On Shelter Island, private ferries are the only way to reach the mainland. With a greatly reduced tourist season, they might be out of business soon.
via www.nytimes.com
09/22/2020
Laurie Fanelli, seeing things through for her community
Laurie Fanelli makes a habit of ascribing anything she accomplishes to someone else.
Like her assertion that she got the leadership skills and compassion that made her the town’s director of Senior Services from her mother, Loretta Gillman. Laurie has a story to illustrate the point. “In my family, it was known that if you came to the New York area [the family lived in Rutherford, N.J.] you’d call Loretta and she’d take care of you.”
Laurie’s compassionate bent led her to nursing as a profession. At 20, she graduated in 1961 from the Christ Hospital School of Nursing and began working there. One day, she heard about a 2-year-old child who needed help. The child’s father was overseas, and her mother was a North Korean medical student doing her residency at Christ Hospital.
“Poor little Sissy — her name was actually Maryann — was alone in her apartment with an aide,” Laurie said. “Her mother didn’t know what to do with her.”
When Laurie went home and told her parents, they took Sissy in and raised her as their own. Sissy lived with the Gillmans for 15 years with weekend visits from her natural mother. Today, Laurie says, Sissy is a family court judge, living in Seattle, married and with two children of her own. Laurie regards her as a sister.
In the early 1960s, at the invitation of a friend who wanted to help her get over a break-up, Laurie went on an 18-day cruise from New York to Venezuela. She volunteered one day to take a little boy up to the bridge to meet the captain, while the boy’s parents went to have a drink in the bar. She and the little boy met the ship’s officers, including Joe Fanelli, a handsome recent graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy, where Laurie’s brother had also studied. Joe was a mate on the United States, docked in New York, and when the cruise returned to New York, they continued to see each other and married in 1966.
Their three children are Cristina, Marissa and Julie. Cristina lives in Mendham, N.J., is married to Tim Babits, and works as a teacher in elementary education. Marissa Fanelli lives on Shelter Island, works at The Islander, and has a 14-year-old son Charlie who attends the Shelter Island School. Julie, also an Islander, is married to Joe Denny; their daughter Vivian is 8 and attends the Hayground School where Julie teaches.
The story of how the Fanelli family found Shelter Island is a familiar one. In 1967, Laurie and Joe were invited out by friends, and immediately fell in love with the Island. Weekend stays at inns and with friends followed, and they bought a sailboat and lived on it for a while. In the early 1970s, they bought a tiny house, and a few years later built a bigger one in Shorewood. Cristina, Marissa and Julie worked every summer, washing dishes at the Inn Between, teaching swimming, and making sandwiches at the Island Boatyard, where they were known as “the Deli Fanellis.”
In 1980, Joe was diagnosed with a life-threatening bone marrow condition with an uncertain prognosis and no cure. Most people with that type of bone marrow condition died within four years of diagnosis.
Joe had started a successful business in ship brokerage that had supported the family for many years, but with the future uncertain, they decided Laurie needed more education, so she got a master’s degree in Nursing Education at NYU, and after certification began working as a nurse practitioner. Joe worked up until three days before he died in 1996 — 16 years after his diagnosis.
In those years, Laurie said, they squeezed in a lot of living. “We traveled and the girls got through school,” she said, “but he missed some great grandkids.”
Over the years, Laurie’s work took her to the front lines of health care. She admits she gravitated to the most challenging assignments “I became the expert on the hard cases,” she said.
In the early 90s, while working as a visiting nurse in Newark, she went on assignment in the company of armed guards, and was once guided through the halls and stairwells of a bullet-hole-riddled building by flashlight and met a couple of intimidating but helpful men who got onto the elevator with her and then suggested she’d better walk. She later learned they were undercover policemen. Parking was possible, but car theft was rampant. “I lost five cars,” she remembered. “After the fifth, Joe said, ‘I think it’s time to get out of Newark.’”
She was living a kind of split life; changing dressings, and cleaning wounds for elderly, impoverished and often bereaved homebound patients during the week, and heading to Shelter Island on the weekend.
From 1999 to 2006, she worked at Village Center for Care, an AIDS program, at Rivington House in the Village. “There was treatment, but people were dying so fast,” she said. “Too many funerals. It was horrible.”
