhood dog left her with a large tear in her abdomen. Her owner, Diane Wogaman, rushed her battered pet from their home in Greenbelt to the Annapolis center for surgery.

Now Emmie is feverish, and Wogaman has returned to ask veterinarian Tasha Fleury to take a second look. “I’m a little concerned by the fever and the fluid around her lymph node,” Fleury notes. “I want to have a look at that under the scope.” As she lifts Emmie, the feline manages a weak meow. “She’s complaining, [but] not in pain,” the women agree.

As Fleury departs, Wogaman praises the care she and Emmie have received at AAVEC. “The clinic staff couldn’t have been nicer,” she says. “Last week, while we were waiting, they brought a CD player into the exam room to play music for her, and when the tech arrived with food, she brought a whole armful of different bowls, just to try to get her to eat.”

Started in 1991, AAVEC has treated an ark-full of ailments. All told, the clinic treats more than 10,000 patients a year (nearly all four-legged), including dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, pocket pets (hamsters and guinea pigs) and other animals in crisis. With its muted dŽcor, comfortable sofas, and magazines, the tiled space isn’t all that different from a human ER, except for the extra-large floor scale and the complimentaryÊleashes at the front desk.

Patient care is administered in a large, high-ceilinged treatment room, where scrub-suited vets and technicians circulate among kennels stacked two high. As they check fluid pumps, insert IVs, and administer medicines via Pill Pockets, a hound bays mournfully, ignoring the “Quiet Please!” sign in the adjacent cat ward. A tiny hedgehog sleeps in a cylindrical container on a nearby counter, oblivious to the bustle. Stopping to peer at the fist-sized patient, named Sparky, veterinarian Julie Wentzel, admits, “I’ve put catheters in a lot of things, but never a hedgehog.”

Access to a range of specialists like Wentzel is a hallmark of the clinic, which is affiliated with the Chesapeake Veterinary Referral Center. A team of cardiologists, ophthalmologists, dermatologists, internists, surgeons, and dentists comprise the center’s staff. “We’ve got more than two dozen docs,” says Dr. Tom Kozek, who founded AAVEC with a partner and still works several night shifts a week. “The practices are separate, but we all work together to provide overnight care andÊICU services.”

Patients are referred to the clinic by other vets or come through the emergency room for all sorts of ailments. Fleury rattles off a menu of possible maladies—immune system disorders, broken bones, gastric emergencies, heatstroke, seizures, paralysis, urinary blockage, lacerations. Foreign bodies run the gamut, ranging from Ping-Pong balls to entire sweaters. Sometimes, Fleury says, it’s not so much about stupid pets; it’s about stupid owners. As in: Keep that pack ofÊsugarless gum away from your pooch. “It’s got Xylitol in it,” she explains. “People don’t realize that it can be toxic.”

Appliances can be deadly, too. Fleury recalls a case where a dog licked a paper shredder, with dreadful consequences. She was on duty when the victim, still attached to the shredder, arrived. (She sedated the pet then hit the reverse button.)

Wentzel offers more common-sense prohibitions, the result of years of experience. “Don’t tie your dog in the back of your pickup truck,” she says. “And don’t let your dog off-leash outside—because that’s when bad things happen.”

Not all patients recover, of course, and some clinic visitors face the decision to euthanize their animals. At one end of the treatment room, Lorraine Caufield sits on a folding chair beside the kennel holding Susie, her elderly Australian shepherd-German shepherd mix. “Two weeks ago, she was jogging with my grandson,” Caufield says of her listless pet, patting the dog’s head and murmuring endearments. “But then she began to fade and wouldn’t touch food or water, so the vet told me to bring her here,” a lengthy journey from her home in Georgetown, Del. “She was such a good watchdog.” An hour later, Susie was gone.

“We deal with death daily,” Wentzel acknowledges. It can be traumatic for families, she says—even more so, Kozek adds, when owners must make a choice concerning intensive, high-tech care. “It can be very expensive, especially given this economy, and there’s usually no insurance,” he notes, “so we need to go over the costs and tailor the treatment to what’s best for everyone.”

“There’s a lot we can do in veterinary medicine these days,” says Fleury. “But there are tough questions about what owners can afford and what’s right for their animal.”

Emmie’s fluid sample revealed she didn’t have an infection, and Fleury sent pet and owner home to recuperate. A relieved Wogaman, whose invoice for Emmie’s first visit was more than the price of a new Apple laptop, admits that she’ll have to cancel her upcoming vacation to cover the bill. “But she’s such a wonderful cat,” she declares.
“I didn’t want her final memory to be in the jaws of an angry dog.” Or, heaven forbid, a paper shredder.

Carol Denny has owned several pet rabbits. None have needed emergency care.

Tony, Come Home!

Or why an increasing number of pets sport human names.
By Mary K. Zajac

When I named the pretty gray cat that showed up on my front porch one March evening seven years ago, Sylvie, I had no idea that I was part of a growing trend to give pets human names. After all, every family pet, beginning with Cleo, a cat, and Patrick, a dog, had had human, rather than descriptive, names. It just seemed natural to me to avoid Fluffy or Smokey in favor of a “real” name, one that captured my interest in all things French. Besides, the name suited her silvery gray color.

Turns out a lot of people prefer Sam to Spot. In June, The Associated Press reported that “almost half of American pet owners gave an animal a human-like name, such as Jack or Sophie.”

And according to a database of names kept by Veterinary Pet Insurance, the nation’s largest pet insurance company, Max is the most popular name for both cats and dogs, followed by Chloe, Lucy, Tigger, and Tiger, for cats, and Molly, Buddy, Bella, and Lucy for dogs.

Brian Iannessa, spokesman for VPI, reports that there’s not much difference in the naming of cats and dogs with the slight exception of cats more often being given names “representative of the species.”

“Tigger and Tiger are two of the most common cat names,” Iannessa points out, also mentioning the prevalence of cats called Smokey.

“On the dog side,” he says, “you see a lot more human names.”

Maybe this reflects pet owners’ strong bonds with their dogs, he wonders aloud. Or that dogs are “more integral family members. It’s dangerous to speculate though,” he adds hastily. “I don’t want to offend any
cat owners.”

In an era of gourmet dog biscuits, pet spas, and pet Halloween costumes, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that we name our pets like we name our children.

“We give our pets human characteristics,” says Dr. Wayne Eldridge, DVM, author of The Best Pet Name Book Ever!, now in its third edition. In a telephone interview from his San Antonio veterinary practice, he says it’s only natural that we give them human names.

“The pets that are named after humans are often closer to us,” he continues, “and we have closer relationships with them. If you name your dog Bob, chances are he’s not an outdoor dog.”

Eldridge began compiling lists of names after stumped pet owners asked him for suggestions in naming their pets, and his book offers name categories like “Appearance” and “Personality” (think Blondie, Slinky,
or Flash) as well as “Literature and Art” (Banshee, for example) and “Liquors and Drinks” (Chardonnay, anyone?). Currently at work on a fourth edition, Eldridge is constantly updating the “Sports” and “Screen
and Television” categories.

Still, Eldridge admits, “It throws me for a loop sometimes that people need to buy a book to name a pet.

“This subject is not complicated at all,” he says with the weariness of someone who’s been asked about pet names innumerable times. “I think you could summarize it as people name their pets after areas of interest to the pet owner. If they name their pet Ferrari or Martini that says more about the owner than the pet.”

So what does naming my pet Sylvie say about me? I don’t know that one, he says gently, spelling it back to me in confirmation, but it sounds nice.

Mary Zajac and her cat, Sylvie, live in Baltimore near a dog named Vincent.

Doggie Paddle

When Lynne and Maury Chaput’s black Lab, Shadow, tore her ACL, her surgeon recommended swim therapy to help her heal. But the only water facility for animals was located at an Aberdeen horse farm, more than an hour from their Millersville home. So the couple decided to build their own therapy center. “Here we were, two professionals—a CPA and an architect—and we’re looking at building dog pools,” says Lynne, the accountant.

Today, the Canine Fitness Center has more than 2,300 dogs who come to frolic in the center’s twin, ph-balanced, 11,000-gallon pools as well as exercise on the underwater treadmill or receive massage or acupuncture from doggie therapists. For the dogs, it’s not just about healing but fun and fitness, says Lynne. “Fit dogs live longer. Plus, it improves the bonds between owner and dog. It’s like taking your kid to soccer practice. It isn’t just the physical benefit. It’s like play day.”

Shadow died in 2005, but through the Canine Fitness Center, the Chaputs say her memory lives on. As a sign by the entrance reads: “Shadow: The $600,000 dog and worth every penny.” 1353 Generals Hwy., Crownsville, Md. 410-923-7946, http://www.caninefitnesscenter.com —J.S

Pets & Perks

The Bark ‘n’ Bean might be the only place in America where you could be asked: Would you like a double espresso with that flea dip?

That’s because it’s “likely the only dog wash and espresso bar in the U.S.,” says Theresa Mutlu, who opened the business, formerly known as Muddy Paw Dog Wash and Coffee Bar, with her husband, John, in 2005. The concept has proven to be both unique and successful, as the business boasts more than 6,000 clients and a new location in Severna Park.

