NH Audubon expands plant sale with Pollinator Festival
For most non-specialists, knowledge of pollinators begins and ends with honeybees. Honeybees are certainly important, said Diane DeLuca of New Hampshire Audubon.
“They do a lot of the pollinating of our agricultural crops and fruit trees and things like that. But the native pollinators include hundreds of species of native bees in New Hampshire. We’re still learning about the native bees in New Hampshire. … We have over 100 species of butterflies in New Hampshire and we’re still learning about those as well. So in terms of pollinators we’re talking about native bees, butterflies, flies, beetles and ants. The hummingbird is really the only bird that would probably be considered a pollinator in New Hampshire.”
For many years one of the missions of NH Audubon has been to educate the public about the importance of native species. Pollinators — species of animals that carry pollen from one plant to another, fertilizing them to produce the next generation of plants — are some of the most important of those native species, DeLuca said.
“For years we’ve been having a native plant sale,” she said, “where we’ve invited native plant nurseries to come and share their plants at New Hampshire Audubon. And in the last couple of years we’ve joined that with a spring craft fair. And so up until now there’s been the native plant sale outside, and the craft fair has been inside the building. But this year we’re expanding and having what we’re calling a Pollinator Fest. It will include native plant vendors and our spring crafters and a number of pollinator conservation organizations. New Hampshire Audubon will also give garden tours and have informational tables about pollinators and gardeners. The whole thing is going to take place outside in the fields near [NH Audubon’s] McClane Center. This will be our first Pollinator Festival, and we’re pretty excited.”
“There will be activities for families,” DeLuca said, “for children. There’s going to be a story hour with crafting for children, and the nature lab’s going to be open, and there will be an hour or two of an educational staff person sharing out the animals that we have. There will also be food trucks and live music as well.”
Different species of plant blossom throughout the year, DeLuca said, so it’s possible to see many different species of pollinators at different times of the year, but June is a particularly good time to pay attention to them.
“Our spring ephemerals — our early bloomers — many of the trees are blooming or even past bloom at this point, so it’s an important time of year for blooming. It’s also an important time of year for many of the pollinators. For instance, the bees are out and about right now because the queen bees are actually gathering food so they can lay eggs and raise young, and they’re going to be doing that underground for the most part. Some of them nest in like pithy stems or woody areas and stuff, but a lot of them are just nesting underground. So it is a really important time for many of the native pollinators.” This will provide an excellent opportunity for visitors to learn about some of the hundreds of area pollinators first-hand, she said.
NH Audubon Pollinator Festival What: There will be native plants for sale, as well as a wide variety of handmade crafts by local artisans. Experts will be on hand to discuss pollination and native pollinator species. When: Saturday, June 6, with a rain date of Sunday, June 7, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Where: NH Audubon McClane Center, 84 Silk Farm Road, Concord, 224-9909 Admission: free More: nhaudubon.org/event/pollinator-fest-2026
How adding smoke can transform your favorite flavors
When most people think of smoky food, their minds go immediately to barbecue.
David Mielke is the co-owner of Smokehaus Barbecue in Amherst. He said one of the reasons we are so drawn to smokiness is that it has been with us for so long.
“Smoking meat goes way, way back…,” he said. “Originally it was used to cure meats so people could hold them for long periods of time. As time went on, I think people have figured out that you can use smoke to impart flavor.”
A smoking tradition
For Mielke, choosing what type of wood to burn is as important as choosing the right cut of meat.
“In the barbecue world,” he said, “when we use smoke we’re very particular about the type of wood that we use. There’s all sorts of different types and each gives you a different flavor. I’m very particular about really wanting wood that only comes from New Hampshire. So I only use red oak. There are a lot of other barbecue places that use hickory and pecan wood and stuff like that, but it just doesn’t grow here. That’s a southern Texas thing. We don’t do that here. Honestly, I think that red oak really gives a really nice sweet flavor to the flavor profile that I’m looking for for my meat. My oak is green. It’s not seasoned. It’s not dried. It’s green. It comes from a friend’s property. He does wood for a living and he splits it from the tree and it comes right here. What happens is when it’s green like that it still has all of its moisture content. So you get a lot longer burn time with it, a lot longer smoke time. So when I smoke, I smoke for 14 hours. My brisket and my pork goes for 14 hours.”