In 2015, she retired, and a few months later ran into Chris Lewis, a friend and former Town Council member, who encouraged her to take on another tough assignment — to rejuvenate Shelter Island’s Senior Center.
“I thought, I know I can do this,” she said. “I’ve always tried to go toward something that spooked me or something that I didn’t know. I’m the idiot who loves to get lost. My husband used to say, ‘You and your shortcuts.’ It’s even true in this job.”
Laurie has made a lot of changes at the Senior Center, with new staff and new initiatives. While keeping vital programs running smoothly, she added a program to administer flu shots, which is expanding to offer a variety of immunizations. This year, all 300 spots for flu shots filled quickly. In the first weeks of the COVID-19 emergency, the Senior Center harnessed a pool of over 80 volunteers to help quarantined and homebound citizens get mail, supplies and food.
She has shown leadership on the question of safe drinking water, the lack of well-testing, and the threats to the quality and quantity of water in Shelter Island’s sole aquifer.
In the early days of the pandemic, Laurie took advantage of the full-time presence of an array of talented health professionals to establish the Health and Wellness Alliance to advise and educate the community. The organization includes three social workers; Lucille Buergers, Nancy Green and Bonnie Berman; psychiatrist Ryan Sultan; and clinical psychologist Trisha Gallagher. Jessica Colas and Laurie, both psychiatric nurse practitioners, round out the team.
These days she’s focusing on issues related to loss and loneliness, such as hoarding and bereavement, problems that cause real pain and suffering. “There just are not the services available over here,” she said. “If I was in New York and concerned about a hoarding situation, a social worker would go out, and if we were still concerned, we’d call Adult Protective Services. They’d call on a team to make an assessment. We might get an aide in to get the place cleaned up and to build trust so we could then work on issues.”
But she refuses to let the current lack of services east of Riverhead for these kinds of problems discourage her. “We don’t have it,” she said. “We need it. I will get this. ”
Lightning round
What do you always have with you? I used to wear a figa, a golden hand charm from Brazil.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? The beach in Shorewood. It’s full of memories.
When was the last time you were elated? Two weeks ago, when our mental health group had a gathering at Crab Creek Beach.
What exasperates you? Stupid questions.
Favorite movie or book? ‘Toms River,’ by Dan Fagin. It’s about what happened when a town polluted their aquifer.
Favorite food? Vanessa’s Dumplings in New York.
Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Florence Nightingale.
Most respected elected official? Rudolph Giuliani.
08/29/2020
Roasted cobia, a new fish on new potatoes
BECAUSE OF WHERE I live, I’m privileged to eat fresh wild-caught seafood, so when a new kind of fish swims into our waters, it gets my attention. Until recently cobia was a rare visitor to the bays of Long Island.
Commonly found in temperate and tropical waters, cobia is a meaty, flaky fish that’s been described as having the texture of swordfish with the taste of striped bass. Flakier than swordfish, it still holds up well to grilling and roasting.
Like swordfish, cobia has a thick skin that the dainty might not eat, but that prevents the fish from drying out as it cooks.
In August 2018, the Long Island fishing report On the Water reported, “With this warm water they have heard of two cobia caught this week,” and in June of 2019, “A cobia was caught deep in Massapequa this week. It went about 15 pounds. This is not a common visitor to our waters.”
Charlie Manwaring at Southold Fish Market in Southold said he’s gotten ten cobias from local fishermen this year, including one that weighed 60 pounds. Alice’s in Greenport (and at the Haven’s market on Saturdays) had cobia for the past two weeks, selling fillets recently from a fish that must have been at least 30 pounds.
Sawyer Clark, pictured below with his nephew Lucas, says this cobia is the first he’s caught this year.
Maybe it’s the increasing water temperatures that sent the lobsters north, and contributed to the demise of last year’s adult bay scallops, and maybe it’s a random three-year fluctuation, but at the rate things are going, I decided to figure out how best to cook it. Here’s where I started.
Roasted cobia on a peppery bed of new potatoes
(Serves four)
1 and ¼ lb. cobia fillet with the
skin on, cut into four thick pieces
1 and ½-lb unpeeled red potatoes, sliced thin.
2 tablespoons, and 4 teaspoons
of olive oil
¼ teaspoon paprika
¼ teaspoon dried ground chipotle or adobe pepper
¼ teaspoon ground pepper
½ teaspoon salt for the potatoes and another pinch for the fish.