Bark ‘n’ Bean offers self-serve and full-service washes, which include shampoo, conditioner, blow dry, and brush. Clients can choose after-bath sprays—in scents ranging from pina colada to lavender breeze—to keep their pooches smelling pleasant.

The coffee bar side (the two are separated by a glass wall and a small revolving door to pass beverages through) serves up traditional coffee drinks and has several racks of pet-themed greeting cards. Customers are encouraged to hang out, check their e-mail, browse the shop’s retail section, or chat with other dog lovers. Spend some time at Bark ‘n’ Bean, and you can see why dog owners find it a whole lot more fun than Starbucks. Mutlu certainly would agree. “I used to work in public relations for a science organization,” she says, “but now I get to hug all of my clients.”

130 Hillsmere Dr., Annapolis. 410-268-7387 and 543 Benfield Road, Severna Park, Md. 410-647-7646, http://www.barknbean.com —J.S.

Westminster Backstage

Irma Tillman and her husband, Donald, of Severna Park, Md., spent many years on the dog show circuit with her Staffordshire bull terriers racking up awards at regional and national shows. In the early 1990s, her dogs, Jim and Lizzie, competed in the granddaddy of them all, the Westminster Dog Show in New York.

1. So what was it like the first time?
It was exciting because it was the first time we had gone. The dogs all have to be champions. They only take so many. The second and third year, Jim won his breed. Lizzie got a medal.

2. We’ve heard the show can get political, is that true?
I think it’s very political, especially when you get to the groups and best of show. The judges know the professional handlers. We used to have a handler who’d show our dogs, and he said a judge told him once that he could walk in there with a donkey, and he’d win. When you hear that, it’s sad. Judges do play favorites. I guess it’s hard not to. The judges see the same handlers all the time.

3. Do you get any money for winning?
You get no money, just a cup or ribbon. But you can get a good stud fee afterward. Jim’s stud fees were $400 or $500. Our last litter in 1995 from Jim and Lizzie—both champions—were $1,000 apiece.

4. How would you primp the dogs before a show?
Actually, our dogs didn’t need any grooming. Just a bath before the show, and we’d have to make sure their eyes didn’t have any coating. We took Jim to so many shows he knew the routine. Whenever he heard the bath water, he’d come running.
—J.S.

Pet Art with Pop

Every pet has its own “color,” according to Annapolis pop artist Erin Simmons, who likes to scope out an animal’s personality first before rendering its portrait in acrylic paint. Based on the vibe she gets from the pet, she’ll choose a bold color scheme—blues and pinks, reds and oranges— to bring the creature to life on canvas.
1. Why pets?
I’ve done some people portrait work, but I find you have a lot more creativity with dogs. With people, you have to be spot-on with details; with dogs, you have a little more room to be creative and wild.
2.What’s your style?
My paintings are huge! The smallest I did was 30 by 30 [inches]. They’re large-scale, sort of like Andy Warhol. They’re funky and a little alternative: big, bright colors and broad strokes.
3. What types of animals do you paint?
I’ve done a cat, a bird, but mostly dogs. I’ve done probably 40 to 50 dogs. But I can do any animal. Right now, I’m working on a koi fish.
4.What message are you trying to get across?
When people remember their pets, they don’t always remember what they look like—they remember how they were, how they interacted with them and what kind of spirit they had. So I wanted to be able to capture both in a painting.
5.Anything weird about this job?
Every dog has their quirks, but the owners are funky, too. Actually, for every dog I’ve painted, the owner has been just like the dog!

443-534-0172, http://www.hotdogsandcatschup.com —L.S.

For the Birds

If you’re a bird person, you might already know about M & D Bird Farm Exotic Birds and Supplies. It’s one of the largest bird supply stores in the Mid-Atlantic, according to its owner, Terri Martin, 47. If you’re not, the store is still worth a stop on your way to the Delaware beaches just to gawk at Martin’s moluccan cockatoo, Princess, who performs her shtick for customers. “Yes, she’s a rock star,”?says Martin of the bird who talks, spins on a bar, and generally does whatever Martin commands.

Martin, who bought her first bird at 18, opened the shop in 2002. “I had 17 birds in my bedroom at home already,”?she says. “Nobody else in the area was doing this, so I figured I would.”?

The colorful, 4,000-square-foot store boasts every bird toy imaginable, plus full grooming and boarding services, not to mention a “bird room,” which contains 75 to 100 exotic birds. But beware, as the half-joking sign on the door reads:?“Enter at your own risk. We sometimes snack on fingers and small children.—The Birds.”
26754 Lewes Georgetown Hwy., Harbeson, Del. 302-684-4101 —J.S.

Pet P.I.

Remember that lost whippet fiasco in New York City back in 2006? The one in which the famous show dog, Vivi, took off at JFK Airport, resulting in city-wide upheaval? Laura Totis, certified Missing Animal Relief (MAR) technician, was one of the first “pet detectives” on the scene.

When Totis started her unusual career seven years ago, only four other certified MAR technicians existed in the country. “Initially it was a running joke about the whole Ace Ventura thing,” she says with a laugh.
“But a lot of info has gotten out there and people do take it a lot more seriously now.” Any pet qualifies for the chase (Totis has pursued llamas, tortoises, and skunks), though dogs and cats
are the most common.

Totis, based in Clarksburg, Md., started out conducting human search-and-rescue on a volunteer basis but subsequently branched out to pet detection. She uses two trained dogs to locate missing pets throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, asking only that clients cover her time with “whatever they feel is reasonable and can afford.” Her bag of tricks run the gamut from behavior profiling to mounting wildlife cameras to listening devices to setting humane traps.

Approximately 80 to 90 percent of her clients are recovered. Much of her success is due to her website, which people can use to post lost pet notifications and track sightings as well as consult with Totis (for a fee of $20). So where is the most common place to find a lost pet? “The last place you look,” she says. 410-239-4746, http://www.ljtpettracking.com —L.S. 

To the Point

When Mac, a 100-pound chocolate lab, collapsed as a result from his diabetes, his owners were told he wouldn’t last more than a few months. But Annapolis animal acupuncturist Lydia Wainwright had other ideas. “They carried him in, and he walked out. It was amazing,” she says. “I saw that dog for three years.”

Wainwright is constantly sur-prising herself and her clients with the effectiveness of acupuncture, a method of ancient Chinese medicine that uses needles to correct imbalances in life force energy or Qi. “If you were a toaster, the electricity that runs through you to make you work is your Qi,” explains Wainwright. “I’m the toaster repairman.”

Wainwright works with both animals and people to improve maladies ranging from arthritis to kidney failure. The result? “Ninety percent of the time there’s some kind of change,” she claims. “This is especially true of animals, because they tend not to hold on to baggage the way people do.”

Wainwright, who is certified by the Maryland Acupuncture Board and sees 15 to 40 patients a week, attends to cats and dogs but is also qualified to help rabbits, ferrets, and birds. Each animal responds differently to the treatment, she says. Some get worse before they get better, some need continued treatment (especially for chronic ailments such as arthritis),
and others are cured after just one treatment. The only common side effect, she says, is that “all animals seem to really enjoy it.“443-474-3631, http://www.acuanimal.com —E.B.

In the Raw

If you’ve ever been to Crunchies Natural Pet Foods in Crofton, you’ve likely met Charlie. The 10-year-old
beagle is not only the store’s mascot
but also something of a poster dog for the benefits of the all-natural foods Crunchies sells.

When store owner Julia Cahill adopted him in 2008, he was suffering from a list of ailments ranging from upper respiratory problems to conjunctivitis. “He was absolutely a mess,” recalls Cahill. “We adopted him on a Friday, and the vet wasn’t sure he’d make it over the weekend. We brought him back two weeks later, and the vet couldn’t believe it was the same dog.”

All Cahill did was switch Charlie’s diet to one rich in raw foods, and “it changed everything about him,” she says.

Raw food is the buzzword in dog parks and kitty condos these days. The tainted pet food scare of 2007 helped give legs to the movement, which emphasizes serving foods made only from raw meats and vegetables—no grain fillers. Cahill and other advocates claim “commercial pet foods,” loaded with chemicals and filler, are the equivalent of fast food. “If you ate fast food every meal, every day for a year, how would you look and feel?”

Cahill asks. “People don’t realize it’s like milkshakes and french fries. You’re not going to have a healthy, well-behaved dog. And people are just starting to realize this.”
Cahill admits that her food lines may sport higher price tags than those found at the big box pet stores, but she says dog owners can feed their pets less because raw foods are nutrient dense.

“Besides,” she says, “you’ll have a healthier dog with less allergies, less ear problems, less skin problems. And you know how vet bills can add up very fast…” 2421 Crofton Lane, Crofton, Md. 410-721-5432, http://www.crunchies.com —J.S.

When Pigs Fly… Literally

Say goodbye to the cargo hold, Rover, and welcome to first class. Pet Airways, the first airline to carry animals as “pawsengers” instead of cargo, started service out of several airports (including BWI Marshall) on July 14. With one-way airfares starting at $149, Pet Airways offers flights out of Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles.

Beechcraft 1900 turbo-prop planes, filled with pet carriers instead of seats, are used to transport the animals. For now, Pet Airways plans to work solely with cats and dogs, but pigs, birds, and reptiles may soon have their chance to fly the friendly skies, too. 888-PET-AIRWAYS, http://www.petairways.com —L.S.