Mielke said the “low and slow” method of cooking meats means he can focus on cuts that are more flavorful. The most flavorful cuts, though, come from muscle groups that get a lot of exercise during an animal’s life and can be extremely tough unless they are cooked a long time to break down connective tissue into something silky and delicious.
Smokehaus Barbecue. Courtesy photo.
“The chest of the cow and the chest of the pig,” he said, “are very hard-working muscles. So you need to have a longer smoke time to be able to break those muscles down.”
“Our main items going [through the smoker],” Mielke said, “are half chickens, brisket, pulled pork, which is the butt.” (In spite of their names, the pork “butts” and “picnics” come from the shoulder and upper arm of a hog.) “I use the butt and the picnic, so it’s all one,” he said. “It’s a bone-in butt that I use, because I think it adds the best flavor. It takes longer to cook it but it adds flavor and I think it helps render the meat down better. I also do St. Louis-style ribs. I used to do baby backs, but I do St. Louis-style now. They’re pork, just a different section of the rib. So the baby back is like the top section of the rib cage, closer to the spine, and the St. Louis is a little further down the rib, you know, more toward the belly, and they are a little bit bigger,” Mielke said.
Mielke said traditional southern side dishes have a natural affinity for smoke.
“I like collard greens a lot,” he said. “We cook it for six hours to where it basically melts in your mouth. It has vinegar in it, which is one of those things that people seem to really like with barbecue.” Creamed corn is another natural with smoky barbecue, he said. “I make a creamed corn from scratch. That’s a very Texas thing, by the way. Nobody up here does it. I think that goes really well with smoked meats because it’s very balanced.”
Smoked, in a glass
And then there’s smoked beer.
Mike Neel is the owner of Candia Road Brewing Co. in Manchester. At any given time, his brewpub has at least one smoked beer on tap.
“Right now, we’ve got two,” he said. “We’ve got Grodziskie, which is a lighter, Polish-style wheat lager, and we have Brennenator, which is a darker Helles-style lager.”
While Neel and his staff make most of their beer on site, he said, they subcontract out the smoke.
“All of the smoked malt that we use was smoked at Blue Ox Malt House in Lisbon Falls, Maine. They have a small program, which has been growing. They’ve been working with distilleries to do smoked peat malt and other smoked malts to do smoked whiskeys. Grodziski is an oak-smoked wheat, where the Brennenator has a mix of alderwood and maple smoke,” Neel said.
Neel said that while a taste for smokiness can vary widely, he generally looks at smoke as an accent flavor. About a fifth of the malt he uses to brew his smoked beers is actually smoked. “Quantities really do matter,” he said. “How much you put into the beer will determine your overall effect. So Grodziskie is 20 percent of smoked malt that went into that beer.”
Because it is a light lager, he explained, it has a crispness that lets the smoke stand out.
“Brennenator is also 20 percent,” he said. “However, that is a higher ABV [Alcohol By Volume] beer. It does have some other character malts, like crystal malts to make it a little bit sweeter. It’s a sweeter style, and the sweetness covers up the amount of smoke that comes to the front when you taste it. It’s funny, the percentage of smoke malt is exactly the same between both beers. So how much it comes through, I think, has a lot to do with the character grains that are going in as well. [Some other brewers] use more smoked malt, but 20 percent is already a little terrifying for us; we throw that to a consumer and hope that it’s not too much. But there are breweries out there like Schlenkerla, who has been making smoked rauchbier in Germany for hundreds and hundreds of years. Some of theirs are 100 percent smoked malt. A lot of people will tell you it is wildly too smoky. Others will tell you that it’s perfect.”
Neel said that while he, personally, would drink a smoked beer with anything, it goes especially well with seafood.
Smoked, on the rocks
While many spirits traditionally have smoky flavor profiles — peaty scotches and some traditional tequilas, for example — for the past few years adventurous bartenders have been deliberately adding smoke to cocktails. James Brownell is a bartender at Nashua speakeasy CodeX — though at work he goes by the name Rusty. According to him, there are some drinks that are enhanced by adding smoke.
“It just adds one characteristic to the cocktails that we make,” he said, “primarily, old-fashioneds, sometimes Negronis, Boulevardiers or Manhattans. We use applewood here; it’s mostly universal. But you don’t always just have to smoke wood. You can smoke herbs and spices as well — like thyme, sage, cinnamon for various other flavors, for the oils to connect to the glass.”
Rusty said the bartenders at CodeX have two main ways of adding smoke to their cocktails.
