Category: General News

The Food & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes a report on the winner of the Portland Trails recipe contest,

As a mother of two, a grandmother of four and a former sixth-grade teacher, Vesta Rand knows how to get kids excited about food. As an avid walker, she also knows what it takes to create portable eats.

So it’s hardly a surprise that her entry for Portland Trails’ first Trail Gourmet contest took top honors.

and an article about the gardening program at the Center for African Heritage in Falmouth,

Boulis Kodi treads lightly through a thriving garden patch, showing off a summer’s worth of hard work by Nuba Mountain refugees from Sudan.

“This is the sweet corn, and this is the tomatoes over here,” said Kodi, who is the farm manager for the Center for African Heritage garden project at Tidewater Farm, just down the road from the University of Maine Regional Learning Center.

 

Forecaster columnist Edgar Allen Beem writes this week about his personal path to a locavorian point of view.

Small local farms, family gardens, locally owned, independent businesses. If the 21st century turns out to look more like the 19th than the 20th, it may well be a good thing. I have seen the future and it resides in the past.

Eat well, my friends. Eat local.

Otto’s mashed potato, bacon and scallion pizza has made it into the Food Network Magazine’s list of the 50 best pizza’s in the nation. (via the Press Herald)

For much of the year, Maine weather demands serious comfort food, and Otto Pizza’s co-owners, Mike Keon and Anthony Allen, were determined to deliver it: They created a pizza topped with mashed potatoes, meatloaf and gravy. Customers didn’t go for it, but when the two edited the toppings to this perfect combo — buttery mashed potatoes, bacon and scallions — it became an instant best-seller.

Today’s Maine Sunday Telegram includes the results from the Press Herald readership poll and a set of PPH staff recommendations.

The range of eats available from food carts continues to expand this Summer. Aunt Kake’s, a wholesale/retail bakery on Walton Street, is operating a food cart in the Old Port which serves cupcakes, pies and other desserts to go.

In the 2nd episode of the Maine Culinary Podcast, host Dan Bodoff interviewed food bloggers from Edible Obsessions, The Blueberry Files and Vrai-lean-uh about “pizza, gelato, bagels, scapes and a public service announcement about NOT squeezing the peaches.”

Today’s Portland Daily Sun takes a look at the pros and cons of the staff trying to oust a bad restaurant manager.

A tight-knit group of twenty-to-life restaurant people I know are plotting the downfall of their worse than stereotypically bad manager. He makes their working hours miserable and in some cases their precious non-working hours as well via friendly texts that are thinly disguised demands for them to pick up shifts on their only full weekend off all summer. Saying no has ramifications felt only in industries where strategic scheduling is everything and your financial fate is in the hands of the person with the Excel spreadsheet.

AOL Travel has included Maine Foodie Tours on their list of the Best 9 Foodie Walking Tours in the country.

From Maine-smoked seafood to local wild blueberry preserves spread on scones, Old Port promises plenty of opportunities to entice your taste buds and teach you about what makes these local products so uniquely delicious. Make sure to spring for a piece of original whoopee pie while aboard the tour.