Laps of Luxury

The kennel, as it used to be known, is a dying breed. Dogs and cats now have “pet resorts” with spas and luxury suites to enjoy while their owners are away. “It wasn’t that kennels were horrible,” says Elizabeth Chaney, owner of Perfect Pet Resort in Lothian (410-741-0000, perfectpetresort.com), “but there’s a demand for dogs and cats to have a great experience while their parents are away, with more benefits than just accommodations.” At Chaney’s resort, both dogs and cats get luxury suites with couches or beds and dogs get TVs playing animal-related shows.

The new Maryland Shore Pet Resort in Vienna (410-376-2107, mdshorepetresort.com) boasts a spa offering blueberry facials and paw cream. Pets can unwind during “Yappy Hour” and “Meowy Hour” with complimentary “happy-tizers” made at the in-house Pure Bred Bakery.

And at Dogwood Acres Pet Retreat in Davidsonville (410-798-4776, dogwoodacres.com) dogs can get “cuddle time”?at the end of the day. “Dogs walk out the door with [richer] experiences than when they came in,” says Chaney. “It’s just like camp. A kid goes in shy and comes out strong. People are not just paying for space anymore. It’s the experience.” —J.S.

Natural Healing

Dr. Francine K. Rattner of South Arundel Veterinary Hospital is not your typical vet. She treats everything from dogs, cats, and birds to rabbits and iguanas, but as one of only 53 vets in the United States certified by the Academy of Veterinary Homeopathy, she does so in a very different way.

Through homeopathic treatments, a formal system of “natural medicine” developed in the 18th century, Rattner addresses all aspects of the animal’s health—from its diet to the amount of exercise it gets to its exposure to toxins.

Symptoms of illness, which vets normally attempt to suppress with drugs, are viewed by Rattner as the body’s attempt to heal itself. She prescribes remedies derived from natural substances that would normally cause the symptoms the animal is already showing, in order to encourage self-healing. For instance, for runny eyes or a bad cold, she might prescribe diluted allium, derived from onions.

Rattner, who also practices conventional medicine, admits that homeopathic medicine for pets has its skeptics, but she believes that her treatments work best with the cooperation of owners who are careful and observant, willing to note subtle changes in their animals. “My favorite cases are patients diagnosed with cancer that have been given a very poor prognosis, who instead choose a holistic approach and live a longer and happier life than was predicted,” she says. 410-956-2932, http://www.southarundelvet.com —L.S.

Clean Machine

For anyone who has ever tried to bathe a dog, doing so in a van may sound like a daunting task. But it’s just another day at the office for Jeff Bawkins, who, as owner of Arnold, Md.‘s U Dirty Dog Mobile Pet Grooming, makes his living grooming dogs out of the back of his white Ford E-350.

1. How did you decide on this mobile pet grooming?
It’s actually been around for quite some time. I like it because it’s quiet and comfortable. It’s also more convenient for the customer.
2. How does it work?
I go to each customer’s house and groom the dogs right
in their driveway in the back of the van.
I groom about 10 to 15 dogs a day. On
a given year, I’ll have a list of 1,800 to 2,200 clients.
3. What’s the van like?
The setup is basically like any other groomer’s: We’ve got special grooming equipment, high-velocity dryer, stainless steel bathtub, hydraulic table, air conditioning—just about everything you could ask for.
4. What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened with a dog?
A bite—that’s the worst. Of course, it depends on the dog and what kind of mood they’re in. If it’s a playful bite, it’s not so bad as if it’s an angry one, but a bite never feels good!
5. Has a dog ever escaped?
No, I’m really careful. Most of them are very cooperative and have never tried. Even if they did, I’m a pretty fast runner. 410-349-3647, http://www.udirtydogmobile.com —E.B.

A drive through Southern Maryland’s Amish Community reveals a shopping adventure chock-full of culture and scenery, not to mention handmade furniture and quilts—even a fresh guinea hen or two.

At the end of a rutted buggy lane in St. Mary’s County, amid an enclave of clapboard farmhouses and weathered barns, a barefoot, 8-year-old Amish girl wearing a white bonnet and blue muslin dress cautiously approaches my car and asks what I want.

“Are there guinea hens for sale?” I ask, as advertised on the handmade sign posted back on the main road. I’m in luck. The price: $6 each.

But as I take out my wallet the kid tosses a glitch. On weekdays, there is no caldron of boiling water at the ready, no way to begin the plucking and dressing process. (This was not the time, I thought, to teach myself a handy farm skill back in my condo in D.C.)

“You come back Saturday,” she says. And sure enough, when I return a few days later, she personally chooses a plump hen, and in short order it’s ready to pop into the iced cooler in my trunk. That night, a delicious, roasted guinea
hen is the centerpiece of a terrific farm-to-table meal.

At Amish-owned farms, along the winding roads that snake through gorgeous fields of corn and tobacco near Charlotte Hall, I always find great shopping adventure. There’s no point in planning a menu. I can’t call ahead. The more than 350, low-profile farming families, who moved to the area in the early 1940s from Pennsylvania, enjoy a simple way of life without iPhones or land lines. They sell a variety of goods they grow or make by hand, but there is no guarantee that what they publicize is available.

The quest requires a slow drive down Route 236 (between Route 5 and Route 234) and a sharp eye for the dozens of signs, often scrawled on a piece of cardboard or wood, signaling that “butter,” “eggs,” “bedding plants,” “quilts,” and more are for sale. You take your chances. The family may have hitched up the buggy and gone to town. The last duck of the day may have been sold. But after five or six farm stops, I’m never disappointed by the bounty available, and at every farm and store, I learn a bit more about the Amish way of life.

The best place to kick off a shopping tour is at the North St. Mary’s County Farmers Market (daily, except Sunday, April through December), where a dozen Amish farmers sell seasonal produce and baked goods. They set up shop in a series of white tents beneath a glade of tall pines that together provide both shelter and a serene setting.

“The gingerbread is phenomenal,” a shopper tells me as I browse the long tables filled with appealing pies, breads, and cookies made by the “plain” people who sit in silence nearby. They appear aloof, but ask a question, and they are ready with information about their own goods and their neighbors.

The flour-dusted dinner rolls are a certain purchase, and something called “hummingbird bread” (made with bananas, pineapple, and walnuts) sounds intriguing. But I first grab a favorite, a bag of fresh-baked, nutty, crunchy, and not-too-sweet oatmeal cookies. Into the car they go, along with jars of pickled beets, rhubarb preserves, elderberry jam, and sweet relish.

On another early morning, there are plenty of Asian eggplants, greenhouse-raised tomatoes, wax beans, onions, potatoes, and mustard greens at prices far below farmers markets closer to the city. The best discovery is tiny jars filled with soft, fresh, golden bee pollen that has the flavor of orange blossom. “Sprinkle it on your cereal,” the farmer tells me.

Minutes later, I’m happily munching cookies and heading down 6-mile-long Route 236, spying signs for “birdhouses,” “rabbits,” and “pigeons,” passing fields where farmers work with teams of horses and windmills provide power. At a farm down Dixie Lyon Road, I buy an enormous bouquet of zinnia, cock’s comb, and lisianthus and then double back to check out a farm that offers “barbecued pork.” (No one is home.) For the most part, farms selling dairy products—eggs, cheese, and butter—are easy to locate.

Free-range chickens, like guinea hens, are best found on Saturdays. (Poultry and rabbit are exempt from the Federal Meat Inspection Act for on-farm sales.) A favorite stop is Locust Grove Dry Goods, a charming, old-fashioned variety store that stocks the basic necessities of a self-reliant life. With no electric lights, it’s dim inside Locust. Neatly arranged on shelves are kerosene lanterns, dark-colored fabrics in deep blue and marsh green, and art supplies—ink blocks, papers, and colored pencils—for making greeting cards, a favorite Amish pastime. Here’s where to find pumice soap.Last summer, the owner (a woman of few words who prefers not to give her name) enlarged the housewares department, adding tabletop china, which is displayed alongside a nice selection of apple peelers, food mills, and strainers. When she noticed my interest in the American-made Rada cutlery she says, unexpectedly: “A lot of your people like them, too.”

Those in the market for hand-crafted dining chairs, tables, and bedroom sets will find opportunities at Yoder’s Furniture Shop, where adorable rocking horses and good-looking cutting boards are also made and sold at reasonable prices. The shop sells eggs, if they have them, for $1.50 a dozen. Best of all is the display of wooden trucks of every sort—fire engines and cement mixers—beautifully constructed from oak, maple, walnut, birch, poplar, and cherry wood. Part of a family collection, unfortunately, they are not for sale.

The Amish enjoy making hand-stitched, patchwork quilts, and two dozen or more can be found at The Quilt Shop, a tiny store that also sells quilted potholders and placemats. “The women and girls, they can make a quilt a week,” says the owner, an elderly gentleman who explains that each pattern has a name, such as “moon glow,” “double wedding ring,” and “tumbling blocks.” His exceptional, family-made quilts, in modern, traditional, and folk art styles, range from $700 to $900.

For quilters in these parts, the most exciting day of the year is the annual Amish Quilt Auction, held each year on an Amish farm on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. “For quilts, you can’t beat that, you’ll see everything,” says The Quilt Shop owner. “People come from all over.”