“We either smoke the glass itself by turning it upside-down over burning wood chips,” he said. “The oils from the wood cling to the glass. So as you pour the liquid into the glass, it combines over time as the drink warms.”
“Or,” Rusty continued, “we use a top smoker, which draws the smoke into the glass from the top of the glass instead of having it vertically flipped over.” He indicated a top-smoker, a wooden disk with a pipe-like bowl in its center.
“We light some wood chips here,” he said, pointing to the bowl, “and the smoke gets sucked down into the glass.” If the drink has been properly chilled, he explained, the air left at the top of the glass will be cold and less dense than the air in the bar, and that creates negative air pressure that will draw the smoke down. ”It adds a little less smoke,” he said, “but it adds a little bit more of a show. It provides the smoke on top of the cocktail so that the guest gets that full whiff of smoke and the flavor from the wood itself. Instead of infusing the bottom smoke, the top smoke only does the top of the cocktail — not throughout the glass.”
Rusty said there are many different ways to smoke cocktails. “Another method a lot of bars use,” he said, “is they smoke the ice cubes as well, which works really well with a top-smoker, so that the smoke infuses into the cube. So what I like to do is smoke the cube and the glass. And then once the cocktail is chilled, pour it into there so that you get the smoke with the cube and the glass. And then you still get the show as well. So when you’re pouring the cocktail into here, you can see all the smoke come out of the glass.”
Smoked cheese
Smoked cheese at Fox Country Smoke House. Courtesy photo.
I don’t know how cheese-focused you are, but you’ve probably noticed that at any event where a cheese platter has been put out, the smoked Gouda always disappears first. (Followed by the pepper jack, but the smoked Gouda gets snagged first. Often by me.)
Fox Country Smoke House in Canterbury has a reputation for outstanding smoked cheeses. Owner Bill Annis said Fox Country produces 13 different smoked cheeses.
“The extra-sharp cheddar is our No. 1 seller,” he said. “And then my personal favorite is the horseradish cheddar. But we also do a pepper jack, we do a ghost pepper, and another popular one is Gouda. Then we do the specialties — Swiss, mozzarella, and provolone. We even do string cheese.”
Annis said he smokes about 600 pounds of cheese each week, but that can vary depending on the type of cheese and the time of year.
“Your mozzarella and your other soft cheeses are the hardest ones to do in the summer months. When you get a hot, humid day and night, that’s a challenge. During the winter months or cold weather, we try to do all the smoking at night, and the cheese is in [the smoker] for about 18 hours — a nice slow smoking. That runs at least once a week, and then when we get into the holidays, three times a week,” he said.
The smokehouse has been in business since 1969, Annis said. “We still use the original smokehouse, in that one room. We use hickory to smoke everything. It’s in sawdust form. It’s basically a chainsaw. It’s a very, very fine grind. The machine that we use now works on a line like a pellet stove. It has an auger, it drops the sawdust onto a hot plate and that creates the smoke for us.”
Annis said that because the cheese is a handmade product, some of it will be exposed to more smoke than other cheese in the same batch. “Any cheese that’s over that pipe gets much darker than the stuff on the other side of the room, which is much lighter. I prefer a milder smoking, but I do have customers who want the darkest possible.”
All about the wood
Smoke enthusiasts — competitive barbecuers, for instance — have strong opinions about which woods should be used to smoke particular foods. Jay Beland is a pitmaster at Lemay & Sons in Goffstown, a custom slaughter house and specialty butcher shop. According to him, successful smoking comes down to paying attention to details.
“If you’re smoking cheese,” he advised, “you have to watch the temperature [in your smoker] to make sure it doesn’t go over 100 degrees — otherwise it will start to melt. And then you need to use a milder wood, like apple, hickory or cherry. Stay away from the mesquites — mesquites will be too strong for cheese. It’ll give it a burnt flavor. You want a subtle smoke flavor and those will give you a subtle smoke flavor. I stick with apple wood for the most part. I like hickory — the most universal wood to use, and it works with most foods. I will mix in cherry sometimes, but if I’m having people over who don’t really like a strong smoke flavor, then I’ll use apple, because apple can be more subtle.”
If this all seems complicated and specialized, Beland said to think about the flavors of iconic smoked foods.
“Most bacon that you get is smoked in hickory,” he said. “It’s the most-known smoke flavor So a lot of times, you know when I have my smoker going, my neighbors say, ‘Wow, it smells like bacon!’ Or if I get it on my sweatshirt and I go somewhere, because I smell like smoke, they’ll say, ‘Do you smell like bacon?’ And I have to admit that I do.”