1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. Cut the unpeeled red potatoes into1/4-inch slices using a mandoline or food processor. The slices should be floppy, but not translucent. Mix the potatoes in a bowl with 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and the spices until the oil coats the potatoes.
3. Spread one teaspoon of olive oil in a lasagna-style pan, or a 12-inch iron skillet, and arrange the potatoes over the bottom in an even layer. Dribble another teaspoon of olive oil over the potatoes.
4. Roast the potatoes for 15 minutes, or until the edges of the thin slices are starting to brown.
5. While the potatoes are cooking, put the cobia fillets into the same oily, spicy bowl you used to coat the potatoes. Add another teaspoon of olive oil to coat the cobia fillets, especially the skin.
6. Arrange the cobia fillets, skin side up on top of the hot potatoes, and dribble another teaspoon of oil and a pinch of salt over the fillets.
7. Roast for 10 minutes, or until the flesh flakes easily with a fork, and the potatoes are well browned and crispy on the edges.
08/25/2020
Toasted pecan cinnamon honey ice cream
Martha and I love to collaborate in the kitchen, especially on dessert, my favorite meal of the day. We had a pint of local honey, some Ceylon cinnamon and some whole pecans. This is what we made with it, possibly our best ice cream ever.
1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup superfine sugar
1/2 cup honey, divided in half.
1 tablespoon vanilla paste
Pinch of salt
2 cups of cream
3/4 cup whole pecans
1 and 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1. Mix the sugar and half of the honey into the milk with a whisk until the sugar is completely dissolved.
2. Add the salt, vanilla and cream and stir to combine. Cover and chill at least two hours.
3. Toast the pecans in a hot iron skillet, turning them once when you begin to smell them. Chop the pecans coarsely, and combine with the remaining 1/4 cup of the honey, and the cinnamon.
4. Freeze the cooled cream and milk mixture in an ice cream churn until it is very thick and semi-solid. Turn off the churn and spoon half the ice cream into a storage container. Spoon the honey/pecan mixture over the ice cream, and add the rest of the ice cream in a layer over the nuts and honey.
5. Freeze until solid. When you serve the ice cream, scoop so that the layer of honey, cinnamon and pecan shows up in every serving.
08/18/2020
08/17/2020
Making the world a better place: Ann Brunswick, at 94, is off to a good start.
TODAY WE TAKE for granted that a woman can have a family and a career, but when Ann Brunswick was born in 1926, it wasn’t like that.
Again and again, in her long life, she’s defied expectations, as a brilliant researcher and scientist, raising two very accomplished daughters, and retiring to Shelter Island, where she built a house in 1979. She has lived here full time since 2010.
The project uncovered information that helped establish, among other things, the fact of HIV infections in women, the extent of homelessness in Harlem, and the profound differences in male and female health.
Speaking about her life’s work, Ann said she was guided by the idea that a scientist must resist the human urge to fit things into patterns instead of observing and recording what you see. “You rarely find a single cause for an observed thing,” she added. “It’s not all nature or all nurture. It’s an interaction between the two. All observations that look for a single cause are wrong.”
Ann was born to a successful businessman, and “a very elegant mother” at Miss Lippincott’s Sanitarium, a Madison Avenue maternity hospital that catered to New York’s most prominent families.
At this hospital, she said, new mothers rested, and their babies were brought to them once a day. “When they came in and told my mother she had a colicky baby, she would not accept that. ‘I’m sending her home to nanny!’” she said. The family’s nanny came in a taxi to take infant Ann home, while Ann’s mother stayed at Miss Lippincott’s to rest.
An early reader, and an excellent student, Ann spent a lot of time in the kitchen of her home in the West 70s with her governess and Thelma, who worked as a maid for the family. Thelma read The Daily News, which included the comic strips, which Ann devoured.
An outstanding student, she attended PS 87, PS 6, PS 93 (Joan of Arc) and Julia Richman High School, whipping through the New York Public School system and Hunter College to graduate at 20 with a Masters Degree in Psychology from Clark College.
Her first job out of grad school was with the Anti-Defamation League, where on her first day of work she was asked to condense an article that had been rejected for publication. When it was accepted, she had her first publication credit, a major accomplishment for an academic so early in a career.
When the ADL started a research department, Ann became interested in survey research, and continued to work there until she married Peter Brunswick in 1950, and moved to Denver, Colo. with him.