And well, they should. The St. Mary’s County Amish community has much to offer. I know of no other place in the region where you can find everything from yummy bee pollen to handmade quilts to a succulent guinea hen or even delicately flavored pigeon, fresh from the barnyard.

Walter Nicholls is a former reporter for The Washington Post.

Most Amish businesses are open in daylight hours but many do not have set hours of operation. All are closed Sundays. It’s wise to have a cooler with ice packs in the trunk for perishables.

North St. Mary’s County Farmers Market

Seasonal fruit, vegetables, baked goods, honey, and jams. 37600 New Market Turner Road, Charlotte Hall, 301-475-4200, ext. 1402. Open: Mondays through Saturdays, 8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.

Locust Valley Dry GoodsM

Poplin fabrics, art supplies, kitchenware, eggs, butter, and jams. 9830 N. Ryceville Road,Mechanicsville Open: Mondays through Thursdays, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.

The Quilt Shop

Handmade quilts, placemats, and pot holders. 28635 Thompson Corner Road, Mechanicsville

Stolzfus Flowers

Field-grown cut flowers. 36723 Dixie Lyon Road, Mechanicsville

Yoder’s Furniture

Dining and bedroom furniture, children’s toys, and cutting boards. 9439 N. Ryceville Road, Mechanicsville

Amish Quilt Auction

The annual event is held the Saturday before Thanksgiving. 301-475-4200, ext. 1404

Information: St. Mary’s County Welcome Center, 37575 Charlotte Hall Road, Charlotte Hall, 301-327-9023, stmarysmd.com/tourism

Bella luna owner barbara helish holdsstrong food opinions. She doesn’t use low-calorie ingredients, is virulently opposed to chain restaurants, and tries to buy exclusively local and organic products for her kitchens. “I want people to know when they come to my restaurants that we’re focused on the highest quality and good karma,” Helish says. “Food is very important to me.”

This is abundantly clear during dinner at the new Bella Luna location in downtown Cambridge (there is another more casual Bella Luna in Royal Oak). Everything, from gnocchi to salad dressings to a warm chocolate pudding cake served in a china cup, are house made.

“Anyone can open a can of something at home,” says Helish matter-of-factly. “Why come to a restaurant if it will be more of the same?”

Why, indeed?

For all the strong talk, however, both Bella Luna’s menu and dining room exude comfort. Familiar favorites like caprese salad and lasagna rub elbows with pasta primavera and ever-changing risottos. You’ll recognize most of the vintage Italian poster advertisements for spirits, and probably recognize the music, too, which mixes indie rock and classic R&B. Coupled with a staff that seems genuinely pleased to serve diners, Bella Luna could easily be your neighborhood go-to.

The only dish I sampled that fell short of expectations was the first that came to the table, homemade ravioli of the day; its mild, tarragon-scented whitefish and scallop filling was enclosed in a round of chewy and somewhat tough pasta. Other than that, the rest of the food shone.

I don’t expect much from a green salad other than freshness and a well-made dressing, but Bella Luna’s greens—served with roasted almonds and pine nuts, a generous wedge of tangy Shropshire blue cheese, and balanced balsamic dressing—was better than fine. If you order gnocchi “made Barb’s favorite way,” you’ll learn that she loves simplicity and why the plump, charmingly misshapen potato dumplings dressed in butter and cream and flecked with bits of prosciutto, basil, and tomato could be anyone’s favorite.

The made-in-house desserts at Bella Luna were some of the best I’ve had. A bread pudding made with panettone benefited from the bread’s chunks of dried fruit and chocolate, and I loved that the chocolate hazelnut pudding cake topped with a dollop of orange-spiked whipped cream was edgily bittersweet.

Bella Luna does have its quirks. On the night of our visit, the restaurant was out of chicken, one of the consequences of relying on local sources where supplies can be limited. And then there is the matter of size.

Unprompted, Helish told me that she’s heard criticism that her portions “don’t seem like enough,” and she counters this by pointing out that she gives diners “what [they] need” on their plate. I’ll admit that I was skeptical when each course appeared, and one of my dining companions even wondered aloud at what seemed to be a modest amount of food. But after three courses, each of us left the restaurant feeling sated but not uncomfortable.

Still, the quality of food and service make Bella Luna a real addition to Cambridge’s downtown. Coupled with Bistro Poplar, Bella Luna’s French neighbor, Cambridge is fast developing a dining scene that’s worth the trip.

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

Ruffled Duck Inn
110 N. Morris St.
Oxford, Md.
410-226-5496
ruffledduckinn.com

Inspector gadget, I’m told, is staying in the next room. Not actually the bumbling cartoon character with gadgets built into his anatomy, but the man who created him. The cartoon creator and veteran Hollywood producer is in town with his wife to pitch a new show about kids and money, starring an animated Warren Buffett(!), to execs at PBS in Washington. That, and he also recently purchased Walter Cronkite’s old yacht, Wyntje, which is undergoing restoration at an Oxford marina. (The boat was rechristened Gadget.)

I quickly learn that the Ruffled Duck Inn is a destination B&B for sailors of every stripe, even those with Hollywood pedigrees. “We wanted to create a synergy with the boating crowd,” says innkeeper and boat captain Danny Cole, who notes that many guests are acquaintances he and his wife, Libby, met at sea. “Oxford is such a salty town, we get a lot of cruisers that fit right in.”

I admit to Danny that I’m not much of a sailor, but when I notice in the living room a replica of the “leg lamp,” that famous fishnet-stocking-clad light from “A Christmas Story,” I know the Ruffled Duck and I will get along just fine.

THE INNKEEPERS The Coles run the inn along with Libby’s parents, Joyce and Dennis Buttner. All hail from Chicago and picked Oxford to open the B&B five years ago because “it was halfway between New England and Florida,” says Danny, who, along with his wife, crews an 80-foot yacht along the Intracoastal Waterway for a client during winter and spring.

THE ROOMS In keeping with the inn’s boating theme, Libby refers to each of the four guestrooms as cabins and each is decorated to reflect favorite ports of call. My bunk is the Savannah Room, with its eggplant-colored walls, framed photos of crape myrtles, and gauzy canopy above the bed. Other rooms visit the West Indies (palm tree motifs and bamboo chairs) and Cape Cod (beachy shells, light blue walls, and white furniture). The three-bedroom Suite Oxford, with a separate entrance and full kitchen, boasts a nautical theme, contemporary leather furniture, and a fun second-floor loft.

SPECIAL TOUCHES/DIVERSIONS Using his local sailing connections, Danny can arrange tours of nearby Cutts & Case or Hinckley boatyards or sails along the Tred Avon River. The inn also has several bicycles and a two-person kayak for use. Sailors—or sailor wannabes—can peruse the inn’s sailing library and its impressive collection of artifacts, including a 1860 spyglass from a Union frigate, a unique sword made from the bill of a swordfish, and a section of anchor chain from the legendary Spanish treasure galleon, Atocha.

WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST I finally meet Inspector Gadget (he’s hard to miss in a brown velvet suit and dark sunglasses) and his wife at breakfast, which is served in the inn’s red-walled dining room or on the garden-side sun porch, weather permitting. I.G. passes on breakfast (naturally) and instead downs a handful of vitamins with a half piece of toast. I, on the other hand, have no qualms about pigging out on Joyce’s excellent eggs Benedict.

ROMANCE FACTOR The West Indies, Cape Cod, or Savannah all qualify as romantic locales, right?

COST $135 and $145

We never wanted a cat.

Fargo just showed up one day and wouldn’t leave. We posted signs around the neighborhood, called friends and family to find her a home, but as days turned into weeks it became clear that the skinny black stray had adopted us.

During the course of the next six months, Fargo introduced us first-time pet owners to a number of things: unconditional love, yes, but also fleas, hairballs, and—gasp!—more than $2,000 in vet bills.
My wife and I were complete newbies when it came to the increasingly pricey world of pet ownership. We had a 2-year-old daughter—and another child on the way—but we quickly learned it was far easier to spend more money on a sick cat than a healthy child.

Pet owners forked over about $11 billion on vet bills last year, a figure that’s increasing by about 9 percent a year, or three times the rate of inflation. All told, Americans spent about $43.4 billion on their pets in 2008 (triple the sum expended 15 years ago), on everything from kitty litter for their calico to $2,000 Burberry jackets for their beagle. Even in this economic downtown, the pet business has proven to be recession proof, as spending on pets is expected to actually increase in 2009.

Our parents’ generation—and their pets—would likely be stunned at the products and services we’ve written about in this issue of CL, our first devoted to the pet world. Pet psychics, beer for dogs, kitty acupuncture, doggie orthopedics, holistic medicine, organic cat treats, pet resorts with spas offering blueberry facials. (Can you imagine Grandpa ordering up a blueberry facial for his Chesapeake Bay retriever?) The trend here, of course, is that pets are now offered the same luxuries as their human masters, er, parents. Heck, we even give pets human names these days. As writer
Mary Zajac points out in “Tony, Come Home!” page 44, almost half of American pets sport names like Max, Elliot, or Ashley.

So what’s this phenomenon all about?

