Charity Robey

Off the Fork: Corn Star

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO At every farm stand on the East End corn is the star attraction.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on August 25, 2016

The best corn of the year is on offer at every farm stand on the East End and I’m doing my best to eat it all.

This is no idle threat. I once ate 11 ears of corn at a sitting; a culinary feat I achieved by going without salt or butter, my mouth moving over each cob like the daisy wheel of an electric typewriter (anyone typed on one of those?) moving steadily across the pages of my senior thesis.

In talking to people about corn, I’ve learned that ordinarily rational people could have arbitrary opinions about the right way to choose and cook it, preferences that were often passed down from a mother or grandmother. Some espouse cooking techniques so prescriptive they border on superstition, as if the ghostly hand of granny could reach across the stove and take the ear out of their grip if they dared to dip it in some mayonnaise, sprinkle it with a little mint, or even butter it.

I think there are many strong opinions about how to prepare sweet corn because when it’s fresh, it tastes delicious no matter what you do to it. The difference between really good corn — sweet, with plenty of milky juice and shiny round kernels — and not so great — bland, starchy with dented or dull kernels that cling to your teeth — is heartbreaking when you consider that just two days ago, those starchy bland ears were probably delicious.

Here are some rules of corn selection.

1. The shorter the distance between the place where the corn was grown, and where it is cooked, the better. Hence the claim some make that in their family, corn was only picked after the water began to boil on a Coleman stove set up in the cornfield.

2. Do not open, strip, or otherwise invade the privacy of the kernels until just before you cook them.

3. A promising ear of corn is thick around the base, the leaves around the ear are tight, and the cut end and the tassel are moist and not shriveled.

Here are three ways of preparing corn that may violate the dietary customs of your family, but are delicious alternatives to the five-minute boil/melted butter practice. You can either grill or boil the corn and then roll it in cheese and spices, after first spreading the hot ears with something to help all that good stuff adhere. For elotes, a traditional Mexican street-food version of corn on the cob, Maria Schultheis of Maria’s Kitchen suggested I use a pinch of epazote in the boiling water. I really like the green, herby flavor it gives the corn.

Alas, my family never ate street-food style corn. In the Kentucky kitchen of my grandmother, Ruby Robey (a farm wife with her own personal corn patch), sweet corn was cut off the cob and cooked in its own milky juices for five minutes in a hot cast iron pan with a little butter. Her enthusiasm for cooking the kernels after cutting them off the cob owes a lot to the fact that our family was blessed with very good corn, but very bad teeth.

Maria-inspired Elotes
6 servings
6 ears of corn, husked
A large pinch of epazote
1 cup cotija, or feta cheese crumbled
¼ cup chopped cilantro
½ cup mayonnaise
“Tajin classic” seasoning, or your own mixture of ground ancho chili, black pepper, and lime zest.

1. Bring six quarts of water to boil with the epazote. Cook the husked ears of corn for five minutes in boiling water.

2. Mix the cheese and cilantro and spread it on a piece of parchment or wax paper.

3. Smear a very thin layer of mayonnaise on each ear while its still hot, roll it in the cheese mixture and sprinkle the seasonings on top. Serve immediately.

Grilled street-corn
6 servings
6 ears of corn, with the husks pulled down, still attached to the ear (use the husks as a handle), and the silk removed
½ cup melted butter in a plate
1 cup grated Pecorino Romano cheese
¼ cup finely chopped mint
Salt
Pepper

1. On a hot grill, with the lid on, cook the ears 5-10 minutes, turning only once to allow some char marks to appear. The husk should smoke and scorch a bit, and the smoke will impart flavor.

2. Mix the cheese with the chopped mint, salt, and pepper, and spread on a piece of parchment or wax paper.

3. Roll the grilled ears in the melted butter.

4. Roll the ears in the cheese/mint mixture and serve immediately.

Ruby Robey’s Fried Corn
Serves 4
6 ears of the freshest possible corn
4 tablespoons butter
¼ cup cream (optional)

1. Test to see that the corn is fresh enough by sticking a fork into a few kernels to make sure a milky juice comes out.

2. Holding the ear at a right angle to a bowl slice the kernels off the cob, gathering the juice and kernels in the bowl. Scrape the cob with the side of knife after all the kernels are cut off to extract any remaining juices.

