Author: John Fladd

Tour inns, eat cookies at a Currier and Ives Cookie Tour

It is time for one of the most delicious holiday challenges, the Annual Currier and Ives Cookie Tour. Each year, inns, B&Bs and small businesses around the Monadnock area lure guests to visit them with homemade cookies. This year 17 local businesses will serve cookies to Tour participants who have purchased tickets and a tour map. At each stop along the way, each cookie tourist will get a cookie, the recipe for the cookie, and a stamp on their map. Participants who collect at least 10 stamps will be entered into a drawing to win a gift certificate that can be redeemed at any of the stops along the tour.

One of those stops is the Benjamin Prescott Inn in Jaffrey. Chris Neilson, the inn keeper and manager of the inn, said that aside from raising money for a good cause — The Helping Hand Center in Troy — the Cookie Tour brings people to the inn who might never visit otherwise. He said the 2023 tour was an eye-opening experience.

“We ran out of cookies last year,” Neilson said, “and I was giving tours all the way past the deadline of 4 o’clock last year because there were just so many people that just wanted to come in and see this place.”

Running out of cookies was a bit of a feat, because Neilson and his family had baked 800 of them. “So … we’re going to [bake] 1,200 to 1,400 cookies this year,” he said. “I’m not going to actually say what kind of cookies they are going to be yet, because a couple of those are still under consideration. We already have the dough made for roughly about 200-ish of the cookies already made up. It takes a little while to get the dough made for that many cookies, especially in a small establishment like what we have here at the Inn.” Neilson said baking that many cookies is a group effort. “It’s a family thing here. I have both of my daughters participating in it, I’m doing it, my girlfriend’s doing it, my mom’s doing it — it’s a family endeavor here at the inn to get the cookies made for the cookie tour.”

Tour participants can buy their tickets at three locations. One of those is the Park Theatre in Jaffrey, where Christine Witham is the box office manager. She said the staff at the Park is enthusiastically throwing itself into the Cookie Tour this year.

Currier and Ives Cookie Tour
When: Saturday, Dec 14, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Tickets: $20 per person and are available at the following locations:
Park Theatre (19 Main St, Jaffrey, 532-9300, theparktheatre.org)
Frogg Brewing (580 Sawyers Crossing Road, Swanzey, 547-7639, froggbrewing.com)
Inn at East Hill Farm (460 Monadnock St, Troy, 242-6495, east-hill-farm.com)
Cash and checks will be accepted. For a list of stops on the Cookie Tour, visit currierandivescookietour.com/participants.

“We’re actually a unique stop on the Cookie Tour,” Witham said. “We have 12 volunteers making 12 different kinds of cookies. We’re anticipating 400 to 500 people coming through. We’ve had as many as 800 in the past.” She hopes the cookie tourists will exercise self-restraint when they visit. “Visitors can “show us the map and pick one cookie out of our varieties,” she said. Like Neilson, she is tight-lipped about what kind of cookies the Park will serve. “I don’t think I want to say. It will definitely have something to do with the Park Theatre and its history,” she hinted.

Debbie Byrne Jonson is the owner of The She Shed in Swanzey, a home and garden decor business. This will be her first year on the Tour.

“We’re really excited,” she said. “We’ve heard about it and we’ve been told about it, so we’re really looking forward to it.”

Because this will be Jonson’s first year, she is a little unsure of how many cookies the She Shed will need. “We’re anticipating something like 350,” she said. “One of our teammates is going to be baking the cookies herself, and she’s actually doing two cookies, chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles. The other teammates have volunteered that they’ll finish them if need be.”

More cookies
Make a weekend of cookie adventures with the 27th Annual Holiday Inn to Inn Cookie Tour on Saturday, Dec. 14, and Sunday, Dec. 15, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day at nine White Mountain inns stretching from Jackson to Eaton, with inns at least 15 minutes apart. See countryinnsinthewhitemountains.com/annual-holiday-inn-to-inn-cookie-tour.

Aatma Curry House offers your Saturday dinner

By John Fladd
[email protected]

According to Chef Keith Sarasin, opening a restaurant can feel a lot like a bad break-up.

For the past two and a half years Sarasin and his team have been running Aatma Curry House as a pop-up restaurant. For one or two nights they would cook and serve their food at specific events, but they didn’t have a permanent home. During that time, Sarasin was looking for a location for a brick-and-mortar Indian restaurant.

“We found three different locations over the course of those two and a half years,” he said, “and each time something would happen that was out of our control. And by the third time this happened, we were looking at a place in Kittery, and when it fell through, it was a lot like a heartbreak or a breakup in a relationship where you just go through these deep emotions of, ‘I’m so close!’ Ultimately I used that frustration and anger and angst to come up with the concept of Atma Curry House.”

Aatma represents an unusual restaurant concept. Customers place their orders throughout the week, then pick it up at a predetermined time each Saturday. One of the advantages of this system is that it gives Sarasin and his staff an opportunity to connect with customers individually.

“We get to have interaction with every single person and talk about our passion and feed them little extra things,” Sarasin said. “We love throwing surprises and handwritten notes in every single solitary order.”

That passion is reflected in Aatma’s very ambitious goal. “It’s punk rock,” Sarasin said. “It’s turned-up food; the flavors are there and super traditional. A lot of times the food that we eat in the West when it comes to Indian food is muted or toned down, not just from a spiciness standpoint but from a spice and flavor standpoint. We decided on Day 1 that Curry House was going to bring the best Indian comfort food that exists in the entire Northeast.”

Part of that mission involves giving customers food that they are familiar with, but at the same time trying to expand their understanding of what Indian cuisine can be.

“We have our staples,” Sarasin said. “For instance, we have our Aatma Butter Chicken, and our butter chicken is based off of the original premise of the dish in Moti Mahal in Delhi, but we add a couple of secret ingredients to it that makes it very New England.” (Moti Mahal is a respected chain of restaurants in India that originally introduced iconic Indian dishes to the West, butter chicken being one of them.) “So we have our staples like butter chicken, dal, things of that nature, but every week we add new menu items and change dishes out to encourage people to try things that are different beyond just what they’re used to.”

Another way the staff at Aatma challenges preconceptions of Indian dishes is by “putting a New England spin” on them. Sarasin used gulab jamun, an Indian dessert spiced with cardamom, rose water or saffron and served in a sugar syrup, as an example. “We have a classic gulab jamun that stays on the menu all the time and they’re made the exact same way, very traditional. Sugar syrup is added just like it typically is with a little bit of cardamom but then our spin on it is we actually add maple syrup to that syrup and it is absolutely mind-blowingly good how well it works.”

Sarasin said his vision for Aatma is to marry tradition with rebellion; it has been a tricky needle to thread. “That’s where I was at personally after feeling defeated, but also the spirit of India is based off of these things. When you think about Indians kicking out the British Raj, or the story of how tea was forced upon them and they created something beautiful out of it, you realize that this is a very Indian attitude. I hope this is an homage to that tradition.”

Aatma Curry House
75 Mont Vernon St., Milford
Aatma takes orders online Sunday through Thursday, for pickup between 1 and 3 p.m. on Saturday. Visit the website, aatmacurryhouse.com, to order and to find out what dishes are on the menu in a given week.