“The way we treat our pets has always reflected the changes in the way humans live,” says Michael Schaffer, author of One Nation Under Dog: Adventures in the New World of Prozac-Popping Puppies, Dog-Park Politics, and Organic Pet Food. “In the last couple generations, there have been some pretty dramatic social changes that at first blush would seem to have nothing to do with pets.” He cites, among other factors, the rise of two-career couples, suburbanization, increases in divorce, growth in the number of empty nesters, and our new focus on nutrition. Plus, he continues, “with more fractured human social networks, we rely on pets for a bigger emotional role in our lives—we’ve promoted them, in essence, to full-fledged family members.”

No, we don’t allow Fargo to sit with us at the dinner table (yet), but I must admit that after a year with our accident-prone cat, we’ve grown quite fond of her. She’s extremely affectionate, plays fetch like a dog, and the kids love her. So why not spoil her once in a while? Besides, I just noticed something online called “kitty caviar.” At beverlyhillscaviar.com, it’s only $40 for a 4-ounce jar ...

Until next issue,
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It’s late morning, mid-July, and a blazing sun beats down on a field of watermelons at Hales Farms on the south side of Salisbury. A group of seasonal workers, sweat pouring down their foreheads from beneath worn ball caps, stoops among the rows of melons, hacking at vines with long knives. Some of them form fire bucket lines, and pass the watermelons along, one by one, loading them into three school buses—roofs cut away and seats gutted to make room for their ripe cargo.

When each bus is loaded with approximately 800 watermelons they rumble down the road in convoy formation and pull into Hales Farms’ “packing shed,” an 8,000-square-foot, open-air warehouse. There, the buses idle as the watermelons are removed, placed onto a conveyor belt, and packed by hand into white bins proudly advertising, “Grown in Maryland & Delaware.” Forklifts zip here and there, stacking pallets three bins high, as tractor-trailers back into the loading dock. 

Inside the office, Will Hales, a third-generation grower, 34, sits at his desk juggling a cell phone, land-line, and fax machine, all of which seem to go off at the same time—nonstop. He politely apologizes. “It’s kinda busy around here,” he says, offering a cold bottle of water. Will’s father, Donald, sits in an easy chair, shaking his head. “Man, I wanna get out of here when all the phones is a-ringing. It’s pretty hectic.” Looking over at his son, Donald says, “He does a good job of keeping it straight. I can’t do it.” He excuses himself and heads into the warehouse, getting behind the wheel of a forklift.

Donald started Hales Farms in 1955, and today the operation annually harvests between 18 million and 20 million pounds of watermelon from 350 acres of a 3,000-acre farm, which also produces corn, soybeans, wheat, and tomatoes. On a busy day, as many as 17 tractor-trailers visit Hales’ packing shed, hauling away up to 40,000 pounds of watermelon each.

Perhaps surprisingly, Delaware and Maryland are major players in the watermelon industry. In 2008, of the 44 states that produce watermelon, Delaware and Maryland ranked in the top 10 based on product value, generating a combined $26.4 million, while producing more than 11 million watermelons. Impressive, considering that the bulk of regional watermelons are yielded from just a few thousand acres in Dorchester, Caroline, and Wicomico counties on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Sussex County, Del.

In Laurel, Del., Travis Hastings, age 30, grows 120 acres of watermelon on his family’s farm. Like Will Hales, Travis is a third-generation grower. Seated in a GMC pickup, Travis surveys one of his fields and reflects on being part of an agricultural fabric that goes deeper than simply tilling the land. “The watermelon industry and growing watermelons—it’s more important to people around here than just making money. It’s definitely a certain kind of culture. It’s a tight-knit group. Pretty much everyone who is doing it, their father was doing it, their grandfather was doing it, and it’s been passed on from generation to generation.” 

In the 1950s, Maryland and Delaware farmers, recognizing the economic importance of watermelons, formed the Maryland-Delaware (Mar-Del) Watermelon Association, bringing growers, buyers, and vendors together to better promote this specialty crop. Donald Hales and Travis Hastings’ late father, John, were founders of the organization, which today tops 138 members. 

With the support of the Maryland and Delaware Departments of Agriculture, the Mar-Del Watermelon Association started a branding campaign in 2007. Growers began labeling their watermelons with stickers, clearly identifying where they were grown, and shipping them in bins with the Mar-Del logo and slogan: “Mar-Delicious Watermelons: The original summertime treat.”  “The Eastern Shore is known for poultry and seafood. There’s been a lot of ignorance over the years with watermelon,” says Will Hales. “As far as your average consumer, they might live in Annapolis or Baltimore and not even know that the watermelon was grown an hour and a half away.”

The campaign has been successful, thus far, particularly with national supermarket chains in the area. Safeway, Food Lion, and Whole Foods, to name a few, all carry the Mar-Delicious brand when in season (mid-July to mid-Sept-ember) and prominently display the white bins in their produce sections.

Each year, the Mar-Del Watermelon Association crowns a watermelon queen who serves as an ambassador and travels to other state watermelon conventions throughout the United States, as well as making appearances at local parades, grocery stores, and schools.

On a breezy afternoon last August, the 2008 Mar-Del Watermelon Queen, 21-year-old Christina Gallant, a Hartly, Del., native, along with the National, Alabama and Florida queens, were all on hand at a promotional event at the Annapolis City Dock. The queens, dressed in princess-like dresses with crowns and white sashes, attracted a crowd by giving out free slices of watermelon and presiding over a seed-spitting contest. Gallant even gave out a few kisses to admiring girls and boys while spreading the gospel of sweet and healthy homegrown produce. “Besides the safety and security of consuming local food—knowing where it comes from—you’re helping out your neighbor ... and really, it’s going to taste better,” she says.

Seed-spitting contests may be an endangered event, however, as seedless melons account for the vast majority of melons grown these days.

Donald Hales was one of the first farmers on the East Coast to plant seedless watermelons 30 years ago. “I really thought in the early ‘80s it was the way to go. I’d grown watermelons all my life. We grew a lot of them old kind, like Jubilee and Charleston Grey. There were seeds in all of them. I thought it was wonderful when the seedless came along.”

“Seedless watermelon is all anybody wants nowadays,” says Will, who notes his farm’s melon crop is almost 95 percent seedless.

Seeded watermelons or non-edible, grapefruit-sized “pollenizer” melons are still necessary to grow seedless melons, however, because the female watermelon (seedless) needs the pollen from the male’s flowers. The whole business of sexing watermelons is a complicated venture involving thousands of shipped-in honey or bumble bees that work to pollinate the watermelon blooms every spring. From planting, which begins in late April, to harvest, it takes a watermelon anywhere from 75 to 90 days to mature. 

With so many variables at play, watermelon can be a risky crop to invest in. “It seems like from the day you plant them you are fighting something,” says Denny Reid, 34, who grows 350 acres of watermelon, in addition to a variety of other crops, in Rhodesdale, Md. “Disease, bugs, rain—two years ago we had major floods that wiped out probably half our crop.”

Travis Hastings agrees. “Not everyone wants to do it. It’s labor intensive; it’s risky.”

Risky or not, for Mar-Del growers, watermelons are a way of life—sometimes in more ways than one. If it weren’t for watermelons, Will Hales may have never met his wife, Candice, the 2005 Alabama and 2006 National Watermelon Queen. They celebrated their second wedding anniversary this April.

For Donald Hales, who turned 70 this year, the proudest part of all of this watermelon business is that his son is following his footprints through the fields. “If it wasn’t for him I’d quit, because I’m getting old and tired.”

After all these years, does Donald still enjoy watermelon?

“Do I? I love ‘em to death. I get tired, but I still love my watermelon. Ain’t nothing like it, especially to cut that thing on a morning after you had dew and dampness on it all night long. There’s nothing better than to sit down and eat a half one of ‘em.” nCL

Freelancer Jason Tinney also loves a good melon.

At the Wedge, Easton’s new wine bar/restaurant, three smooth decorative stones rest in a dish on our table. “Namaste,” a Hindu salutation, reads one stone. “Ecstatic” is inscribed on another. So is “ngon,” a Vietnamese word loosely translated as “rich in taste.” The stones, with their quirky messages chosen by staff members, are just one example of the restaurant’s unofficial mantra, “Keep it small, keep it real, keep it funky.”

Opened by restaurateurs Patty Brown and Monika Takala (Brown owned the Queen Bean in both Claymont, Del., and Rehoboth Beach; Takala and her mother had Sunflowers in Stevensville) in December 2008, The Wedge is a celebration of eclecticism. This is evident in the menu, which lists everything from tiny nibbles of olives to an ahi tuna martini to meatloaf and mashed potatoes. Her servers also wear their own clothes in lieu of a uniform and are encouraged to show off tattoos while maintaining a respectful professionalism.

If this sounds a little disparate, it is, but The Wedge manages to hold it all together by providing pleasant service and a variety of dining options in a Zen-like setting. And while small plates have probably outlived their 15 minutes of fame, there’s something to be said for a place that allows you to linger over a cheese plate and a bottle of wine or dig into something more substantial, like a crab cake and a microbrew. At least The Wedge’s customers think so. Takala already reports patrons taken to calling themselves “wedgies.”