“Pork is a great thing to smoke for the summertime,” Beland said. “With pork, I would always go with hickory because if you think about hickory you think of bacon and bacon’s pork. You put hickory on a pork butt, you put hickory on ribs, that gives it that smoke that tastes like bacon. It’s a familiar smoke with people and it complements the pork.”
Beland said that more aggressive woods have a place in smoking.
“I like to use mesquite on beef cuts,” he said, “but I will use it sparingly. I like to get wood chunks and mix it with a lump charcoal. When I’m grilling at home, I use a Big Green Egg, and I will only put like one large chunk in the whole bundle because a little bit of mesquite goes a long way. You don’t want to overpower with mesquite because then it’s boom, it hits you hard, and it’s not tasteful.”
For seafood — especially mild fish and shellfish — Beland recommends using the same woods you might use for smoking cheese.
“I like to use hickory or cherry,” he said. “I’ve done tuna, I’ve done salmon, I’ve done haddock, swordfish, I’ve done scallops. And crab cakes; crab cakes are delicious on the smoker. I’d recommend that heavily. You get a nice crab cake, it’s delicious.”
Beland said another good rule with smoking is that the denser a food is, the longer it needs to be smoked. He loves to smoke cheese crackers — not surprisingly, with hickory — and he generally smokes them like cheese, at a cool temperature, for 45 minutes or so.
“Cheese puffs are too light to take much smoke, though,” he advised. “They aren’t dense at all. I smoke them for 15 minutes, maximum, but they are really, really good.”
The smoke panel Smokehaus Barbecue 278 Route 101, Amherst, 249-5734, smokehausbbq.com Candia Road Brewing Co. 840 Candia Road, Manchester, 935-8123, candiaroadbrewingco.com CodeX 29 Main St., Nashua, facebook.com/CodeXBARNH Fox Country Smoke House 164 Briar Bush Road, Canterbury, 783-4405, foxnh.com Lemay & Sons 116 Daniel Plummer Road, Goffstown, 622-0022, lemayandsonsbeef-bbq.com
Smoke your own
What if you want to smoke something at home? Primitive humans were smoking meat hundreds of thousands of years ago. It’s got to be pretty straightforward, right?
It turns out, if you want a dedicated smoking rig, the type designed for professional barbecuers, you’ll probably spend over $1,000 for a not-great one. The top pros have custom-built rigs that can run upwards of $30,000.
Is there a way to dip your toe into food smoking cheaply enough to try it out and see if you even like it? Spoiler alert: There is and you probably will.
In 2007, Alton Brown dedicated an episode of his Food Network show Good Eats to this problem. For cold smoking — smoking food at a low temperature without actually cooking it — he suggested using a large cardboard box. It should be a couple of feet on each side, he said. He opened each side of the box, then punched several holes near the top and inserted a couple of long wooden dowels through the box, making a resting place for one or more of the cooling racks you might use after baking a cake. (You could also use the grate from your charcoal grill.) The general idea is to suspend a food — Brown smoked a salmon; you might want to start with cheese — above a heating element. He bought a $10 single-burner hot plate from the and placed it in the bottom of the box with a pan of sawdust on it. The concept was pretty straightforward. Use the hot plate to smolder the sawdust, which will make smoke that will rise up and smoke your food. Keep the flaps of the box shut, but open them from time to time to check on whatever you’re smoking.
Here is the FladdSmokeShow Home Smoker (patent pending). It is essentially a big metal box to hold in smoke. A hot plate with wood chips smolders below, filling the top chamber with smoke. Two cooling racks hold slabs of cheese, suspended on bricks to give additional distance from the heat, to minimize melting. Your home grill is also a big metal box. You could place a hot plate at the bottom of your grill, and use the grate you already have to hold whatever food you might want to smoke. Be advised that your home grill is a much smaller metal box and will probably heat up very quickly — that’s what it’s designed to do. You will have to experiment with time, temperature and flipping to find out what works best for you. This will involve several experimental batches of smoked food, which I’m sure will be an enormous sacrifice to eat as you dial in your smoking details. Photo by John Fladd.
