The forsythia was blooming and that means one thing to this hungry pilgrim: Shad Roe! It will surely kill me one day (it's loaded with cholesterol) but I love the stuff. It is hyper-seasonal and local, and hard to find.

Shad roe is the eggs of the shad fish that used to spawn in prodigious numbers up the Connecticut, Housatonic, Hudson, Delaware, and other mid-Atlantic and New England rivers. The Hudson Valley is famous for shad roe, and it was in great demand years ago in the finest restaurants and hotels in Manhattan. Cole Porter asks for it in "Let's Fall in Love".  

So we set out to explore the Hudson Valley, knowing that even if we missed the roe it would be a fun drive. We make a version of this trip every year, but it's not always during shad roe season. We make a point to visit our old favorite Olana, a grand house built by a wealthy landscape painter in the mid-1800s. It's worth the trip just to visit that house!

The long, sunny spring days are here, and that means long sunny spring drives!

This time we shot up through the White Mountains to St. Johnsbury, VT, then we ambled along the familiar backroads of the Northeast Kingdom to Newport, VT before setting off into unknown territory: the mountain road from Newport to Enosburg over Jay Peak, and then onward to Swanton and The Hero Islands in Lake Champlain.

It was a long drive (635 miles by the time we got home), but a lot of it was through some of the prettiest countryside in New England. Spring comes late way up on the Canadian border, and it doesn't unfold in the same way that we see it in Plymouth and on Cape Cod.

Some plants respond to warming weather, others to the number of hours of sunlight they get. That means that some plants, like the daffodils, were just up, a few weeks behind southern Massachusetts, but many of the trees were not so far behind. The higher elevations were still pretty bare, especially on the northern slopes, but the lakeshores were bursting forth in spring glory.

Boiled beef is sought after by gourmets all over the world. Tafelspit, the famous Viennese version, is made from special cuts and is reputed to be sublime. If I ever get to the famous Plachutta Wollzeile in that city, I'll report on it, but for now my topic is the steamed cheeseburger.

To truly appreciate a steamed cheeseburger, you have to put aside all your preconceived ideas about hamburger.  Forget the sweet, crunchy caramelization produced by contact with the heat of the grill.  Forget medium rare. Then you have to travel to a small area in central Connecticut where steamed cheeseburgers are a local delicacy.  

I was visiting our friend Ina in Meriden when I set out to investigate this phenomenon.  I went to Ted's Restaurant at 1046 Broad Street in that fair city, but there are other eateries in town where you can expand you r culinary horizons and sample the treat. Another restaurant I visited on my stay had to install a steamer to satisfy popular demand.  

This winter seemed very long and reluctant to depart. As much as I enjoy winter cooking, I was just about ready to see the end of the snow and ice.

But we had one more trip planned for the maple studies. As you can see in my earlier posts, I had learned much from several sugarhouses in Maine, but I wanted to get a Vermont perspective too.

Of course, Vermont is famous for maple syrup, so why did we keep going to Maine? Because every weekend it seemed there was more snow in the Green Mountain State. We could get better driving in Maine, and as you saw there is no shortage of sugarmakers in the Pine Tree state.  It's a long way from Plymouth to Vermont, and a blue-sky day makes the drive fun.

This is a delicious version of the more famous Boston Baked Beans. They go well with pork dishes and turkey or chicken, as the maple is a lighter flavor than the molasses of their Beantown brethren. 

I bet they'd be great with fishcakes and a corn muffin for a Yankee breakfast, too!

I made them with Soldier Beans, which are traditional in Maine and much of New Hampshire and Vermont.

This festive dessert is spectacular, time-consuming, and short lived. It is best made for a celebration.

It is simply a shell made of meringue filled with whipped cream and fresh berries; the trick lies in making a good shell.

It's maple sugaring season! This quintessential New England flavor is enjoyed all year, but it must be made in the fading days of winter when the sap is rising in the trees but they can still freeze at night.

We spent two Saturdays exploring the sugarhouses of southern Maine learning the intricacies of maple syrup making.  We visited Hilltop Boilers in Newfield, Cooper's Royal Heritage Farm in Windham, and Goranson Farm in Dresden. It was a lot of fun, and very interesting. Here's what we learned.

Maple syrup comes from the sap of sugar maples, black maples, and red maples. At this time of year you can see plastic or metal buckets equipped with roofs hanging from maple trees all over New England. A gallon of syrup requires on average about 40 gallons of sap, and each tap produces 10 to 20 gallons of sap, so the buckets must be emptied frequently over the course of the season, which lasts about 6 weeks.

Maple Syrup comes from the sap of maple trees, and now is the time when the sap is running.

Maple Sugaring time starts in late February and extends into early April, culminating for many at Maine Maple Sunday, New Hampshire Maple Weekend, or the annual Vermont Maple Festival away up in St. Albans, VT. 

The sap is collected in buckets, sometimes linked by many yards of plastic tubing, and then boiled down in a shed called a sugarhouse. You can read all (really all) about it in this 30pp Connecticut Maple Syrup Producers Manual.

We took a drive to Quechee Gorge to celebrate the first blue-sky Saturday in ages, but that wasn't far enough so we meandered up Route 5 along the frozen Connecticut River through Thetford and many smaller towns to St Johnsbury, at the northern terminus or I-93 beyond the White Mountains.

Saturday was another dreary day, our third dreary Saturday in a row! Rain in the afternoon, sleet and snow in the evening, and too crummy for a long drive anywhere, even if there were sunshine to be found. We badly needed a dose of whimsy and something very nice.

For me, there's no better store of whimsy than the collection of paintings by Ralph Cahoon at the Cahoon Museum of American Art in Cotuit, on Rte 28 on the Upper Cape.  Ralph Cahoon and his wife Martha were Cape Cod artists active through much of the 20th century, known for their happy, folksy paintings of Cape Cod scenes filled with humor and color.... and mermaids, as in Megansett Tea Room, pictured above.

For Valentine's Day I wanted to make a special dinner, but it was a work day so it couldn't take all day to prepare.

I knew Lorna wanted lobster and champagne, so using that as a cornerstone, here's what we came up with:

• A Winnemere cheese from Jasper Hill Farm in Vermont.
  
•  A fresh salad with goat cheese and toasted walnuts
• Sauteed mushrooms with Madeira
• The centerpiece was a Lobster Cardinal
  
• Chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert

The Winnemere is my favorite washed-rind cheese and one of my top five cheeses in all the world. It is an earthy, rich, cow's-milk cheese banded in spruce bark. It has awesome complexity that rewards savoring and reflection.  You can buy it during the winter months at some Whole Foods Markets. It worked well with Veuve Clicquot. She was able to linger with the cheese while I prepared the lobster.