Within a year, Ann and her new husband were back in New York, and she went to work for National Opinion Research Center (NORC), where she learned the scientific approach to surveys. In 1953, pregnant with her first child, she finished writing the report on an important project and was walking home to her mother’s house when her water broke.
She stayed at home for a time with her daughter Debra, and continued working at NORC through the birth of her second child, Naomi, in 1956. Debra is now retired and living in Jacksonville, Fla., Naomi is a pediatric intensive care doctor, living in New York, and between them Ann has three grandchildren, and three great grandchildren.
Ann went to Columbia University as a Senior Research Scientist in 1966. By then, she’d developed a strong sense of the right and wrong way to conduct scientific research, and it had caused her to leave a previous job as research director when she realized that the questions were loaded. “I don’t believe in rocking chair research. It has to be socially useful,” she said.
At Columbia, she began the project of a lifetime, although at the time it was meant to be a one-time survey of adolescents, to help Harlem Hospital determine the need to upgrade its services when the field of adolescent medicine was just beginning.
Combining a medical examination with a parent interview, and participant interviews, the survey sought to create a full report on the health of African-American teenagers in Harlem. “I couldn’t imagine adolescent girls talking about their periods with a male interviewer, so I matched racially, and by gender, the interviewers and the adolescents, hiring interviewers who were African-American.”
The data collection for the Harlem survey was in 1968 and 1969, and at first there was no plan to fund the project in the future. “There was so much doubt that anyone could do a survey in Harlem that I was only funded for the first year,” she said.
But the project continued to follow the original participants over five decades, gathering data from them in waves that occurred every five or six years through 1994, recording the effects of such public health crises as homelessness, substance abuse and the HIV epidemic of the 1980s.
In 1976, Ann and Peter divorced.
A year later, visiting a friend with a home on Shelter Island, Ann stayed behind to sit on her friend’s deck while the others went to the beach.
“Something grabbed me to be able to sit alone in that peace and beauty,” she remembered. “I had been married to someone who worked for an international airline. We went all over the world, but were never in one place for more than a week.”
She rented a house for July 1978, and by the end of the month, she had bought a lot in West Neck. She moved into her own home the next summer.
At first, Ann said she didn’t feel integrated into the life of the Island. “At that time, newcomers were not so welcome,” she said.
Not one to sit idle, she led an effort to establish a program for shop students at the school to receive training to work in a town program to help seniors maintain their homes. Her plan came to naught when she could not get approval from the town to launch the project, in spite of support from the Lions Club and school administrators.
“That took the wind out of my sails to do a lot of organizing,” she said, although she was an early member of the Shelter Island League of Women Voters, serving as secretary for the non-partisan organization for three years.
Over decades of living here, Ann has come to treasure some of the things about Shelter Island that have never changed. “The fact that you can charge at the drugstore. You just walk in and they know your name,” she said. “The drugstore is one of the wonderful places on Shelter Island. It still has that old-fashioned feeling.”
In August 2017, Ann experienced the nightmare that haunts many who live independently — a serious fall. While hanging something in her closet, she fell backwards, broke a bone, and was unable to move to get help. Her 50-hour ordeal ended when she failed to show up for dinner with a friend, who asked the Shelter Island police to check on her, which they did at once, rescuing her more than two days after her fall.
She recovered from her injuries, but as a close, and scientific observer of the human lifespan, Ann has seen the way human development fails to follow a predictable line, but proceeds in spurts.
“With aging, there are a lot of chemical changes, immunity changes, allergies changes, you stay level for a time and then there is a spurt of aging,” Ann said. “That concept of change applies to changes in human cultures as well. We are going through one of those big rapid changes now, a social epidemic as well as a viral epidemic.”
Lighting Round
What do you always have with you? A tissue.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? Hay Beach, looking out at the Atlantic.
When was the last time you were elated? When I look at my trees. I prefer maples.
When was the last time you were afraid? I’m afraid of the COVID situation. It’s terrifying. We don’t really know how to protect ourselves.
What exasperates you? Artificiality and phoniness.
Favorite book? When I was 15 or 16 I read ‘The Americanization of Edward Bok.’ As he was dying and his children were around him, he told them, ‘You have to leave the country better off for your having been here.’
Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? John Lewis — the opposite of what we have in the White House. He did not get into ‘good trouble’ to glorify himself.