3. Heat the iron skillet on high heat, and add the butter. When the butter is melted and foamy add the corn kernels and their liquid and cook over on a medium high flame for no more than three or four minutes, until the corn is just heated through. The liquid should not completely cook off, and if the mixture seems too dry, add a splash of cream. Serve immediately.

Why not the Shelter Island Olympics?

REPORTER FILE PHOTO Shelter Islander Amanda Clark, left and Sarah Lihan during a training session ahead of the London 2012 Summer Olympics.

Every four years the Summer Olympics gives me license to dream.

As I watch swimmer Michael Phelps, shaped like a garden trowel with flippers for feet, win another gold medal in the 200-meter butterfly, I imagine myself slicing through the water like an eel. And when the bouncy, sparkly nymph Simone Biles flies through her floor exercise like Tinkerbell, I think back to my high school gymnastics class, in which I once executed a forward roll on the balance beam flanked by my classmates who pushed me back onto the beam as I rolled heavily off.

Later I made a misstep while attempting a vault, and broke my little toe, effectively ending my gymnastics career but never my daydreams of Olympic glory.

Not even a cloud of Zika-carrying mosquitoes, polluted water and a disgraced Russian track team could stop Rio de Janeiro from throwing a great 2016 Olympics.

On Sunday the party ended and the torch was passed to Tokyo for 2020. The process of choosing the host city for the 2024 Olympics will be decided next year by a vote of the 100 International Olympic Committee members from among the five cities still left in the running; Los Angeles, Rome, Paris, Budapest and Hamburg. Here’s Life on the Half Shell’s official bid for Shelter Island to host summer games of 2024.

Until July of 2015, Boston was on the shortlist of five cities vying for 2024 summer games. But when Bostonians failed to summon enthusiasm for the expense of hosting the Olympics, they were dropped from consideration, replaced by Los Angeles.

Los Angeles’ bid for the Olympics immediately found favor with the I.O.C. since their pitch emphasizes the sustainability of their plan, which would require the construction of only one new building since they already have a “pre-enjoyed” Olympic stadium; the one they built when they hosted in 1984.

If hosting the Olympics without constructing new buildings is the measure of sustainability, what place could out-sustain Shelter Island? We manage to host 10,000 visitors every summer and we don’t even have public bathrooms.

We could recruit a star-studded Olympic Organizing Committee, with two-time Olympic sailor and hometown-girl Amanda Clark, and Shelter Island 10K regulars and Olympians Joan Benoit Samuelson, Frank Shorter and Meb Keflezighi to represent us.

Cities that bid for the Olympics submit a transportation plan, and Shelter Island’s would establish East and West ferries to complement the current North and South, along with an “All Hands on Deck” system; a fleet of private boats from paddleboards, to kayaks, to yachts prowling local waters and dispatched with an Uber-like app.

The Shelter Island bid would include a generous supply of athlete housing, due in large part to the complete absence of local regulations controlling short-term rentals. An Airbnb/VRBO/Town of Shelter Island marketplace would procure agreements from an estimated 95 percent of local homeowners to vacate their homes for the duration of the games, allowing the athletes to stay unsupervised and unimpeded.

Since this is pretty much what happens during a normal summer, there would be plenty of housing.
Olympic hosts are expected to outline a security plan to keep the athletes and spectators safe during the Games. Our defensive fauna would be a key part of our security plan. Operation Deerhawk would employ osprey on patrol in the skies, communicating with teams of browsing deer, to identify and repel intruders.

Any evildoer who has seen what an osprey can do to a bunker fish will know they are no match for a raptor with a six-foot wingspan and talons, especially when they have a bulls-eye rash on their back from an encounter with deer ticks.