We got the most pleasure from the fresher-than-fresh seared tuna special, served mock-sushi style over wasabi mashed potatoes with a pickled ginger garnish (though the sriracha-spiked cream cheese sauce on the side was an anomaly) and the “Van Gogh” pasta, a sweet mix of ear-shaped orecchiette pasta, green peas, and cream sauce, which managed to remind us why we thought sundried tomatoes were fab the first time we tasted them so long ago. Small potatoes with gorgonzola, walnuts, and bacon nestled in their hollowed-out middles made us wish there were a few more on the small plate. But both the crab cakes studded with roasted corn and the “amazing crab dip” failed to wow.

Unlike some restaurants that offer several cheese selections on one plate, The Wedge features only one 31/2-ounce portion of usually raw milk cheese, so choose carefully. Our plate boasted a generous (dare we say) wedge of Cabra Romero, a firm, tangy goat cheese from Spain, as well as a small tower of crusty homemade bread, an array of fresh fruit, and even a few sea salt-covered chocolates, something I’d skip if
I planned to order anything beyond the plate.

Desserts at The Wedge are more sweet than substantial, like the kitchen sink concoction of pound cake, ice cream, whipped cream and caramelized pecans or the burn-your-tongue hot rice pudding with more sweet nuts. French press coffee in full and half pots, however, is eminently civilized.

The Wedge offers a small storefront stage where local performers can literally sing for their supper.

This happens mostly on Friday and Saturday nights, but Takala is open to musicians showing up any time. “C’mon, bring it on,” she says with a wry laugh. “[Spontaneity is] part of the spirit of the place.”

Mary K. Zajac writes from Baltimore.

One-dish pasta meals are a great vehicle for fresh summer vegetables. Making them is a snap for the chef, and cleanup is easy. To assemble these dishes, forgo the grocery and make a trip to your favorite roadside stand or farmers market.

I love green beans, and I’m always trying to get my children to eat them. They actually do in my recipe for spinach rotini with chicken, a simple dish that bursts with the taste of fresh sweet basil. Grilling summer squash and peppers to include with the trofie (short, squiggly twists of pasta) is easy; pulling them together with fresh pesto takes them to another level. Spaghetti and tomatoes is a classic pairing. Adding feta, crunchy bread crumbs, and thyme reinvents the dish. For a more sophisticated option, try the radicchio with shrimp, artichokes and capers—a guaranteed crowd-pleaser for any special occasion.

Don’t let the simplicity of these dishes fool you—ripe, well-sourced vegetables perfectly capture the bright, clean flavors of a summer garden. Enjoy!

Recipes:

• Trofie with Grilled Summer Vegetables and Pesto
• Spaghetti with Feta, Cherry Tomatoes, and Thyme
• Orecchiette Pasta with Shrimp, Radicchio, and Lemon
• Spinach Rotini with Chicken, Basil, and Green Beans

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s Thai Ki.

In Thomas Eakins’ painting, “Max Schmitt in a Single Scull,” the rower’s craft is slim and light, skimming the surface of the water as lightly as a dragonfly. When the Baltimore architectural firm of Ziger/Snead was asked to create a home for a pair of avid water enthusiasts and rowers, it took this image of a historic rowing scull as inspiration. Like the quiet pastime of rowing, the new home on the Rappahannock River was to be a peaceful weekend retreat, a place to reflect on the convergence of water and land, horizon and sea.

“The water was the most important reason for being there,” says Douglas Bothner, the project architect. “There was something really compelling to the owners about where the water met the land and they wanted to be able to experience that from everywhere in the house.”

To maximize the connection between the structure and the landscape, the house was placed as close to the water as possible, with simplicity underscoring every aspect of its design and construction. In addition to the view of the Rappahannock, it also encompasses vistas of a wetland and a forest.

Historically, rowing sculls consisted of a straightforward frame construction covered in a light skin. Like a scull, the home is a long, slim frame wrapped in glass. The result is that the house becomes a border and the landscape around it a work of art. “If you take a snapshot and put it in a frame on the coffee table, people engage with it differently, as if it has more value,” says Bothner. “This is a way of representing the landscape and the river in that way.”

Though some private spaces in the home are opaque, due to the use of concrete fiberboard siding, interruptions in the transparent frame are kept to a minimum by using floor-to-ceiling glass in the public areas. Even the master bathroom presents an open face to the river, requiring no solid walls for privacy in this rural setting. Sliding doors allow the entire house to be opened to cross breezes, giving the feeling that the structure is one large, pleasant screened porch and blurring the line between house and nature.

The ideal of simplicity carried into the home’s interior finishes, where the owners challenged the architects to use basic materials in creative ways. Inside the 3,500-square-foot home, galvanized steel structural columns are left bare, the fireplace and hearth are concrete block and poured concrete, and the light fixtures (from Home Depot) are cast metal. Ziger/Snead developed the custom stainless-steel kitchen and minimalist lacquered cabinetry in keeping with the home’s restrained palette. Because the structure is essentially a glass box, there is little need for artificial light during daylight hours; a glass floor along the south-facing wall of the building allows sunlight to filter into the lower-level multipurpose and storage spaces while giving a lightweight feel to the home’s main floor.

Despite the home’s minimalism, the owners are colorful people who are active in the Baltimore area art community when not at their river retreat. Their personalities can be seen in splashes of color throughout, such as the red Ligne Roset “Togo” sofa (which offers a soft counterpoint to the rigor of the architecture), and the vibrant array of Arne Jacobsen “Series 7” chairs and bar stools scattered throughout the home.

“The success [of the home] is its simplicity,” says Bothner. “It’s so lightweight when you are inside. I think, in part, it is a very rigorous thing and yet it allows the life of the river to dominate. It slips away and becomes a wonderful frame for being in the landscape.”

Christianna McCausland writes from Northern Virginia.

Hotel Rehoboth
247 Rehoboth Ave.
Rehoboth Beach, Del.
302-227-4300
hotelrehoboth.com

After getting caught in bay bridge traffic, my husband and I rushed into the lobby of the Hotel Rehoboth, late for a friend’s wedding in Lewes. “May we please check in so we can change clothes for the wedding?” I blurted to the woman behind the desk. Retaining every modicum of calm, she checked us in quickly, reassured that we had plenty of time to get there, and even complimented our quick change as we made our return rush through the lobby.

It was only when we returned to the hotel that we noticed the lobby’s little details: the buttery gold chairs and sofa arranged around the marble fireplace as if it were someone’s living room; the faux grand piano that doubles as a sound system; the sweeping staircase leading to the second floor; the fresh flowers, and the Oriental rugs (even in the elevator!). With its striking bright yellow facade and attached restaurant and upscale boutiques, it almost looks like something out of Naples, Fla. It’s definitely a different sort of accommodation for Rehoboth Beach, polished and predictable, but still family run. Best of all is the hotel’s location, right on the main drag, five blocks from the beach.

THE INNKEEPERS The hotel, which opened in March 2008, is a collaboration between former restaurateurs Bill and Peggy Martin (who owned Rehoboth’s The Homestead and Café on the Green, among others), their son, Keith Martin, and his wife, Sherri. “Our aim was to create more of a [full-service] hotel feel, not just a front desk,” says Keith. Hotel staff will schedule spa appointments or make dinner reservations for guests, services typically found at hotels with concierges. In addition, the hotel hosts a nightly wine and cheese reception for guests in the lobby.

THE ROOMS Although each of the Hotel Rehoboth’s 52 rooms (and five suites) is slightly different in size and shape, all have a standard, corporate hotel layout, but are decorated in the colors of sand, sky, and surf, a color scheme that runs throughout the hotel. Our king-size pillow top bed is dressed in shades of pewter blue, the walls are a creamy yellow, and the overstuffed couches and chairs in the sitting area are upholstered in muted nubby tweeds. Some rooms boast gas-powered fireplaces; 11 have private balconies, several with primo views overlooking the hullabaloo on Rehoboth Avenue.

SPECIAL TOUCHES/DIVERSIONS The hotel offers many extras including free parking, an open-air free shuttle back and forth to the beach, beach chairs and towels, an outdoor heated pool, and a lobby lending library known as the Book Nook. The hotel shares space with the charming Italian restaurant, Lupo di Mare (which provides limited hotel room service), as well as two swanky shops, Mod Cottage and Cleo’s Boutique.

WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST The ample compli-mentary breakfast buffet isn’t going to improve your swimsuit figure. We grazed among plates of hardboiled eggs, bagels, oatmeal with dried cranberries and raisins, pastries, and an obviously homemade quiche.

ROMANCE FACTOR You’re at the beach. Live it up!

COST Rates in-season range from $179 to $399 per night.

Confessions of a Beach Tag Inspector

By Jessica Bizik

At first glance, when the Chevy van’s door slid open, you might have thought we were a bunch of neon-vested juvenile delinquents coming to pick up trash. (Or teen cult members sent to lure new recruits from the boardwalk). We were, in fact, Bethany Beach beach tag checkers coming to ruin your day.

The year was 1989 and two of my buds and I had taken the job to pay for our summer expenses before heading off to college. We expected sun, fun, and the opportunity to flirt with Chad Allen—“the hottest lifeguard, like, ever”—on our daily trek down the shore.

I had already planned, in great detail, the circumstances under which he’d save my life. These involved a tsunami, my efforts to rescue a lost puppy from the jetty, and a strong wind blowing me gracefully into the ocean.

But on our first day at work, the Beach Inspector General divided us into teams of two. My friends got to work together and I was paired with the last remaining female: a cranky, 300-pound North Jersey gal who could’ve made Tony Soprano cry Uncle Junior. Her name was Bertha. (Seriously, Bertha.) And she scared the living daylights out of me.