07/24/2020
Inside Long Island's Fruit Farms
Inside Long Island's Fruit Farms May 2020 Feed Me magazine.
Great food is slow food. A radish goes from seed to salad in few weeks, but an apple takes a decade. A peach tree needs five years to bear fruit, a cherry about seven. It takes an old farm to grow the best, and only a few Long Island families have been around long enough: men and women with the skill and the attention spans to raise the finest fruit.
On a mild April afternoon last year, I climbed into the cab of Clark McCombe’s Bobcat to see the spring bloom at Briermere in Riverhead, where his family has farmed ever since 1961. Even before McCombe’s father, Leonard, a photojournalist for LIFE magazine, bought the property, fruit trees had been growing on it for 40 years. Today, about 200 acres of the land is planted in rows of berries, peaches, nectarines, plums, pears and apples.
I particularly wanted see the gooseberries, a plant that is rarely grown these days, and more’s the pity. Gooseberries have a complex flavor and a load of pectin that gives them substantial texture when cooked, which makes them ideal for pies and jellies. They are the most beautiful of berries, light green to deep purple, with veins of pink like fine marble.
When a fruit variety is called heirloom, it means the plants are handed down from generation to generation, freely propagated by farmers and gardeners, and sometimes even grow wild. Heirloom fruit varieties are usually at least 50 years old, and rarely commercially viable, but most established farms grow a few anyway, for reasons sentimental as well as practical.
“Heirloom fruit is so difficult, so gnarly, has so many negative attributes that it just isn’t a satisfactory fruit for a commercial farm operation,” said Tom Wickham of Wickham’s Fruit Farm in Cutchogue. “You can have some to talk about, but not to rely on as the only fruit you are going to sell. You will be out of business in no time.”
Strawberries are the first fruit of a Long Island summer, and for Tom Wickham, whose family has been farming in Cutchogue since the 1640s, they are an excellent example of why cultivating the traits of heirloom fruit is so important, even if trying to sell actual heirloom fruit can break your heart.
Strawberries on Long Island used to grow in lockstep with the length of the days, reaching the peak of ripeness when there was most daylight, around June 21, and producing large, delicious fruit that was picked and eaten in a matter of weeks. But in Europe, heirloom strawberry varieties paid no attention to day length, producing fingertip-sized strawberries all summer long, often full of tiny seeds and sometimes more pink than red, even when fully ripe. Wickham said scientists at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva decided to breed a better berry. “They started crossing those little, long-bearing strawberries with luscious large, red berries we have on Long Island, and lo and behold, they finally got several varieties that are really very nice.” The everbearing strawberry hybrids have largely replaced old varieties that bore fruit in June and then took the rest of the growing season off. “Those old varieties have wonderful traits. The problem is how to integrate those traits with the wonderful traits we want today,” said Wickham.
“Yes, and you just took that cherry tree down,” McBride said. “We just planted more cherry trees, and it will be five to seven years before that planting is in full swing. The first two seasons, the tree is working on its roots.”
Many pears qualify for the heirloom moniker. At the edge of a Briermere field yards from Long Island Sound, McCombe introduced me to a Bartlett tree that is still producing fruit after nearly 100 years, quite a record of fecundity. “That’s the last of the original pear planting,” he said. “Dennis Gash, a hired hand who was here when my father bought the farm, was like a grandfather to me. He started working this land in 1920, and he remembered planting these trees.”
Pears are a crop my father loved,” said Tom Wickham. “The old saying ‘grow pears for your heirs’ has two meanings. It takes forever to get them to fruit, and once you do, they last forever.”
At Wickham’s, Anjou and Bartlett are among the pears his father planted in the 1980s. Flemish Beauty is a 100-year old variety that is new to the Wickham’s farm, meaning he planted them a few years back, and they are just now starting to bear fruit.
Spend time looking at a family’s orchard, and you start to recognize traits that are as much markers of the clan as the cultivars. At Milk Pail, Jennifer Halsey Dupree and Amy Halsey are the 12th generation of their family to farm in Water Mill, on the shores of Mecox Bay. Halseys have worked this land since the 17th century. The sisters’ side-by-side homes (their parents’ home is next door) share the best backyard ever—20 acres of blooming, productive fruit trees in undulating rows that stretch to the bay, with Dune Road and the Atlantic Ocean visible just beyond.