Construction of stadiums and venues are usually part of a host-city’s Olympic bid, but would we really need them? Shelter Island events are traditionally pop-up affairs: Shakespeare performed on the lawn at Sylvester Manor without the cost and fuss of building a theater; Sunset Beach volleyball played in front of an admiring crowd seated at the café across the street.

Every Bucks fan knows when you attend a sporting event on the Island, you bring your own chair.

Like all Olympic hosts, Shelter Island would face challenges. 2016 Olympic rower Megan Kalmoe claimed that she wasn’t worried about polluted water in Rio, writing in her blog that she’d row through anything to represent America.

Her resolve to soldier on in spite of disgusting water could be the sort of support needed for a Shelter Island Olympic bid to prosper, since after last Wednesday’s heavy rain, the waters around Shelter Island were closed for shell fishing, the summer algae blooms resulting from nitrate runoff were turning local bays the color of beet juice, and Fresh Pond was taking on the same shade of green seen in Rio’s Olympic diving pool.

Organizers of the summer games are said to be considering eight new Olympic sports, including bowling. Of course the 2024 games in Shelter Island would be the ideal place to introduce the world to Olympic bowling. Kevin Lechmanski who bowled a perfect 300 game during the Shelter Island Men’s Championship Tournament on April 1 could be Shelter Island’s next Olympian.

Let’s roll

A Cultural Exchange to Last a Lifetime

 

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Lydia Martinez Majdišová outside STARs, the café that she and her husband, Pepe Martinez have run for 13 years.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on July 28, 2016

For 13 years, Lydia Martinez Majdišová and her husband, Pepe Martinez, have run STARs Café in the Heights, an Island institution.

With warming soups in the winter, sandwiches in the summer and consistently great coffee every day, their café is an important part of Island life; a place where people gather to catch up, to gossip and to meet new friends.

Lydia’s parents and two siblings live in Slovakia. When Lydia’s parents learned that she would be raising her children, Emma and Sebastian, on an island off the coast of North America, they issued a directive: “Make sure our grandchildren are fluent in Slovak.”

She grew up in Dolny Kubin, Czechoslovakia, which in 1993 became Slovakia. Born in 1979, she lived the first 10 years of her life under communism. “Being a member of the party was the only way to go to college or to have some perks,” she said. “But my parents and grandparents were not politically involved at all. We had to be silent.”

In the fall of 1989, Lydia vividly remembers streets filled with the sounds of protest songs and peaceful demonstrations as the Communist Party fell and her hero, Václav Havel, was elected president. “The Velvet Revolution” was the most memorable event of her childhood, and one that determined the course of her life. “When I have grandchildren,” she said, “I’ll be able to tell them what happened back then.”

Lydia immediately felt the changes at school. “In 5th grade, we had to take Russian,” she said. “When I entered 6th grade, we had English and German and Russian went down the drain.”

The peaceful revolution that brought down communism made it much easier for people to travel. At 16, Lydia had the opportunity to be an exchange student in an English-speaking country. With strong encouragement from her father, who wanted her to have the opportunity to live in the West, she applied.

Chosen by a host family in Canada, 17-year-old Lydia went to live in Manitoba for the 1996 school year, in a large clan she came to love. “After, I got there, I asked them why they picked me, and they said they wanted to take me out of the war zone,” she said.

“They thought I was from Slovenia, a third world country.”

The enlightenment that comes from exposure to a new culture went both ways. “They asked me, ‘Do you have microwaves and vacuum cleaners?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, ours are actually a little bit more modern than yours.’”

“That was the year I got to see so much of the world,” Lydia said, describing a bus trip across the American West, a trip that included a quick crossing of the California/Mexican border at Tijuana. She was horrified.

“It was like they opened a door and right behind it was a whole different world with children begging and half-naked,” she said. “Ironic, because later I married a Mexican.”

Back in Slovakia, Lydia studied to teach English as a Second Language at Comenius University in Bratislava, working summers in a special government department for minorities, living with Roma people in shacks in the eastern part of Slovakia. “The kids, when they recognized me, jumped all over me,” she remembered. “I would wash their hair in the river because they had no running water. It was very rewarding. Those kids were really amazing.”

