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8-25-2020 – The Lure of Cape Breton – Part 1

August 25, 2020 by DonnaHebert

*The Inverness boardwalk* (D. Hébert photo, 2017)

What is there about this place that draws new visitors not just once but lures them back over and over again? The beauty of the island is a given. It’s truly gorgeous, from coastlines to Cape Breton Highlands to inland river valleys and farmlands, but there’s something else here, something stronger. I think it’s the people.

Visitors to the island almost always want to come back. They crave that Cape Breton welcome. People wave at you when your car goes by, smile at you and tip their baseball cap if they see you on the sidewalk, stop for you even if you’re not in the crosswalk. People here are actively nice, even cordial, to strangers. If you live in a big American city, you almost never make eye contact on the street or on public transport. Here, you are seen and welcomed. While you are here, you’re part of the village – not just your wallet – but you. How refreshingly kind.

The first time I met someone from Cape Breton was back when I was a spring chicken, at the French Club in Waltham Massachusetts. (Capers refer to “the Boston States” when they talk about Massachusetts.) They introduced themselves and one of their first questions was “and what was your mother’s mother’s name? And your father’s mother?” We quickly established that my family was French and kept talking. Everyone you meet here is interested in your lineage because, in fact, you might be related. And if it turns out after all that you’re NOT a relative, they are truly disappointed. It happens here all the time. That kind of welcome keeps people coming back.

Bob began visiting the island with his late wife Jay and their daughters in the early 1980s. After a few trips around Nova Scotia, Cape Breton was such a success as a family vacation spot that they drove every year from their home in Torrington CT to the MacLeod Campground in Dunvegan. The campground owner was not really surprised when they bought a place a few miles down the road late in the late 1990s. “We rather thought you’d be doing that, didn’t we?” I guess the locals can tell when the island has claimed another heart.

They went looking for a piece of land where they could build a tent platform. What they bought instead was a three-bedroom, one bathroom house on almost 3 acres, located on the main road to the Cabot Trail. I’m not telling what they paid for it in 1995 because you’d cry. I did. Since then, golf and tourism have much improved housing values on the island. Today, a decent house with good land, say an acre, will cost between $200-300K, and can run a lot more with bigger acreage or a snazzy water view. However, with Canadian currency today pegged at $.76 to the American dollar, you can see it’s a whisker of opportunity. A $200K house on the island would cost around US$152,000. Not too bad if you’re selling your American home to finance a life here (once you can legally live here full-time, that is), but you probably want to keep your snow-blower!

Years ago, this house was a general store and even a post office and the locals still know it by the folks who built it a long time ago. About two-thirds is sloping lawn and the rest is spruce, birch, and maple forest, with no near neighbors except the main road, remarkably quiet in this COVID year. It’s a bucolic paradise in summer if you’re prepared for the bugs, a nice piece of land with a spring-fed well, lovely in spring and gorgeous in fall. Winter, the longest season (some locals say it’s spring), is for the hardy – the very hardy. Some older friends here flee to warmer climes in the worst of winter, others tough it out. And the islanders are tough. They have to be!

Tomorrow I continue this essay with a look at what it took Bob and Jay to establish themselves here as more than property owners, to become Canadian citizens. Bob has shared stories and facts and photos and proofread every word!

8-24-2020 – Betty Beaton’s Oatcakes

August 24, 2020 by DonnaHebert

Today is another food story. I figured you’d want something yummy to go with Andrea Beaton’s coffee, so why not one of her talented mom Betty’s oatcakes?

One of the first things I learned to make when I came here was oatcakes. Bob loves them. We bought many different ones at the Co-op and I always picked up a bag whenever I found them. I relentlessly compared them, looking for that Cape Breton “je ne sais quoi” but no store-bought were ever as good as the homemade version. Luckily I had already made some friends here and Betty gave me her recipe for oatcakes. Bob no longer has to make do with grocery-store oatcakes. Hooray!

What are oatcakes, anyway? Well, they’re not a cake, they’re a cookie but they are made with half oats, half flour, and they can definitely sustain life. They are something like oatmeal shortbread, with no eggs and very little leavening. The hobbits could easily have survived a trek on this way-bread. Like shortbread is in Scotland, oatcakes in Cape Breton are a staple of life. Some folks use brown sugar, some don’t. I also sneak in a few non-traditional ingredients like a teaspoon of cinnamon or some minced pecans. This recipe is delicious in it’s basic form and with additions.

Betty rolls hers out and cuts them into rounds. I confess that unlike Betty, my hand with a rolling pin is pretty dang heavy and they came out tough as nails. I wanted that buttery crispness that dissolves in your mouth and not a tough cookie!

The secret for me was DON’T ROLL IT OUT FLAT. Instead, when the dough comes together, I form it into a long roll inside of plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge – sometimes overnight. It can also be frozen at this stage. Cut the log in half, make half a batch and freeze the rest for later when you need them in a hurry. Before COVID, when Bob and I would be separated for up to a month sometimes, I’d send him back to the island with a log of oatcake dough.