Dupree said Granny Smith apples have been part of Milk Pail’s orchard since her father started growing fruit on this land 40 years ago. “We still have two rows of Granny Smith from the early ’80s,” she said. “They are very productive, but we had to replant some because of flooding from the bay. I had no plans of replacing them before that.” Milk Pail’s Granny Smiths are not the uniform baseball-size fruit found in supermarket bins. “Our Granny Smiths have a nice pink blush on them, and they vary a bit in shape and size. A Granny Smith in the supermarket, they are all exactly the same size and the same shade of green.”
“We are a mile from the ocean, which makes us one of the latest-blooming orchards in New York State,” said Dupree. However, the moderating effect of the ocean gives Milk Pail the longest possible fall growing season. “I was harvesting Pink Lady apples right through Thanksgiving last year,” she said. “They have a real pizzazz flavor.”
In Wickham’s opinion, the most flavorful apple on his farm is a greenish-brown fruit with no official name. It is sweet and tart, with a great crunch. “A grower in Virginia found a branch, liked it and saved it, somehow it got to the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, and then we grew them here. We love them, but never found a commercial market. We call them Razor.”
In 1982, Woodside Orchard was born in Jamesport when Robert H. Gammon began planting what would eventually be 28 varieties of apple trees on 40 acres. He rigged up an old irrigation trailer to serve as a farm stand when he started harvesting a few years later. “The raccoons ate more of my stuff than I got to sell,” said Gammon, so he moved a cabin from a former day camp at nearby Laurel Lake to the orchard, where it has served as a raccoon- resistant farm stand ever since. “When you are in agriculture, you’ve got to be self-sufficient,” he said.
Among the varieties Gammon planted was the Arkansas Black, a dark beauty of the apple world developed by De Kalb Holt in his Arkansas orchard in the 1850s. The Arkansas Black apple is almost purple in hue and turns darker as it matures. Crisp with a tart flavor, it keeps well, and like many older cultivars, its flavor continues to develop as it ages.
Gammon’s sons Bob and Scott joined him in the 1990s and now run the business. It was Bob Gammon’s inspiration to take advantage of the very large number of apple varieties the family grew to make a product that hadn’t been huge on Long Island since the 19th century. Hard cider.
Left: Bob Gammon, co-owner of Woodside Orchards. Top: An Arkansas Black apple at Woodside Orchards. Bottom: Crates of harvested apples at Woodside Orchards in Jamesport. Photo credit: Randee Daddona
“For hard cider, you need that blend,” said Bob. “Our apples are coming in from late August through November, and then they are in storage.” Woodside’s cidermaking operation opened in nearby Aquebogue in 2012. Open year-round, it uses most of the 28 cultivars, including Golden Russet, a very old American variety known as an outstanding cider apple, to create a sophisticated menu of ciders with flavors from Champagne-like to fruity.
For the last stop of my seasonal Long Island fruit tour, I circled back to Briermere on a sunny October day, where I admired a bushy row of Newtown Pippins—100 trees about 20 years old, that will produce, with careful pruning, for another 20.
The Newtown Pippin, which was first cultivated in Newtown (now Elmhurst, Queens) in 1759, is the oldest apple in the United States and one of the few heirloom apples that is still commercially viable. This green apple is firm and crisp. It is extremely fragrant and develops a sweeter and fuller flavor after a few months of cold storage—that is, 30 degrees at 90 percent humidity. (It’s closer to basement than refrigerator conditions, in case you are thinking of trying this at home).
In a world full of “new and improved” foods, these old fruit varieties are not just a taste of the flavorful past, but a living link to generations of American growers on some of the nation’s oldest farms. They’re reason enough to eat your way through the season.
Gooseberry Fool recipe
Culinarily speaking, a fool is a chilled dessert that involves whipped cream (or custard) gently mixed with stewed or mashed fruit, and it is a boon for people who love dessert, but don’t/won’t/can’t bake. The name may come from the French word fouler (“to trample”), but fool is an English dish and belongs to a category of desserts that includes tri e. Like the fruit farms of Long Island, gooseberry fool has a history going back to the 17th century. If you can’t nd gooseberries, with their complex sweet-tart avor, don’t worry: Other soft fruits, such as red currants, strawberries, raspberries or blackberries will work well, too. Just adjust the sugar to taste. Serves 4.