Here’s what I’ve been doing:
A well-meaning relative who doesn’t cook bought my wife and me an extremely affordable wood-fired pizza oven a couple of years ago. As it turns out, it is made of thin steel and doesn’t retain heat very well. Pizzas require a very hot temperature — upwards of 700 degrees — and this thing couldn’t make toast. And I got really frustrated trying to keep the fire lit and the smoke kept blowing in my face every time I opened the door, and — hey, maybe —.
So we’ve started using the “pizza oven” as a smoker. We use that same one-burner hot plate in the firebox, and suspend baking racks on top of bricks in the oven compartment to give them some distance from the heat source. We place slabs of cheese between two baking racks and suspend them in the smoke. A quick internet search reveals that the cheapest hot plates are still between $10 and $15. Wood chips for grills are available online or in any hardware or department store.
The key, we’ve found, is to flip the racks every 10 to 15 minutes, ideally when the weather is cool, in order to keep the cheese from melting through the holes in the cooling racks and forming cheese stalactites. Every smoking rig — especially a homemade one like this — will be different, and probably require different smoking times. There’s also the matter of your taste in smokiness. For us, 45 minutes to an hour is about right. We’ve smoked several different types of cheese at this point, but the winners seem to be muenster and pepper jack. We just buy the big bricks of cheese at the supermarket and cut them into slabs.
Featured photo: Smoked cocktail at CodeX. Courtesy photo.
I recently needed to develop a recipe for a cocktail based on the theme of a magical fruit bat, as one does, because — well, because of reasons.
Purple Fruit Bat
½ ounce + 1 ounce chili-lime rum
¼ cup (4 Tablespoons) dried, sweetened blueberries — the type you might put in some sort of fancy trail mix or something
¾ ounce Aperol
¾ ounce peach-flavored whiskey — Crown Royal makes a good one
1 ounce fresh-squeezed lime juice
You will also need some special equipment for this. Well, not need need, but you’ll be able to use a couple of these items that you don’t get to break out very often, and you’ll feel vindicated for buying them in the first place:
A muddler — This is a special stick for grinding ingredients up in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. Sure, you could use a wooden spoon for this, or even an actual stick, but I like breaking out the pestle — the stick part — of my largest mortar and pestle.
A bar spoon — one of the ones with a long, twisty handle. Again, you could just use your largest cereal spoon or the wooden spoon mentioned above, but if you’ve got a cool actual bar spoon, it would be a shame not to use it. I have one that’s black and twisty and has a skull on the end of it.
A strainer — This could be an actual fine-mesh strainer that you use for pasta or something. There are any number of bar strainers, often called julep strainers or something similar. I use a $2 sink strainer from the dish-soap aisle in my supermarket. It does a really good job and has almost exactly the same diameter as a martini glass.
Add the dried blueberries and ½ ounce of the rum to a cocktail shaker, then muddle the heck out of them. Adding just a little alcohol to the muddling process will help strip colors and flavors from the berries, some of which are not water-soluble. Muddle everything for longer than you think necessary.
Add the rest of the alcohol — the rum, the Aperol and the whiskey — then stir everything thoroughly with the bar spoon. Mashing the berries like you just did has smashed them into a solid layer on the bottom of the cocktail shaker, and this will break that up and give all the berries access to an alcohol bath.
(Optional) If you’ve got a few minutes, let the berry corpses marinate in this alcohol bath for a few minutes while you make yourself a piece of toast or something.
Add the lime juice (which is acidic but not alcoholic and probably won’t help with the blueberry stripping) and some ice to the shaker, and shake the mixture thoroughly, until you hear the ice start to break up into tiny pieces.
Strain the mixture over fresh ice in a rocks glass. Sigh with satisfaction at its beautiful purple color.
This is a really nice afternoon drink. It is definitely fruity but not overly sweet. The chili-lime rum works really well with the fresh lime juice. Blueberries love acid — lemon or lime juice especially. The dark purple from the blueberries blends with the bright red of the Aperol, giving it a classic violet color.
Given the number of ingredients, “refreshing” is probably not the adjective you would expect to describe this cocktail, but there you are. It is refreshing; you’ll just have to have a couple more to check that first assessment.
Featured photo: Purple Fruit Bat. Photo by John Fladd.
April Repoza and her daughter Bailey own and operate Bigfoot Sourdough in Milford, a sort of a combination homestead bakery and mad science lab that goes well beyond simple loaves of bread.