When I take them out of the fridge, I just slice rounds (or whatever shape they decide to be in), put them on a cookie sheet and bake them. The recipe below is Betty’s, with my variations noted. I include a gluten-free option as well. I’ve tested it and it’s downright delicious and doesn’t taste ‘healthy’ at all!

8-22-2020 – Beaton’s Delight Espresso

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

Coffee. It starts many people’s day. If you live in a big city or a suburb, it’s easy to find on the way to work. In rural Cape Breton, however, that good cuppa joe is much more elusive. There is no Tim’s on every corner, no Dunkin’ and for sure, no Starbucks. So far, I’ve identified four places with good coffee on the west side of the island. One is 10 miles NE, another is 11 miles south, a third is 30 miles north, but my new favorite coffee vendor is 25 miles south of us in Mabou. So, how far would YOU go for a really good cup of coffee?

After the Mull in Mabou, a local eatery, closed recently, world-renowned fiddler Andrea Beaton was touring in the states with Troy MacGillivray, bemoaning the lack of fun little coffee shops along Route 19 at home. She joked about buying the recently closed Mull and opening a coffee shop – but it started to become real in her mind. She’d already bought a used commercial espresso machine and a few years back had been researching tiny houses. Turns out that was perfect for selling coffee, so she modified a tiny house design for an 8×5 foot trailer and had a contractor build it to her specifications. “Make something like this,” she asked, “and he did…. the rest is what you see!”

Beaton’s Delight Espresso popped up last year next to the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou when Andrea returned to the island from Montréal with her family and bought the house where her grandfather had lived, right next door to the legendary Red Shoe. Seasonal, of course, like many services here, Beaton’s Delight provides (and I would expect no less) world-class coffee and certainly the best cafe mocha I’ve had anywhere and I’m an American coffee snob. The maple latte looked enticing but it will have to wait till next time.

Yes, I love the Dancing Goat in Northeast Margaree and they remain my favorite lunch place and I always order their cafe mocha latte when I go there. I am a loyal Goat lover and I had and enjoyed their latte earlier this week but I have to say, Beaton’s Delight edges them out just a bit with a richer, deeper, more chocolatey mouth feel. Try the mocha latte at both and decide for yourself!

The whole time we were there, the line kept forming and Andrea had already run out of mini cinnamon buns, “minnie cinnies,” a specialty. I think everyone in Mabou can smell it on the air, like when I come downstairs and Bob’s made coffee. The smell of good joe lures them to her stand – old, young, in-between. Hot, cold, sweet, straight up, fancy, whatever flavor, they all want their coffee. Two young guys wait, jonesing for their espresso hits, while my latte is almost gone. The line never stopped, so I couldn’t grab a photo of Andrea. I ponder the wisdom of a refill while I wonder how many of her customers know her music.

Andrea Beaton is a truly amazing fiddler from Cape Breton who blew me away the first time I saw her perform. I loved her music but even more, I loved her style. She made me laugh. Years later, I was lucky enough to play music with her. It’s pure joy playing with others who give their all, nothing held back. Andrea is one of those people. That same sense of commitment is evident in what she’s done with Beaton’s Delight Espresso. I can only guess what the mini cinnies taste like because they sold out. But I know Andrea and only the best will do. Guess I will have that refill!

Beaton’s Delight Espresso
Andrea Beaton CD orders

8-20-2020 – Blueberry Dreams

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

As a child, one of my favorite activities was treasure-hunting all alone in the woods. I loved August, when I could find those elusive blue pearls hiding under a leaf on the ground cover. I often ate as much as I picked, coming home blue-handed to my mother. She froze them and made pies but it wasn’t until I became an adult that I discovered blueberry JAM.

My first summer here was 2017 and my blueberry obsession had finally hit the mother-lode. Nova Scotia and northern Maine are the blueberry capitals of the world and rightly so. The soil is perfect – sandy, acidic, rocky. Professional growers even burn the fields every few years to keep the forest from encroaching. That first year, I bought fifteen pounds of local berries in five pound boxes. You can freeze the berries right in the box – as long as you DON’T wash them! Then you get a five pound block of blueberry ice!

After several years of upsizing recipes unsuccessfully, I’ve finally succumbed to the logic of small batches. My earlier attempts were quite tasty but were closer to blueberry drool. It was awesome on pancakes but I couldn’t call it jam.

It’s another August and today is blueberry jam day. We’re freezing one five pound box and making jam with the other. Last year I combined five pounds each of blueberries and cranberries for a tasty chutney and used another box to add to a batch of our homemade applesauce. There is nothing like the flavor of little blueberries bursting in your mouth in January. Summer in a jar!

We’ve reached the point where we don’t buy many jars, just lids. Mason jars have become our go-to water glasses and desktop pen holders. Occasionally I think “hey, we should buy some glasses,” and then I remember we have several cases in the garage. Right now, Bob is immersing a dozen half-pint jars in boiling water, so I have to go do my duty. I’m the stirrer and bringer back to the boil, so I’ll be gone for awhile. Before I go, my recipe and the order of assembly are cribbed from Kraft Canada but of course, I’ve played with it, adding a whole grated Granny Smith apple, the grated rind of a half lemon. Some honey, maple syrup, who knows? I’m not done yet!