INGREDIENTS
2 cups ripe gooseberries
6 tablespoons sugar, plus more to taste if necessary
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon zest
3/4 cup heavy cream
1. In a saucepan, heat the gooseberries with 2 tablespoons sugar over low heat until they break down into a soft, juicy mash. Force the fruit through a fine-mesh sieve into a bowl, pressing out the juice with the back of a spoon. Discard the stems and seeds.
2. Add 2 tablespoons sugar and the grated lemon zest to the puréed fruit. Taste it for sweetness and add more sugar if needed. Let the sweetened purée cool to room temperature.
3. Beat the cream in a bowl with an electric mixer until it gains volume, then add the remaining 2 tablespoons sugar. Beat until cream holds soft peaks. Gently but thoroughly fold in the cooled fruit purée. Spoon into 4 glasses, cover tightly and refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.
More information
BRIERMERE FARMS: 4414 Sound Ave., Riverhead; 631-722-3931, briermerefarms.com
MILK PAIL FRESH MARKET: 1346 Montauk Hwy., Water Mill; 631-537-2565, milk-pail.com
WICKHAM’S FRUIT FARM: 28700 Main Rd., Cutchogue; wickhamsfruitfarm.com
WOODSIDE ORCHARDS: 116 Manor Lane, Jamesport; 631 722-5770, woodsideorchards.com
04/16/2020
Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on April 16, 2020
I have a sister living in Arkansas, where the peak of the coronavirus hasn’t hit — yet. She says it’s “like being at the base of a mountain, where it’s sunny and lovely, but I can hear the rumble of an avalanche coming down.”
For the people who have already lost a job or a loved one the avalanche has arrived, but for the rest of us, it’s hard to know what we should be doing.
When facing threats to my well being, doing things makes me feel better. But in this crisis, once I had filled the freezer, secured the drinking water, donated to the organizations that are dealing with this mess, and washed my hands, I was at a loss. Am I really expected to bake sourdough bread and watch Tiger King for the foreseeable future?
Two years ago, I gave her 10 N95 masks for Christmas (I considered it a thoughtful gift) along with a supply of drinking water, and she said she couldn’t find either. I tried to persuade her to move her conversation class to Zoom, and she interrupted me with the story of running an errand that involved driving and interacting with people in crowded places. This information predictably whipped me into a frenzy, and it took a few days for me to realize what she was trying to tell me; stop pestering her with hysterical phone calls, and to hell with Zoom.
I love you, Mom.
I did some grocery shopping for a neighbor, but the bananas I brought her were too ripe, and she asked me to replace them with some greener ones the next day. Appalled at the waste of perfectly good fruit, I suggested she use them, since overripe bananas can be frozen and used to make a sweet and creamy smoothie. This is not what she wanted to hear. She was looking forward to a firm, easy-slicing banana for her pandemic breakfast. Brown mushy parts were not part of her vision.
The bananas were rejected, and I was schooled.
In an emergency, the comfort of familiar food is important. Outside my bunker for a therapeutic walk I have observed useful activity in the animal world that I can model. The osprey are hard at work building nests. When a bird this size builds a place to raise young, it’s more like something involving a survey and two-by-fours than twig- and feather-lined cups nestled in the crook of a tree branch. I nodded approvingly as an osprey flew by with a branch the size of a javelin for a building site atop a platform overlooking Dering Harbor.
On another outdoor foray I spied a seal lying on a rock in Gardiner’s Bay right off the Ram Island causeway. Like the osprey, the seal’s pandemic behavior seemed worth emulating — go to the beach by yourself, swim out to a rock and lie on it, keeping a lookout for anyone who might approach. If they do, swim away.
The neighborhood racoons are not picky about eating wilted vegetables and scraps of food as they nose around foraging and getting plenty of exercise. They deftly avoid getting near anyone, and they always wear a mask. I will reproduce this behavior on my next excursion to the IGA.
Back indoors, my hound Mabel makes time to nap in between the lengthy rounds of dog walking that I impose on her. During those walks, she insists on stopping to smell the roses. And since roses are not yet in bloom, she stops to smell earthworms and deer poop, and other items of importance to her, for she is a dog.
Most of the rest of her day is spent asleep, her quiet breathing punctuated by lively dreams that cause her tail to thwump, her legs to gallop, and her nose to twitch. She never offers unwanted advice, and she’s always available to comfort and console her loved ones. I will try harder to follow her example.
