Category: Food

First, travel to somewhere people don’t know you. You can try this at home, but frankly, convincing people you already know that you have a mysterious past is an uphill slog. You can pretend you have a history of things like knife-fighting in an alley in Eastern Europe, but your friends and family will remember the time you walked into a telephone pole, or laughed so hard as a kid that milk came out of your nose.

When you get there, pepper your conversation with small clues to a worldly past. If anyone asks what you do for a living, say vaguely, “I’m in imports and exports.”

If your brain cramps up in a conversation, and you can’t think of a word, say, “I forget how to say that in English.”

If there’s a loud startling noise — a busboy dropping a dish, or a seagull screeching suddenly — adopt a martial arts stance, then relax it very slowly, looking conspicuously from side to side.

Ask a bartender for something really exotic, something you know she won’t have, then “compromise” with this:

The Alias

2 ounces peach-flavored whiskey – I like one by Whiskey Smith; Crown Royal makes one, too

1 ounce orange juice – fresh-squeezed is really good; you only need an ounce, so you can take out your inner rage on half an orange, if you want to; alternatively, if your supermarket sells fresh-squeezed juice near the takeout coffee counter, that would be super-excellent

½ ounce orgeat (almond syrup)

large pinch of black pepper – if you don’t like the look of black specks of pepper swirling through your drink, white pepper will work almost as well, but the black pepper will make you look more exotic and dangerous

5 ounces (give or take) plain seltzer

Clear your mind, and open yourself to your instincts. This is what an unpredictable, mysterious stranger would do before mixing a drink.

Pour the whiskey, orange juice and orgeat over ice in a cocktail shaker. Grind some pepper over the top. Ask your digital assistant to play the theme to Mission: Impossible. This will bump up your shaking game by at least 20 percent. Shake for at least 30 seconds.

Strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass. Top it off with seltzer. Stir gently.

Garnish with a paper cocktail umbrella. Sip with a straw, which probably won’t make you look any cooler but will keep you from accidentally jamming a paper umbrella up your nose. If you want more spy music to drink a couple of these to, look up “Sneaky Spy Music for Writing Heists and Mysteries” on YouTube and play it in the background.

If it weren’t for the pepper and a back note of whiskey, this would taste a lot like a tropical soda. It’s deceptive, the sort of drink a mysterious stranger would drink in order to throw any enemies off their scent. Goons in trench coats will look for a tough guy in a nice suit drinking straight whiskey, or a woman in an exotic evening gown drinking a martini, not a relaxed-looking bystander in a concert T-shirt, drinking an umbrella drink.

Peach has an affinity for almonds and for black pepper. Orange juice gets along with almost any other fruit. The base flavors for this drink get along very well but are on the sweet side on their own. Instead of adding lime juice or bitters to offset the sweetness — which would cover up some of the more subtle flavors — the plain soda dilutes it and gives it some sparkle.

If anyone asks what you’re drinking, you can say, “Oh, just a little something I picked up in Mandalay….”

(It’s a city in Burma, if they ask any inconvenient follow-up questions.)

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: The Alias. Photo by John Fladd.

New Hampshire celebrates Maple Weekend

Each year, on the third weekend in March, the maple producers of New Hampshire celebrate Maple Weekend, a statewide event to share the maple syrup making process with the public. Dozens of local producers will hold open houses on Saturday, March 16, and Sunday, March 17. According to Andrew Chisholm, President of the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association, this maple weekend is very important to New Hampshire’s maple producers.

“There will be lots of unique opportunities for visitors to see a multigenerational tradition, first-hand,” Chisholm says. “For us, this is like the Super Bowl and Daytona 500 wrapped up into one.”

The participants represent a wide spectrum of producers, from large operations that produce several thousand gallons of maple syrup to hobbyist producers who finish the season with less than 100.

Big or small, one thing that all the maple producers agree on is that this has been a rough year for maple production.

The weather hasn’t cooperated. According to Darcy Lefebvre of Peterson Sugarhouse in Londonderry, maple producers need a combination of cold nights and warm days to collect enough sap from maple trees to make syrup.

“It’s been a really weird winter,” she says. “It’s been either too frigidly cold this winter, or the nights have been too warm.”

According to Emily Sliviak, the operations manager for Ben’s Sugar Shack in Temple, this will probably be a short maple season as well.

