Vacation Chowder

By Lori Powell

All this week, Special Fork bloggers will be sharing recipes for vacation cooking. And to celebrate summer vacations, Special Fork is giving away a beautiful, English-style picnic basket fitted with service for four by Picnic Time. It’s easy to enter the sweepstakes.

Lucky me, I get to spend a couple of weeks each year in Mid-Coast Maine at a house on a cove that I have rented now for the past six years. It is my Northeast Oasis where I fatten myself up with all that Maine has to offer, including all the seafood, berries and great produce that I can consume in that short period of time.

Of course, all of that cooking (yes, I love to cook on vacation with the indigenous ingredients that surround me), eating and then reading need to be combined with a lot of hiking so that I can do more of the first two things.

Maine, to me, screams seafood and Seafood Chowder in all its glorious forms… whether it is lobster, scallops, shrimp or even clams. To me it generally involves some shellfish, vegetables, herbs, sometimes pork and a creamy, slightly thickened base.

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A Sneak Peek at Special Fork, Our New Mobile Website

By Sandy Hu

About 15 years ago, the public relations agency where I worked conducted some major consumer research for a food client about how women, as the primary family cooks, felt about the dinner hour. In focus groups they drew some disturbing pictures: a bomb with a lit fuse…a jagged lightning bolt and roiling black clouds…one woman drew a stick figure of herself hanging from the hands of a kitchen clock set at 6 o’clock.

This research had a lasting impression on me as a working mother in a demanding job with two teen sons. I identified with their situation, although unlike most of the women, I am blessed with a husband who does his share of the cooking and all the grocery shopping. Through the years, I have been looking for a way to help people with solutions to this daily dinnertime dilemma.

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