In 2001, with excellent English honed during her time in Manitoba, Lydia decide to apply for a work and travel program that allowed her to go to the United States on a special visa. She landed at the Hampton Coffee Company in Water Mill, where Pepe was the roastmaster. “I was lucky because when Pepe saw my application with my picture, he said, ‘O.K., this girl is hired,’” Lydia said.

The summer of 2001 was Lydia’s first visit to Shelter Island, riding shotgun in a delivery van with Pepe, bringing fresh-roasted coffee to businesses on the Island. Seeing that Lydia was curious about the local cuisine, he asked if she had ever tried chicken wings. Lydia said, “I don’t know, but it sounds weird.”

They stopped at the Dory for wings, and soon Lydia was looking for another chance to make coffee deliveries on Shelter Island and eat more wings. Lydia said she and Pepe were friends for almost two years before they fell in love. In 2004, Lydia and Pepe’s daughter, Emma, was born.

In 2003, Pepe began running STARs, after first getting Charlotte Hannabury’s blessing to use the same name that her late daughter, Cheryl, gave the café when it was founded. But the first winter, Lydia said, “We were sitting upstairs and there was no one.”
Unable to find housing on the Island, they commuted from Water Mill on the 5:45 a.m. ferry, with a baby at home and struggling to pay bills.

“Pepe never wanted to let it go, but it was very hard for me. In Slovakia, a woman who has a baby has a three-year maternity leave,” she said. “They get paid very little, but they get paid. That’s how it is in many countries, and it doesn’t make any sense to me in such a developed country. I’m a mother who is raising citizens. A country should take care of its people.”

When their son, Sebastian, was born, Lydia took the children to live with her parents in Slovakia for a year to ease the strain.

Finally, in 2009, Pepe was able to find a house to rent on the Island. “That’s when we started our life here,” Lydia said.

“Even now, there are people who see affordable housing as a threat because they think with it comes some sort of low income, questionable families,” Lydia said. Her youngest sister, Kristina Martin, now lives in Greenport, and works on the Island. Her sister, Lenka, and brother, Matej, live in Slovakia.

In 2010, Pepe was returning from a family visit to Slovakia when his green card was confiscated and he was instructed to make an appointment with an immigration judge. At the appointment he was arrested and held for six weeks in an immigration facility in New Jersey. It was the worst crisis Lydia had ever faced.

“Here I was, with a 2-year old, and my 6-year old daughter, and I had to run STARs, and handle all the immigration paperwork,” she said.

Pepe was released without a resolution to his case. It took six years and a group of Shelter Island neighbors speaking on his behalf to settle his immigration status. He is now applying for citizenship.

Emma and Sebastian attend the Shelter Island School, and as their grandparents wished, speak Slovak as well as English. Lydia, who is also fluent in Spanish and Italian, hopes one day to go back to the interpreting and teaching career she started before her children were born.

Until then, she’s happy to be flexible for her kids and glad to be able to live and work on Shelter Island, where Pepe introduced her to chicken wings so many years ago.

For now, she said, “Whatever my husband cooks is my favorite food.”

An ugly fish makes a beautiful meal

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Monkfish in a bath of leeks and chicken broth.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on June 30, 2016

East End fish markets offer some of the best-looking seafood in the world — fillets and whole fish laid out on ice for inspection in all their finny glory, with glistening scales, and moist shiny eyes. Although most stores sell monkfish, a delicious fish with firm white flesh and few bones, you rarely see a whole monkfish on offer. That’s because the monkfish is a creature so ugly, it looks better without a head.

According to Candice Manwaring at Southold Fish market, “The heads are huge, and the liver is attached, so the fishermen prefer to sell them without the head and that way they can sell the liver separately.” The livers of monkfish are enormous, averaging a pound or more, are considered a delicacy in Asian cuisine and bring a high price.