“If the weather continues to be this warm, the maple trees will wake up and start to bud; that leads to some ‘ropey’ [off] flavors,” she said.

According to Christopher Hicks, owner of the Sugarhouse at Morningstar Farm in Plaistow, this is not an isolated phenomenon.

“This is shaping up to be an especially tough year,” Hicks said. “It’s an El Niño year,” he explained, referring to a weather pattern that often blows mild weather into New England. “It’s affecting producers all the way up to the north of the state and into Quebec. That’s farming, though; last year there was too much rain for us to harvest much hay, and the year before that there was a drought.”

Hicks said there are a lot of factors that affect the quantity and quality of sap.

“The trees aren’t developing their sap now,” he said. “That all happened last summer. They [the maple trees] need a lot of sunlight and water to develop the sugars that go into syrup.” Over the past couple of years, he said, New Hampshire has gotten a lot of one or the other, but not in the right ratio for sap production. This year Hicks is expecting to produce a little more than 10 percent of the syrup he would in a good year.

“I’ve heard that some farms are getting as much as 50 percent, but that’s not what anyone hopes for,” Hicks said.

Dale Smith, owner of Mt. Crumpet Farm in New Boston, is excited by the changes in the maple syrup this year. Even though there is less of it, the syrup this year is darker than usual, with a stronger maple flavor.

“Early-season sap makes a lighter syrup,” Smith said; it gets darker throughout the season. This year’s syrup has been darker from the start. He likes that. “Everyone thinks they like lighter syrup,” he said, “but in blind taste tests, almost everyone prefers the dark.”

You get the feeling, talking to maple producers, that they really enjoy what they do. They get to spend time outdoors, working with their hands and producing a tangible, delicious product. But most of them seem especially excited about the equipment they get to work with. Darcy Lefabvre says that the No. 1 item on Peterson Sugarhouse’s “I Want” list is a reverse osmosis system, which can remove up to 40 percent of the water content from sap before it even gets to the boiler that cooks it down into syrup.

“We’re trying to do a little bit more each year, and we’d love to have reverse osmosis here,” she said.

Emily Sliviak agrees.

“We have one of the largest R.O. systems in the country,” she said. “It’s really advanced; we can control it from our phones. It’s a real game-changer.” She says that going out to the sugar house in the middle of the night used to be one of those things that a farmer just had to do. Now she and her husband have a better chance of sleeping through the night.

Marc Fortin of 2 Sappy Guys in Bedford puts it more succinctly: “There’s so much equipment to play with,” he said, “so much shiny equipment….”

This year’s Maple Weekend is shaping up to be a big one. Christopher Hicks, one of the biggest maple producers in the state, with almost 10,000 taps in operation, is enthusiastic about Maple Weekend.

“We’re expecting between 6,000 and 7,000 visitors this year,” he said.

Emily Sliviak said Ben’s Sugar Shack is planning several activities, from wagon rides and sugar-on-snow to tours that show visitors how the syrup is produced.

“We start tours every 10 to 15 minutes,” she said. “We take visitors out to see how we collect the sap — our plastic lines and some of the old-fashioned buckets. They have a chance to watch us boiling [the sap into syrup], and we give out samples of the syrup and some of our maple products.”

Marc Fortin is excited about showing off his operation.

“We’re not usually open to visitors,” he said, explaining that because he produces such a small amount of syrup — he estimates about 50 gallons this year — he doesn’t boil frequently enough to have regular hours. “We’re hobbyists,” he said.

Levi St. Germain of MapleSaint in Deerfield is looking forward to a relaxed experience at his open house. “People come, get to see the evaporator working, and ask a lot of questions,” he says. “Some people stay for a couple of hours; some stay 10 minutes.”

Like many maple producers, Peterson Sugarhouse has diversified its products from traditional maple syrup.

“We’re looking forward to sharing our candy, maple pecans, and our bourbon barrel-aged syrup,” Darcy Lefebvre said. Other producers mentioned maple cotton candy, maple barbecue sauces, spreadable maple cream, maple kettle corn and even maple hot sauce.

Maple producers in general are excited advocates for how versatile maple syrup is. Christopher Hicks likes to use it on the grill.

“We make two types of maple mustard,” Hicks says, “but we make a maple-garlic barbecue sauce that will knock your socks off.”

Dale Smith likes using it as a dipping sauce for sharp cheddar cheese: “You get that whole sweet-salty thing going, and it is fantastic!” he says.