“We do make artisan loaves,” April Repoza said, “and then we do all of the very standard ones like jalapeno-cheddar and pesto-parm. We make bagels and they’re sourdough obviously, but they’re New York-style where they’re boiled in malt syrup and then baked. We make hamburger buns. We make stuffing cubes for Thanksgiving, cookies, and brownies. We do sourdough pizzas. It’s endless. But what we’re known for is when people reach out and say, ‘Hey, can you make this flavor?’ and if it’s something I’ve never done, I’ll say, ‘Of course — you know, let me try that.’”
“We love taking on crazy ideas,” Repoza continued. “We made a Pizza Night Loaf that we actually folded cooked spaghetti into. We used a tomato sauce-based dough and added cheese and it was literally a whole meal. You’d cut it and there’d be pieces of spaghetti inside. We made a Demogorgon Loaf for Stranger Things that went kind of viral. But yes, so we make regular loaves, too. Our English muffins have definitely been our best seller recently. We make standard sourdough English muffins and then we do a flavor of the week; this week we’ve got banana-nut ones and then we do a sourdough coffee cake of the week. This week we’re doing a Cosmic Brownie Coffee Cake. We make a cinnamon roll of the week and this week it’s based on the concept of a ‘kitchen sink’ cookie; we call it Bigfoot’s Junk Drawer. There’s a viral trend of people holding their sourdough like men hold their fish when they’re showing off their catches, so I upgraded my sourdough one week and made it into a fish shape”
Getting creative with sourdoughs began with April’s daughter Bailey, Rapoza said.
“She had gone to college and came home for Christmas break and said, ‘Mom, I got us a sourdough starter. Let’s try to make some bread.’ I was like, ‘OK, sure,’ I’ve never done it before. I went to culinary school 500 years ago, but I was like, ‘Alright, let’s try it out.’ We both just fell in love with it and fell in love with the science. We did hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of research before we even offered it out to friends or family or anything like that. I wanted to really try to perfect it before we went any further. Eventually we started getting known for our unique flavors and the different projects that we take on. Every product we make is sourdough-based, from cookies to king cakes, which we made this year. It was insane! I think we sold about a hundred different king cakes this season.“
The Rapozas started with a purchased starter, April said, but after developing thousands of batches of dough, their dough has evolved to the point of being uniquely suited to their needs. “It’s funny,” she said, “because people will say, ‘Well, I use a 200-year-old starter…’, and that’s partially true, but once you start feeding it your own water and your own flour, it changes. So it’s not the exact sourdough starter from 200 years ago. Ours is definitely its own thing at this point. My family jokes that if we go on vacation I have to arrange babysitting for our dough. My mom will come over to feed it; she’s like, ‘We never expected for you to have another child.’”
Working with sourdough, and learning to think about it as a living organism, has changed the way she looks at her baking and at food in general, Rapoza said. “We constantly look for ways to make not-so-healthy things healthy, but we also like to go kind of over the edge and make healthy things a little crazy too. I feel like you can do both.”
Bigfoot Sourdough Where: 33 Cortland Road, Milford, 801-6265, facebook.com/BigfootSourdough When: open Thursday through Sunday, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pickups can be arranged seven days a week by appointment. Special orders require notice 48 hours in advance.
FLOW, the Friends of the Library Of Windham, who support the Nesmith Library, is holding its biggest fundraiser of the year this weekend, its annual Strawberry Festival and Book Sale.
Mary Connelly, a FLOW member, said the event is time- and labor-intensive.
“We start meeting in September [the year before],” she said, “and then go all the way up until the end of May with the actual event. FLOW supports the library; we give about $7,000 in programming money for the teen, children and adults programs. We have supported some of the physical needs that they had this year. We helped pay for a new fence around the storybook garden that they have outside and bought a picnic table for them. The Library needed a new book return this year, and if there are other things that we can help out with as we go along, we try to support those. The Library here is a wonderful resource and we’re very proud of it. We hold two book fairs each year, one in December and then this one that’s part of the Strawberry Festival.”
The book sale goes on for four days, Connelly said.
“It starts next Wednesday,” she said, “and on Wednesday it’s for FLOW members, senior citizens and teachers. And then Thursday and Friday it’s open to anybody, after which we’ll pack up whatever’s left and take it over to the High School for the Strawberry Fest on Saturday.” By the end of the day on Saturday, the book sale will become a Bag Sale. “We provide the bag,” she said, “but then for $5, whatever you can fit in the bag, you can take home with you. Over the years, we’ve learned that we need to provide the bags; we’ve had people be a little too creative in the past.”