02/29/2020
Island Profile: Meet and greet with a baseball-loving deer
February is a poignant time for Shelter Island’s deer herd. Hunting season is over, fawns are on the way, and pitchers and catchers have reported for spring training. If you’re a baseball lover, and a white-tailed deer, life doesn’t get any better than being the mascot for the Shelter Island Bucks, of the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League.
Meet Billy Buck, the outgoing, jovial ungulate of the dugout.
He’s living the dream.
If you’ve had the pleasure of greeting Billy during a game, you know that he’s not much of a talker, preferring to do his job with friendly gestures — a hug, a high-five, and the occasional nose-rub. So, it took the people who know Billy best to fill in the story of the life. People like Ken McGuinness and Brian Cass, this year’s general managers.
Heading into his seventh year in the job, Billy sees a lot of fun and excitement in the upcoming baseball season on Shelter Island — six weeks of non-stop, high quality baseball played by college athletes who aspire to the majors, and who come here to compete and excel, while we get to watch.
Billy Buck is a harelegger, born in Sachem’s Woods to parents who trace their line back through many generations of Island deer. The adored fawn of his family, and later a feisty button buck, as Billy grew, he developed an unusual set of plush antlers, that flop fetchingly on either side of his massive head and set off his baseball-sized brown eyes.
In 2012, when the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League (HCBL), founded in 2007, decided to establish a Shelter Island team, Billy stepped out of the woods as the obvious choice to become the mascot for the newly-formed Shelter Island Bucks.
As with all jobs in the HCBL, Billy’s mascot gig is a volunteer position, and one that is vital to the mission. Buck’s co-GM Ken McGuinness said Billy’s special strength is his ability to lighten up the fans,
“Billy walks out on the field and finds someone who said, ‘Hey ump, you stink,’ gets in front of that person, and they stop and laugh. In other words, morale.”
During games, Billy is everywhere, starting with the announcers’ booth, where he is introduced to the crowd. He walks the field; the visiting team’s dugout, along the third base line, and all the way out to the fans who watch in the outfield. If there are grouches, he jollies them, and if there are babies, he kisses them. He hands out game schedules, he poses for pictures and when the time comes, he passes the hat for donations to support the nonprofit HCBL.
In a turn of events that must seem incredible to Billy’s deer family still at large in Sachem’s Woods, his years as mascot have brought him friendships with human players and fans alike. One such player was Ryan Smoot, a catcher and team leader who was hosted by Joanne and Hoot Sherman during 2018 season. Ryan, who came from a family of sports coaches and champion athletes, later graduated from VMI, and now has a coaching job at George Washington University. During his summer with the Bucks, Ryan paid back the love and care he received from the community; playing table baseball with the Sherman’s little nephews and signing baseballs for Little Leaguers.
Outside of being a deer, Billy’s life is baseball, and it hasn’t left room for him to start his own family. A long-time Met fan, he stays connected to the game from the first days of spring training right through the fall championships. He loves his Shelter Island home, especially the wooded margins of Fiske Field, and he’s been known to declare there is no better browse anywhere.
His biggest on-the-job challenge? Rain. “We get wet, they tarp the field, and I can’t do my job,” he said. “It sucks.”
Although Billy continues to live in the wild during the season, he encourages Shelter Islanders who can free up a bed, washer/dryer and some refrigerator space to consider hosting a Buck for the 8-week season from late May through July. Hosts such as Frank Emmett, Chrissy Gross and Hoot and Joanne Sherman have supported the team in this way for years, and the Bucks could not field a team without them.
Billy’s got a major goal for the coming year, and that is to cheer the Bucks on to another championship. Back in 2015, the Bucks were champions of the HCBL and it left Shelter Islanders, and their fuzzy-antlered mascot hungry for another victorious season. Go Bucks!
Lightning Round
What do you always have with you? Tom Seaver baseball card.
Favorite place on Shelter Island? Fiske Field
Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Citi field
When was the last time you were elated? 2015, when we took the Hamptons Collegiate Baseball League championship.
When was the last time you were afraid? Crossing Route 114 at dusk in October.
What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? Opening Day
Favorite movie? Field of Dreams
Favorite food? A hot dog from the concession stand at Fiske Field.
Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Yogi Berra.
Most respected elected official, serving or retired? Jay Card.
02/28/2020
02/08/2020
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