Descending on the beach, we surveyed our prey: a sea of seemingly narcoleptic people who fell asleep the moment we approached. The ones who managed to remain conscious popped their widening, Looney Toons-style eyeballs back into their heads, nudged their partners in (beach) crime, and ran directly into the water.

“Beach wenches, 3 o’clock!” they’d yell, leaping from their Ocean Pacific towels, leaving us in a wake of sand and disdain.

I, the ever-so-polite suburban prepster, had no rap whatsoever. “Excuse me, sir. Did you, by any chance, happen to purchase beach tags for your lovely family today?”

Some people were simply obstinate: “Do you seriously expect me to pay you to use nature? I mean, you aren’t GOD, are you?”

Others pulled out their wallets with a huff—forking over the cash as if I had somehow just offended them or something.

One woman asked me to watch her kid for 15 minutes. She came back five hours later!

And the older folks? Well, they simply enjoyed the company.

Bertha uttered two simple words: “BEACH TAGS” and you could practically hear the “Jaws” theme in the background. Everyone paid. Period.

“Why are you so nice?” I remember Bertha asking on about our fifth outing together. And I got the sense there was a lot behind that question.

I just stared at her blankly, shrugged, and we spent the rest of the summer thick as thieves.

Sometimes, she was even sweet to me. But not as sweet as vanilla soft-serve with chocolate jimmies—or practicing mouth-to-mouth with Chad Allen in the lifeguard stand a week before the season ended.

The Summer of My First Real Kiss

By Mary Ann Treger

The summer before turning 16, my biggest fear (and embarrassment) was that I had not been kissed. I spent many sultry nights at a pity party on the front steps of my New Jersey home contemplating the possibility of missing out on this momentous marker in my young life. 

My prospects for meeting Prince Charming were grim.

A shy, quiet kid, I longed to be one of the pretty, perky, popular girls. But my crooked teeth (now crowned) and oversized nose (now reduced) kept me off that much-envied list. Who-kissed-who was the topic du jour of every girlie conversation. I would keep mum about never graduating from the Spin-the-Bottle variety. The only real kiss contender I had in sight was Bob, the best friend of my sister’s boyfriend.   

The horror of turning Sweet 16 kissless superseded thoughts of kissing Bob’s grotesquely mismatched lips. His lower lip was, to be polite, oversized. This unappealing trough hung open all the time, exposing more moist, pink flesh than I cared to observe outside of a butcher shop. His upper lip was a cartoon line. I realize that this sounds superficial, even cruel to those born with less than ideal smackers. Bob was a great guy. If only I had focused on his wit—he was pretty funny—or his brains I might have seen beyond “the lip.” But cut me some slack. Fifteen-year-olds are not known for wisdom. Character was not my concern. My objective was a kiss. Ideally, equal to the one Burt Lancaster gave Deborah Kerr on the wave-swept beach in “From Here to Eternity.”

Bob asked me out a few times during that hot, sticky 1960s summer. Since my biological clock was ticking and there was nothing more palatable on the social horizon, I succumbed.

I can’t remember where we went—the movies or bowling or miniature golf. It doesn’t matter. All I remember was the wet smooch he planted on me at the end of the evening in the front seat of his overheated Chevy. Bob’s lips were like a big suction cup, covering the real estate from my nose to my chin. I imagined a teenage squid or octopus would have felt the same after a first smooch. When it was over, half of my face was wet. All I wanted was a towel. Just like Deborah Kerr.

The Summer I Stopped Tanning

By Kessler Burnett

I was a teenager in the early ’80s, when women were expected to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and maintain a savage tan at all times. Next to a kickin’ pair of Candies and skin-tight Calvin Klein jeans, bronze skin was the most sought-after accessory—and I worked hard to get it.

At boarding school, as soon as spring’s thermometer topped 65, I would find a spot by the pool amid rows of girls slathered in oil dense enough to use in the filter of a Ford F-350. To amplify the grease’s effect, we’d use homemade UV reflectors engineered from tinfoil-wrapped Duran Duran and Go-Go’s albums. Every so often, girls would lift their heads to compare the progress of their melanin production. Even back then I understood that among women, tanning is a seriously competitive sport. Yet, try as I might, I just couldn’t keep up with my olive-skinned opponents. 

Truth is, I’ve never come by a tan easily. My mother has the tawny tone of a Choctaw squaw, my father the soapy pallor of a Scotsman. The genetic combo earns me a spot on the color wheel somewhere between ochre and bile, which yields skin with a tendency to burn. But I never let heredity stop my quest to look like the Bain de Soleil lady.

Then came my wakeup call. On one particular visit to the spa for a facial, the esthetician asked to look at my face under blue light. In the mirror before me emerged a beast’s face covered with a constellation of small black dots and big, misshapen brown blobs. As the esthetician pointed out the areas that revealed the most severe damage, the icy breath of regret brushed against my consciousness. Before me was the handy work of my ego: deep sun damage that threatened to define my future appearance and possibly health. That night, I broke off my relationship with Apollo and opted out of the tanning game. 

Now when I (twice annually) go to the beach, I more resemble a pile of laundry deposited under an umbrella. Instead of Brazilian bikinis, I wear a long-sleeve tunic, floor-length sarong, wide-brimmed floppy hat, and large sunglasses. I’ve donned this Sigmund and the Sea Monsters-esque costume on some of the world’s most exclusive beaches, from St. Barth’s to Mustique, without shame. While I may look like something out of Central Casting, my face, which I obsessively treat with microdermabrasion, Retin-A, and copious amounts of sunscreen, looks pretty darn good, and I sleep better knowing that I’ll have a few less wrinkles and age spots than my contemporaries, who continue to sear under the direct sun. So perhaps, when it comes to midlife female competition, I just might finally have a (pale) leg up. 

The Summer I Went Blond(ish)

By Jayne Blanchard

With its knee-high waves and pasty-skinned beachcombers, Ocean City was a far cry from the West Coast. But in the early ’70s, everyone was California dreamin’ and you wore pukka shells woven on leather strings around your ankles and Hawaiian print bathing suits whether you were from Hermosa Beach or Hampden.

Part of this California look was blond hair. The year I turned 14 I thought I was doomed to go through life a brown-haired Midge to the flaxen perfection of Malibu Barbie until a miraculous new product came out, Sun-In, which promised streaks as sun-kissed as Cheryl Tiegs on the cover of Teen magazine. All you had to do was spritz it on, wait 10 minutes, and then wash it out. Voila, instant surfer girl.

I ran down to Bailey’s Pharmacy for my bottle of Sun-In (a scene I imagined repeated across the country, as mousy-tressed teens stormed unsuspecting store owners, demanding their inalienable right to the pursuit of blondness) and squirted it on my head, as per the directions. True to teenage logic, I thought “Why wait 10 minutes when 15 would be even better?” By the time I washed it out, my crowning glory did not evoke images of Peggy Lipton or Michelle Phillips, but Archie Andrews of comic book fame.

All I needed was cross-hatches on the sides of my head and I could have been the king of Riverdale High with Betty and Veronica on either arm. But follicle faux pas love company, and as it turned out most of the beach that summer was dotted with girls and guys who tried Sun-In, so much so that by August the sand looked like fields of orange chrysanthemums in bloom. 

All season long I assiduously avoided the sun until 4:30 p.m., when I ventured out onto the beach, my carroty hair ablaze and my flounder-white flesh on display, sitting alone in a canvas chair reading “A Season in Hell” or furiously stabbing at my summer art project—a needlepoint rendition of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Come to think of it, I had few dates that summer. Wonder why.

Summer Friends, Self-Doubt, and Raquel Welch

By Stephanie Shapiro

I loved the beach and I loved my best friend, Jo Ellen.

The beach was freedom, possibility, salt and sensuality.

Jo Ellen was fun, true blue, and always up for adventure.

But when Jo Ellen, a precocious beauty, came down to the beach and unpacked her astonishing bikini, the emotional metrics went haywire. Imagine lying next to a teenage Raquel Welch while you’re draped in a loud beach towel that does little to disguise an ill-fitting swimsuit and the chubby body contained within.

Jo Ellen flirted easily with the lifeguards while I toed the sand. I coveted her effortless banter and feared it at the same time. If I were in her flip-flops, I’d be petrified that it could lead to something more, like a date, and then I’d have to worry about other possibilities besides making small talk. 

So it went those circa-1960s summers: Jo Ellen tanned, I burned. Jo Ellen’s hair miraculously turned from dark brown to blond. My hair stayed tangled in a hippie-wannabe mess.

That Jo Ellen wrestled with her own self-doubts didn’t occur to me. Nor did it allay a simmering resentment that flared at times into full-blown jealousy. I downplayed Jo Ellen’s admiration for my jokes and dilettantish store of knowledge and craved a more tangible sign of superiority, as clear to a lifeguard as to Jo Ellen.

The triumph came one cloudy day at a faded amusement park. We slid into a weathered seat for two on the Tilt-A-Whirl. Rising, dipping and rotating, our panoramic view shifted nonstop between shining sea and boardwalk hokum. For about eight revolutions, nothing mattered.