With slimy, mottled grey skin the monkfish (a k a dangler fish) has an appendage that serves as a fishing rod positioned just above its jaws complete with another appendage that serves as a lure to attract smaller fish into a gaping mouth full of jagged teeth. It is the stuff of nightmares until you consider that the flesh of a monkfish is sweet and delicious with a flavor that reminds some people of lobster.

To my mind it’s even better than lobster because it doesn’t get rubbery or tough, and there are no bones or shells to deal with. The fillets are from the tail of the creature, thankfully nowhere near the head.

Monkfish medallions in a bath of leeks

Serves 4

1 and ¾ pounds monkfish fillets

Salt

Pepper

3-4 leeks

2 tablespoons butter

4 ounces cherry tomatoes, halved

Leaves from three sprigs of tarragon

¼ cup white wine

1 cup chicken stock

1. Remove the grey membrane from the monkfish fillets by pinching it with paper-towel covered fingers and pulling it off. Slice the long monkfish fillets horizontally into ½ inch thick medallions. Lightly salt the medallions on both sides and give them a grind of pepper.

2. Trim the root ends of the leeks and make a horizontal cut where the leaves turn from white to green. Discard the green tops. Split the white half down the middle and rinse out the dirt and grit. Cut horizontally into ¼ inch pieces.

3. Heat the butter in a large sauté pan until it foams, add the leeks and cook over medium heat until the leeks are soft. Add the tomatoes and tarragon, continue cooking until the tomatoes collapse, add the white wine and stock, and cook down by about half.

4. Lay the monkfish medallions flat on top of the leek and stock mixture, bring the heat up so the mixture simmers, cover, turn heat to low and heat for five minutes, until the monkfish is cooked through.

5. Serve in bowls or soup plates with some crusty bread, or cook a pound of linguini about a minute less that the package says, and add the drained pasta to the sauté pan to combine with the fish and leek mixture.

Monkfish roasted with cherry tomatoes and capers

Serves 4

2 monkfish fillets, each about ¾ of a pound, with membrane removed

Salt

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 garlic cloves crushed and coarsely chopped

3/4-cup breadcrumbs made from 2-3 slices of crusty bread, toasted and diced

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO | Roasted monkfish with caper stuffing and roasted tomatoes.

¼ cup capers, drained and rinsed

12 oz cherry tomatoes, sliced in half

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. Split each monkfish fillet open by cutting a vertical line through the fat part of the fillet from one end to the other, without cutting through. Sprinkle the inside of the cut lightly with salt and drizzle with a 2 teaspoons of olive oil.

3. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in an iron skillet or oven-safe sauté pan, add the garlic, and cook for five minutes at low heat. Raise the heat to medium, add the capers, and cook briefly. Add the breadcrumbs and stir to coat with the oil/garlic/caper mixture. Remove from heat and set aside the stuffing mixture.

4. Clean the skillet with a paper towel and add a little olive oil to coat the bottom.

5. Stuff the fillets with the breadcrumb mixture. Lay each opened fillet flat on top of two or three pieces of butchers twine or cotton string, divide the stuffing evenly between the fillets. Bring the ends of the string together to tie the fish loosely around the stuffing. Arrange the fillets in the skillet, scattering any stuffing that falls out around the fillets.

6. Place the cherry tomatoes on top of and around the fillets cut side up. Add another light grind of pepper, a little salt and drizzle with the remaining olive oil.

7. Roast at 425 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes until the flesh is tender to the fork.

Time for dessert? Make a mess

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO
Menantic Mess is based on a dessert invented in England that was meant to be served at a cricket match.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on July 28, 2016

When my husband and I arrived in England for a vacation less than a week after the Brexit vote, there were signs of disarray; a protest in Piccadilly Circus, screaming headlines in the papers, and vociferous politicians on television.

We had lunch at a brasserie in a neighborhood of art dealers and financiers, and at every table the discussion seemed fraught, the word Brexit often audible.

On the dessert menu was a dish called Eton Mess. What sort of mess?