Emily Sliviak likes a maple pulled pork sandwich with sliced ham, called a Boss Cuban sandwich. Darcy Lefebvre has two favorite uses for maple syrup: on ice cream, and in cocktails. “The other night, I had a bourbon Old-Fashioned, with maple syrup instead of simple syrup,” she said. “It was a revelation!”

Sugar houses

Here are some of the sugar houses participating in this year’s Maple Weekend, according to nhmapleproducers.com, where you can find more locations across the state.

• 2 Sappy Guys (324 Joppa Hill Road in Bedford, 860-7992) Open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. both days with tours of the maple sugar bush and sugar shack, according to their Facebook page.

• Ackerman Brothers (137 Amherst Road in Merrimack, 714-9784)

• Babel’s Sugar Shack (323 Hurricane Hill Road in Mason, 878-3929) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Ben’s Sugar Shack (8 Webster Hwy. in Temple, 924-3111, bensmaplesyrup.com) Ben’s is open every weekend in March, Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with tours and samples, according to a Facebook post. The Temple location also has a deli/cafe selling breakfast and lunch.

• Blue Roof Sap Camp (6 Carter Hill Road in Canterbury, 234-5067, sugarbonesfarm603.com)

• Blueberry Hill Sugarworks (31 Blueberry Hill Road in Raymond, 300-6837, wickedsappy.com) Open both days, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to their website.

• Briar Bush (160 Briar Bush Road in Canterbury, 809-6393, briarbushfarm.com)

• Brookview Sugar House (154 Gage Road in Wilton, 731-5214)

• Dill Family Farm (61 Griffin Road in Deerfield, 475-3798, facebook.com/DillFamilyFarm)

• Ice Mountain Maple (276 Queen St. in Boscawen, 341-4297, icemountainmaple.com)

• Lamb’s Maple Syrup (228 Shaker Road in Canterbury, 783-9912) Open Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• LMP Maple (6 Jump Lane in Hudson, 781-539-2087)

• MapleSaint (28 Lang Road in Deerfield, 235-7167) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Meadow Ledge (612 Route 129 in Loudon, 798-5860)

• Mt. Crumpit Farm (207 Lull Road in New Boston, 325-5900)

• Munson’s Maple (44 Blueberry Hill Road in Raymond, 303-8278) Open both days, according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Peterson Sugarhouse (28 Peabody Row in Londonderry, 247-5289)

• SMD Maple Syrup (6 Falcon Drive in Merrimack, 978-815-6476, facebook.com/SMDMapleSyrup)

• Sugar House at Morningstar Farm (30 Crane Crossing Road in Plaistow, 479-0804)

Open both days, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. There will be a pancake breakfast both days, fresh cider doughnuts, maple dogs, farm animals and syrup production, according to the New Hampshire Maple Producers Association’s website.

• Sunnyside Maples (1089 Route 106 North in Loudon, 783-9961, sunnysidemaples.com)

• Windswept Maple Farm (845 Loudon Ridge Road in Loudon, 435-4003, windsweptmaples.com) Open both days, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., according to their website.

Featured Photo: Courtesy of Ben’s Sugar Shack.

from the 1950 Betty Crocker Cookbook

4 cups (124 g) Cheerios – how long have these been heart-shaped?

1½ cups (210 g) salted roast peanuts

1½ cups (319 g) brown sugar

¾ cup (255 g) molasses

½ cup (113 g) water

4 teaspoons vinegar

1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar

1½ teaspoons baking soda

In a large greased bowl, combine the cereal and the peanuts.

In a large saucepan, combine the brown sugar, molasses, water, vinegar, and cream of tartar.

Over medium heat, bring the molasses mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally. Continue boiling, until the mixture comes to a temperature of 250ºF — this is what no-nonsense grandmothers and aunts used to call the “soft-ball” stage.

At this point you will need some way of measuring the temperature of the hot molasses syrup. One option is an old-fashioned frying/candy thermometer. Another is a whisk with an integrated thermometer — I like this option a lot; it allows you to multitask. You can continue to stir and still keep track of the temperature.

