Our Summer 2019 Issue

When I was in junior high (way before sushi restaurants had made an appearance on the suburban dining scene), I created a science fair project about seaweed. I don’t remember many details of my report, but I do recall that I baked a batch of seaweed cookies as part of my display. As my two younger sisters, my guinea pigs, can attest, they were pretty vile, tasting distinctly of iodine, with a crunch of sand. In fairness, I was operating without a roadmap. There was no recipe for seaweed anything in my mother’s copy of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. And there were no packages of ready-to-use nori on the supermarket shelves. I just harvested some washed-up seaweed from our beach, rinsed it well (maybe not well enough) and added it to a batch of butter cookies. Nevertheless, I was excited that my cookies gradually vanished during the science fair, only to later discover that someone had “fed” them to the papier-mâché blue whale in the exhibit across the aisle. That memory came rushing back to me as I read Andrea Pyenson’s article about Chatham Kelp, a new operation growing sugar kelp in Nantucket Sound. Their product is being used by some of the top chefs on the Cape, who are looking to add more innovative, healthy ingredients— not to mention a hit of umami—to their offerings. Given that this sustainable aquaculture product can boost your intake of vitamins and minerals without adding many calories, I look forward to discovering dishes using Chatham Kelp on menus this summer. Maybe I’ll invite my sisters to join me.

I don’t think chef/owner Florence Lowell has any seaweed on her menu yet, but in the 13 years she’s owned Naked Oyster, she’s consistently kept things fresh and innovative. In particular, we love the creative combinations she comes up with for both her raw and baked oysters, which are harvested from the restaurant's own oyster farm. (Oysters Reposado with Fresno pepper, lime and Casamigos tequila, anyone?) We have been big fans of the Naked Oyster since its early incarnation on Independence Road in Hyannis and we’ve never had a meal there that was less than top notch, so we asked Larry Egan to bring us up to date on one of our favorite bistros.

We also catch up with Drew Locke of Hillside Poultry Farm in Truro. We first wrote about Locke in 2012 when he was just a few years in as a seventh-generation farmer raising chickens in the moveable pastures pioneered by Joel Salatin at Polyface Farm in Virginia. As Michelle Koch writes, he’s still raising meat chickens and has subsequently added turkeys, ducks, and soon, goats to his operation. At the other end of the Cape, a new community garden is being created at Tony Andrews Farm in Falmouth, which was recently saved from development by a coalition of farmers, conservationists and concerned citizens. The town overwhelmingly supported the effort to purchase the land when it was put up for sale a few years ago. It’s inspiring to see that people want to preserve what precious little farm land we still have on the Cape.