Our waiter explained that it was a traditional English dessert, originally served at Eton on the occasion of a cricket match, but now eaten everywhere. The dish relies on seasonal berries, often strawberries, whipped cream, and meringue for its light fruity taste and crunchy texture.

It’s a great dessert to serve to uninvited guests he added; you can run into the kitchen, crumble up some cookies, whip the cream and throw in the berries, and produce a presentable and delicious treat in a few minutes.

That sounds like my kind of entertaining, so I decided to teach myself to make a Shelter Island version of Eton Mess. Our strawberries are finished, so I made it with raspberries. I’ll call it Menantic Mess.

If you are making your own meringue, do it the day before you want to serve the dessert to give the meringue time to dry out completely. It should be so crisp that when you crumble it, you get dust as well as large crumbs. The meringue dust and the crumbs, when mixed with the whipped cream give this dish its wonderful texture as well as its name, because it looks like you swept the kitchen floor and threw the sweepings in a bowl.

Menantic Mess
6 servings
4 cups crumbled meringue either purchased, or made the day before using 3 egg whites and a cup of sugar.
4 cups raspberries
3 tablespoons super fine sugar
1 pint heavy cream
4 sprigs of fresh mint cut into very thin strips

1. If you are making your own meringue, start with a spotlessly clean bowl. Even a little grease will compromise the puffiness of your meringue. Put three room temperature egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer and mix at high speed until they are foamy.

Add one cup of sugar gradually as the whites continue to gain volume and structure. When the whites are glossy and stiff, spoon blobs of the meringue on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Each blob should be no bigger than an apple. Bake at 275 degrees for one hour, turn off the heat, and leave the meringues in the oven with the door closed until they are completely cooled. Keep them in an airtight container at room temperature until you are ready to use them.

2. Set aside the six nicest-looking raspberries to put on top of each serving, and coarsely chop half of the berries. Put the rest of the raspberries in a sieve and press out the juice with the back of a spoon into a bowl, resulting in a pulpy purée. Discard the seeds, taste the strained berries, and add up to 1 tablespoon of sugar to sweeten them.

3. Whip the cream with a hand-held mixer until it gains volume; add 2 tablespoons of sugar and continue whipping until soft peaks form. Do not overbeat.

4. Spoon 2 cups of the whipped cream into a bowl, and stir in 3 tablespoons of the raspberry purée.

5. Just before serving, gently fold in the crumbled meringue to the remaining whipped cream. There should be crunchy lumps of meringue throughout the cream.

6. Assemble the Mess. In each of six dessert dishes, place a scoop of the meringue-laced whipped cream, drizzle it with a tablespoon of the berry purée, then a spoon of the berry/cream mixture, then two tablespoons of the chopped berries, another spoon of the cream/meringue mixture and finally a whole raspberry and a sprinkle of the sliced mint leaves. Serve immediately.

Marie Eiffel, grateful and fearless

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Marie Eiffel with Ringo.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on July 7, 2016

Marie Eiffel is a woman reborn, a self-created person whose first 40 years have almost nothing to do with the life she lives now.

Since 2004, she’s lived and worked on Shelter Island, starting with a consignment shop and building a series of retail businesses that now includes a successful market, catering business, two clothing shops and plans to open a new store in Greenport.

The new life began with a terrible automobile accident in 2002 and the financial, material and physical losses she endured in its wake. “From the moment of the accident to now, what matters is I started from scratch,” she said. “I didn’t have a pair of shoes, a toothbrush.”

She decided to start her new life with a new name. “Marie Eiffel is the name my father gave me before he died. That’s my father’s doing,” she said. “Marie Eiffel is my identity.”

Marie said she was born and educated in Paris. Her brother Alain is a mathematics professor, who lives in Annecy, France. “My mom was tough,” Marie said. “Fun was not in her vocabulary.”

Marie said her mother, who is now suffering from Alzheimer’s, is not generally lucid when Marie visits.

“Sometimes she has one little minute in three days, so you better catch it.” Her father died when Marie was 30. “I was just getting to know him,” she said.