I would add a note of caution, however. There are two parts to this whisk/thermometer — it’s a probe thermometer that is pushed through a small hole into the whisk component. The electronic thermometer doesn’t like to get wet, so as I was cleaning up after making this candy, I congratulated myself on remembering to pull the two components apart before washing them. This turned out to be difficult. The molasses candy was very sticky and had set up more firmly than I expected. I decided to pull with more effort, only to rip the whole thing in two. As I stared down at the loose wires jutting out from the broken thermometer base, I swear they looked judgmentally at me for my betrayal.

As soon as the molasses syrup reaches 250ºF, remove it immediately from the heat, and stir the baking soda into the mixture as quickly as possible. It will foam up and look really cool.

Pour the hot, foamy syrup over the cereal-peanut mixture, and stir to combine with a well-greased spoon. The key term from this point forward will be “well-greased.”

Let the mixture sit and cool for a few minutes, which will give you a chance to grease up your hands.

Using your well-greased hands, form the cereal mixture into 2-inch patties and press them down on a well-greased silicone mat or a well-greased sheet of parchment paper. As greasy as this whole endeavor is, when you get about three quarters of the way through the patty-making process you will wish you had greased everything even a little bit more.

Let the patties sit for half an hour or so before eating any of them, and let the remainder harden up overnight.

A note about cleaning up: The best tool for cleaning your mixing bowl and saucepan seems to be a stiff-bristled kitchen brush. You might be tempted to use the green scrubby part of a sponge, but you’ll end up going through several of them, which you will end up having to throw away. A brush will not only make reasonably fast work of cleaning up; it will also clean itself of any candy residue. This brush may become your new best friend. Name him.

If you haven’t run the gauntlet of candy-making before, this is a pretty good beginner’s project. This is a good candy, with a low effort-to-reward ratio. In 1950 Betty and her ghost writer wrote that these candies are “like caramel corn,” which they are, in a way. There’s no actual popcorn involved, of course, but the Cheerios and the peanuts stay crunchy, without the annoying hard bits of corn kernels that stick in your teeth with actual caramel corn. These are chewy candies that taste mildly of molasses, Cheerios and salt. They are excellent with a mug of tea.

They just need a more exciting name. Ernesto, perhaps? Bruno? Fanaka, Queen of the Amazons?

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: Molasses Patties. Photo by John Fladd.

Red Arrow shows famous visitors in online photo album

Presidential hopefuls love to have their pictures taken in diners. And primary candidates make absolutely certain to visit one of the Red Arrow diners — well-known diners in New Hampshire — particularly the mother diner in Manchester.

This makes sense to Amanda Wihby, co-owner and COO of Red Arrow, who says that visiting a diner gives candidates a chance to meet with Granite Staters from every walk of life.

“Diners are the focal point of a community,” she said. “All types of people want comfort, and we specialize in comfort food.”

The Red Arrow regularly posts photos of celebrities who eat there on an online photo album at redarrowdiner.com/category/famous-guests. It isn’t surprising that the most recent photos are predominantly of politicians — though scroll down to September 2023 and you’ll find Adam Sandler, who regularly dines at the Red Arrow and has a burger named after him.

Wihby says that sometimes the diner’s staff has advance notice of when a candidate will come to the diner, but there’s always the possibility of a surprise visit.

“Sometimes a campaign team will get in touch with us a week ahead of time; sometimes it’s a day. There are times when the Secret Service will show up and we’re like, ‘OK, I guess we’ve got a candidate visiting,’” she said

Even the ad hoc visits are not as disruptive as you might think.

“Most of our staff are veteran employees. They’ve been with us a long time, and they know how to make sure everyone is taken care of, no matter what’s happening up front,” Wihby said.

According to Wihby, these are some of takeaways from this season’s candidate visits:

• Nicest Candidate:Sen. Tim Scott — According to Wihby, he had the press wait outside during his visit, took a coffee pot around to all the customers and gave them refills. Afterward, he went into the kitchen to talk to the staff there.

• Hardest-Working Candidate: Nikki Haley, who visited four times. “She put in a lot of effort. She’s a good example of retail politics.”

• Best Tipper: “None of them pay; it’s always the campaign manager. But the servers never complain — let’s put it that way.”

What did they eat?

Tim Scott: An Arrow spinach omelet, with grits and wheat toast.

Vivek Ramaswamy: Veggie quesadilla.

Donald Trump: A Trump Tower Burger and a chocolate shake.

Dean Phillips: A peanut butter and chocolate chip waffle.

Featured photo: Tim Scott at the Red Arrow. Courtesy Photos.