Then, I glanced at Jo Ellen. She wasn’t having nearly as much fun. Her perfect tan had faded to pale green. I signaled the operator and the ride glided to a halt. Jo Ellen excused herself and became sick. For once, I had bested my best friend, who apparently couldn’t take the physical rigors of summer’s idle pleasures. “Wimp,” I crowed silently.

The next day, we probably returned to the beach. There was little no room for smugness there, save a giggle or two at Jo Ellen’s expense, as I lay shrouded in terry cloth next to my beloved, curvaceous friend. Jo Ellen and I probably pattered about boys and bands and hilarious teachers. And as we continue to do today, quietly forgave one another for the wounds that jealousy, self-doubt, and the nauseating ride between the two can exact on a friendship.

If asked to describe Latin American cooking several years ago, I would have cluelessly replied something about giant blobs of sour cream, guacamole, and dripping cheese sauce—the familiar American take on the cuisine.  
Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first to dive into a plate of nachos the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, but the authentic cuisines of Mexico, Peru, Chile, and other South American countries are much healthier and far less heavy. Sorry, sour cream and puddles of melted Velveeta do not exist south of the border.

I have had the good fortune to become friends with the Peruvian owner of a South American grocery store here in Easton, and I began my quest for authentic Latin cuisine with him. I also contacted a Mexican friend of mine, and I was not disappointed in what they told me. The recipes that follow are easy to prepare with ingredients readily available online, from Latin American markets, or from the international aisle of large supermarkets.

The steak a lo pobre is classic hearty food from Chile that is easy to make and filling. The chicken dish or aji de gallina is Peruvian, tasty and different, and you can adjust the spice to your liking. The refreshing Mexican beet and apple salad is a family recipe from my friend. Various empanada recipes can be found all over South America, but I find this version, made with seafood, to be particularly delicious.

Give these dishes a try and see if they don’t forever change your perception of Latin American food. You may never dump sour cream on a burrito again!

Recipes

• Aji de Gallina or Chicken with Yellow Pepper Sauce
• Grilled Steak a lo Pobre
• Pickled Beets, Apples, Oranges and Pecans
• Mixed Seafood Empanadas

Andrew Evans is the chef at Easton’s Thai Ki.

Old Gratitude House
5944 Lawton Ave.
Rock Hall, MD 21661
410-639-7448
www.oldgratitudehouse.com

It’s all about the water. Anyone who’s familiar with Rock Hall, Md., will tell you it’s true. This old fishing village has almost as many boat slips (about 2,000) as it has people (about 2,400). Its dozen or so marinas are spread along the village’s winding shoreline, which also boasts several waterfront restaurants.

A particularly scenic slice of this shore is occupied by the Old Gratitude House, which might best be described as a large waterfront deck with an attached house. The house is a frame structure dating to the nineteenth century and has the narrow foyer and low ceilings of an old house. But the modest foyer leads to a large, comfortable sitting room that in turn opens onto the inn’s best amenity, a rustic 1,000-square-foot deck overlooking the Chesapeake. The partially covered deck is where breakfast is usually served, and where cushioned settees invite you to spend the afternoon with a book in your lap as you watch boats transit a channel 100 yards away. It’s also a great place to open your own bottle of wine at sunset. On our recent visit, a rain shower spoiled the show, but we did find a decent shiraz at the nearby grocery store and retreated to our room to listen to the rain.

THE INNKEEPERS Sandy and Hank Mayer came to the bed-and-breakfast business about ten years ago, starting with a B&B in Annapolis, and are now beginning their fifth season in Rock Hall. “We used to stay in a lot of bed-and-breakfasts,” Hank says. “So we knew what we liked. And Sandy was looking for something else to do.” Helping to welcome guests are two West Highland Terriers and two cats. 

THE ROOMS Four rooms have private waterfront decks. A small fifth room—the Navy Blue and Gold—overlooks the street. The largest and most expensive room, the Orient Escape, is decorated in an Asian theme, with a queen-size platform bed and an in-room jetted bathtub. The Tuscany, which my wife and I stayed in, is a generous-size room with two armchairs and an electric fireplace. Furnishings inside and out are warm, traditional, and comfortable, with lots of dark woods, plush upholstery, and rich-looking wallpapers.

SPECIAL TOUCHES/DIVERSIONS Check local listings for the time of sunset; you’ll want to be on either the large communal deck or the one off your room. The time between breakfast and sunset can be spent using one of the inn’s eight kayaks. The inn also has one tandem and eight cruiser-type bicycles that some guests use to visit the Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge, about six miles south of town. “What we find,” Sandy says, “is that on the first visit here, people kayak and bike and explore the area. On the second visit, they do it less. And on the third, they just sit and watch the boats go past.” One outing that almost all guests make, she says, is to Waterman’s Crab House where a large deck draws crowds in summer to hardshells.

WHAT’S FOR BREAKFAST Coffee is available as early as 7:30 a.m., but breakfast is at 9. It might start with juice, banana-nut bread, and baked pineapple, followed by crab quiche and croissants
or perhaps bacon and pancakes. It’s a good bit of food but not the over-the-top fare that some inns serve. 

ROMANCE FACTOR Rock Hall is hardly a big honeymoon destination, but the Old Gratitude, its private decks and the cinematic sunsets are the right ingredients for a romantic weekend getaway. 

COST Rooms range from $150 to $250 per night. There’s a two-night minimum on weekends.

You know all those offbeat places along Route 50 you’ve always been curious about but never stopped to visit? Well, we did. What follows are fourteen funky finds from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City.

1 A.H. Herb ’n Craft Farm

Spot It: Look for the handmade signs advertising fresh herbs and eggs, and, during election
season, political candidates.

What’s Inside: Who knew you could find the “World’s Best Bathroom Cleaner” on a Talbot County herb and chicken farm along Route 50? At A. H. Herb ’n Craft, you’ll also score dozens of other all-natural household cleaning products, dietary supplements, vitamins, handmade soaps, and organic eggs. Best of all, you’ll get an education in all-natural living from its loquacious owner, Fran Kisser, a Greek immigrant who practices what she preaches. Kisser grows many of the ingredients in the products she sells, from the roses in her rose-scented soaps to the lavender in her furniture polish. “Everything here is 100 percent natural, not 99 and a third,” she says.

Kisser, who once used the property to house her 4,000 show rabbits, now raises a flock of South American Araucana chickens, which lay
a blue-green egg. And according to Kisser, who also sells her wares at Easton’s Amish Market, business is booming. “There’s no recession for people who want to buy natural,” she says.—J.S.

13433 Ocean Gateway, Wye Mills, Md.
410-364-5068, http://www.ahherbncraft.com

2 Tuckahoe Steam & Gas Association

Spot It: Look for the small sign on the west side of the road—and old engines belching steam during special events.

What’s Inside: “Is this Tuckahoe State Park?” That’s what Tuckahoe Steam & Gas (TSG) caretaker Dave “Bullet” Wooters hears all too often from confused motorists who turn into the TSG complex. Hopefully, some of them stick around because there’s a lot to see here. TSG gets big crowds for its annual gas and tractor show, held the weekend after the Fourth of July every summer (July 9-12 this year). But you can pull in anytime to check out the impressive collection of vintage steam- and gas-powered engines, as well as numerous John Deere, International, and Farmall tractors at rest. The grounds are also home to the Rural Life Museum, filled with myriad Eastern Shore memorabilia, including farm tools, a re-created general store, and farmhouse kitchen. A new Machine Shop Museum houses huge early-twentieth-century, belt-driven boring machines, grinders, power hack saws, and more, all smelling of lubricating oil and hard work. No, this is definitely not Tuckahoe State Park, but it’s definitely worth a stop.—J.S.

11472 Ocean Gateway, Easton, Md. http://www.tuckahoesteam.org

3 Rabbit Hill Music

Spot It: Look for the ukulele mounted to the sign out front.

What’s Inside: Is it open? Is it closed? We’re never quite sure of the status of this eclectic music shop along a lonely stretch of Talbot County highway. And even when that recently installed “Open” sign is burning brightly, we’ve found the store locked. If you do manage to get inside, you’ll find a truly funky mix of music ephemera, from cheap guitar strings to stacks of 1980s cassette tapes to the odd ukulele hanging on the wall.—J.S.

10687 Ocean Gateway, Easton, Md.

4 Ruin of Old White Marsh Episcopal Church

Spot It: Brick wall that looks like a Mack truck drove through its center.

What’s Inside: This is one spooky place with some seriously deep roots. Built prior to 1690, White Marsh is one of the oldest churches on the Eastern Shore. Today, all that remains is a stumpy brick wall with a huge hole in the center. One of its most intriguing features is the restored tomb of Robert Morris Sr., father of the financier of the American Revolution, who settled in nearby Oxford. And White Marsh is not without lore: Legend has it that a few hours after the wife of the first rector, Rev. Daniel Maynadier, died, grave robbers dug up her body and cut a heirloom ring off her finger. The robbers were shocked to learn that Mrs. Maynadier was only sleeping. Roused by the pain, she sat up, and walked home to reunite with her likely equally surprised husband.—K.B. 

Located south of Easton, just before Trappe

5 Unicorn Bookstore

Spot It: The white, roadside sign emblazoned with a strutting unicorn.

What’s Inside: Hush-quiet, appropriately musty, and totally organized in its o