She said she was a good student, but lacked motivation, was easily bored and ended up graduating with a degree in musicology from the Sorbonne. Teaching music for a year after graduating, she enjoyed getting in front of a classroom as a teacher who refused to stick to a standard curriculum and often made her students laugh.

Seeking to turn her gift for making people laugh into a career in acting, she found her way to a Paris after-hours club frequented by actors and directors. “The owner of the club asked me, ‘Who are you?’ and I told him I want to be an actor,” she said. “He pointed to some guys and said, ‘Then go speak to them, they know Romain Bouteille,’” referring to a well-known director with a troupe of comic actors.

In 1984 Marie said she began a three-year period working and touring with Bouteille’s troupe, followed by television and movie work.

By 1989, Marie said her acting career was over. She had been cast in and fired from a movie for slapping the director; she was drinking and increasingly unmoored. “To be an actor, you have to have a good family. You have to have an emotional support system,” she said. “I had no support. There was a lot of drugs, I had two friends who died. It was a very strange world.”

After a year away from acting, she tried to go back to it, but could never regain the momentum she called, “le vent en poupe,” — the wind at your back. “When I started, every audition I went for, I got the job,” she said. “When I went back after a year, everyone forgot. You can only leave the job of acting and come back if you are famous.”

By the early 1990s, Marie was living in New York, working in a restaurant. She studied to be a life coach, began consulting with restaurants, helping struggling businesses deal with communication issues to improve performance and her business grew. “I was consulting and living a very high-paced life, flying to Fiji, coaching people, living in Paris for a year,” she said. “I was an executive, making a lot of money, as much as when I was an actor.”

In an effort to scale back the pace, Marie said she decided to leave her New York apartment for a year and move to a rental on the South Fork. She was on her way to move in, her car packed with most of her belongings on October 1, 2002, when her car left the road near the end of the Long Island Expressway and rolled. “It was a beautiful day, around 1 p.m., there was no one else on the road. I stayed 20 months in the hospital,” she said.

Marie considered her time in the hospital as a bridge to a new life. Although she had medical insurance, the costs of her treatment combined with her inability to work ruined her financially.

“In the hospital, I had to find bliss inside myself. Within is so much peace, so much happiness,” she said.

“My joy came from irrelevant stuff, a nice piece of cake made me happy. When I left the hospital, I was grateful and fearless.”

After working as a hostess at a Bridgehampton restaurant and living in a series of tiny apartments, she spent Christmas of 2004 on Shelter Island at the invitation of an old friend, Marcel Iattoni, who was the chef at the Olde Country Inn.

“He told me, ‘I’m cooking Christmas dinner for Governor Carey,’” Marie remembered. “So I had my first Christmas outside the hospital at Governor Carey’s House.”

In 2005, she opened a consignment store on Route 114 near the Olde Country Inn. “I was sitting there seven days a week from 10 to 5 and almost nobody came in,” she said. “Of the few that did, very few bought something, but they all thought I had good taste.”

With the help of a small business loan, Marie slowly expanded her business, moving it to the Heights and opening a children’s store. Expanding again, she opened a clothing store in Sag Harbor and in 2012 opened Marie Eiffel’s Market on Bridge Street. Her latest store, a food market in the movie theatre building in Greenport has just opened, she said.

When Marie hired Annabel Cohen a few years back to make the pastries and bread that are such an important part of the market’s offerings, Annabel was fresh out of a French pastry school and thinking of looking for work in New York after a summer on the Island.

“She came and worked crazy hours,” Marie said, “and decided to stay longer. I offered her an interest in the business, I love her.”

More than a decade into her new life on the Island, she has established deep roots here. She and Jason Penney, her companion of seven years, recently moved into a house near the Center with a handsome black and white cat named Ringo. The cat came to them when someone visiting the Island found, and then abandoned him. “When he first came to live with us he bit everybody, but now look,” Maria said as

Ringo followed her and curled sweetly around her leg, perfectly at home.