The key element of the Strawberry Festival however, is the strawberries. FLOW sells a lot of strawberry shortcake over the course of the day, Connelly said, serving upwards of 2,000 strawberry enthusiasts most years.
“Last year, we went through 480 quarts of fresh strawberries. Anyone who wants to learn the recipe of our shortcake is welcome to come volunteer, but it isn’t complicated.” FLOW sells a classic biscuit-based shortcake with strawberries and whipped cream, she said. “And there’s ice cream too, for people who want it.”
The Strawberry Festival is a way of recognizing the start of strawberry season, Connelly said. “It was established in 1984. Originally it took place later in the season, but now we’re just a little bit outside of it. It’s a great community builder. Last year we probably had 2,500 people come over the course of the day. It was just kind of nice and steady and everybody seemed to be having a good time. It was typical weather — one minute it was sunny, the next minute it was overcast. Then it was rainy and we had to go indoors. It’s New England, though, so there’s nothing you can count on, but the high school is big enough that it can handle things indoors or outdoors.”
Strawberry Festival and Book Fair When: Saturday, May 30, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Where: Windham High School, 64 London Bridge Road, Windham. What: There will be food trucks, live performances and a bicycle parade. More info: Visit flowwindham.org.
• Looking for a purr-fect name: There are plans for a new cat cafe in downtown Concord. Entrepreneurs Star Chagnon and Taylor Marshall had hoped to call it “Purrs and Pours” but have discovered that the name is already in use. Chagnon and Marshall are looking for input from the greater Concord community for a new name for the mixed-use space, which they hope to open by the end of the summer. One half of the business will be a traditional coffee and tea cafe, with a separate “cat lounge” next door, where customers will be able to relax with cats from local rescue organizations. Chagnon and Marshall have posted links in their social media accounts that will allow the public to weigh in with possible names for the new cat cafe. Search for “Purrs and Pours” on Facebook, TikTok or YouTube, and leave your suggestions for a new name for the cafe.
• Wine and fairies: Wine on Main (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) will host a fairy garden workshop and wine tasting Thursday, May 28, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Wine on Main’s website describes it as “a whimsical evening of creativity, laughter, and fairy-sized fun. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll design your very own miniature fairy garden to take home, complete with charming accessories, faux plants, moss, and magical touches. No soil, no watering, just pure enchantment that lasts.” Tickets are $65 each through the Wine on Main website.
• Charcuterie assembly: There will be a charcuterie workshop Thursday, May 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Manchester Distillery (284 Willow St., Manchester, 978-308-2867, manchesterdistillery.com). Boards and Barrels will teach attendees “the art of building stunning charcuterie boards. Every ticket includes a craft cocktail. Good boards, great spirits, and a few laughs,” according to the Distillery’s webpage. Tickets are $81.88 per person, through eventbrite.com.
• Kitchen inspiration: The Palace Theatre (80 Hanover St., Manchester, 668-5588, palacetheatre.org) will host its 19th annual Kitchen Tour on Sunday, May 31, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This self-guided tour will showcase kitchens in homes in Amherst, Hooksett and Merrimack and is the Palace Theatre’s biggest annual fundraising event. Registration will take place beginning at 9:30 a.m. at Granite State Cabinetry (384 Route 101, Bedford, 691-3124, gscabinetry.com). Tickets are $55 in advance or $65 on the day of the event, through the Palace Theatre’s website.
• Springtime cookie decorating: Posy Cottage Cookies (801-7590, posycottagecookies.com) will present a June Cookie Decorating Night at Station 101 (193 Union Square, Milford, 249-5416, station101nh.com) on Monday, June 1, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Get creative and decorate some delicious spring-themed cookies. This event is for all skill levels, 9+. There will be five cookie designs and four colors of royal icing. Tickets are $64.80 each, through the Posy Cottage website.
• Cooking with wine: Learn to use wine in South American recipes. LaBelle Winery Derry (14 Route 111, Derry, 672-9898, labellewinery.com/labelle-winery-derry) will host a fun and interactive cooking demonstration and tasting featuring authentic South American recipes on Wednesday, June 3, from 6 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $40 each through the LaBelle website.
• 603 Food Truck Festival: The Southern New Hampshire Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the Town of Salem, invites you to the 603 Food Truck Festival Wednesday, June 3, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Chamber’s parking lot at 81 Main St. in Salem. To celebrate 603 Day, many vendors will be offering special featured items for just $6.03.