Blueberry Jam

In a large soup pot, assemble

7 cups whole blueberries – crush down to 4 cups approx. (If you don’t crush them, they’ll all float to the top of each jar.)
Juice and zest of ½ large lemon
1 Granny Smith apple, grated (peel and all) (I think the lemon and apple bring out the full blueberry flavor.)
1 box Certo dry crystals – pectin (and here’s where I got lazy and let them all sit in a cold pot mixed up together for about fifteen minutes while I enjoyed a cup of tea – that really did the trick. It gelled from the start.)

Mix everything well, stirring all the time, and bring to a full bubbling/rolling boil.

Add 5 cups sugar, mix well, add ¼ cup honey OR maple syrup (but not both!), stir that in. The mixture will begin to look glossy. That’s the sugar melting.

Bring back to a full boil (takes 4-5 mins on high), let boil for one minute. Remove from heat, stir a few times and let it rest for five minutes, stirring occasionally. Skim any foam if it appears. I filled 9 half pint jars with the first batch, made with honey, another 9 plus a half cup with the second, made with maple syrup. (photo on the porch, sunflowers from Miller Farms in Northeast Margaree). The blueberries are from Blue Pearl Farms in Strathlorne.

I close with a foraging memory from my young adulthood. My folks lived in Leominster, Massachusetts and we drove up to New Hampshire to buy cigarettes one Labor Day in the early 1970s . Driving back, I called out, “BLUEBERRY BOG” and my dad screeched to a halt. We all piled out of the car. Sure enough, bush after high bush of berries beckoned. Huge, beautiful, easy to find, the grape-like clusters just reached out for our hands to grab them, and we did. Turns out the only containers in the car were the cartons of bootleg NH ciggies, so we emptied them and filled those carton boxes with berries. We came back the next day with two five gallon Charles Chips cans, which we also filled. Good times!

8-19-2020 – Cooperation, Chéticamp Style

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

I’m an American and this is Canada. Everything here is just a bit different and other aspects are very different indeed. One noticeable foundation of Cape Breton life is a strong and active sense of community that includes people who are different and diverse, who didn’t grow up here, as well as families long embedded in the island.

*Chéticamp from Chéticamp Island, Co-op buildings in the foreground. (2020)*

Here I find institutions – banking, food markets, music production, and more – that are actively and successfully cooperative. The food Co-op, at least on the west coast, is almost the only place to buy food, so of course everyone joins. Everyone shops there. The woman (also a Donna) who took my quarantine phone orders at Margaree Forks recognized Bob by his four digit Co-op member number!

Friends see each other buying food, just like we do in Massachusetts and though the scale may be smaller, you have a wicked bigger chance of seeing someone to whom you are related. That connection will be reinforced if you are a church-goer, as many are. The first Europeans were Catholic – first the French, who called it Ile Royale, then the Highland Scots, expelled by the British after the Highland Clearances. The island, with both French and Scots professing, is overwhelmingly Catholic. That and a lot of intermarriage between families contributes to a real sense of relatedness.

Even though I’ve been a self-employed sort-of capitalist since the mid-’70s, I’m also a band leader and musician who believes deeply in group energy and what we can do together. Up here in the relative wilderness, life is tough and people count on each other for real life needs, so perhaps this leads them to cooperate more easily than our individualistic and competitive society does. It’s true that Canadians are usually nicer and more genuinely welcoming. Kinder, overall, than we are, as well. But there aren’t that many people around once you get 100 miles north of the U.S. border, are there? Does that make everyone more important to each other? That fellow from down the road you may not get along with will still help you with a roadside emergency. This sense of community, of belonging to each other, is sadly at risk of disappearing in the states.

Coming back to the cooperative model, Bob and I have been reading the back issues of the Inverness Oran (The Voice in Scots Gaelic). This weekly publication knits the community together. You won’t find a rehash of global news, but you learn about how the community is coping with global, national, and local events and how they are supporting and helping each other. In other words, far more good news than the average newspaper.

One of Chéticamp’s leading lights died recently and as I read about his life, I was touched to the point that I was grieving that I never met Raymond Doucet or talked with him. I could have learned so much from this remarkable man about how to hold a community together and make it grow and thrive. Chéticamp Co-op manager Doucet is remembered as “someone who dedicated his life to the economic and social development of his community.” (The Inverness Oran, 15 July 2020). To fully understand what he accomplished in a life’s work, you have to look at geography. The town is the largest settlement on the northwest coast of Cape Breton. North are only the Cape Breton Highlands.

In summer there are tourists (not so many this year) but in winter, this is a rough place to live, right on the Baie de St. Laurent. No regular icebergs like Newfoundland, but then that’s only a ferry ride away and the winter pack ice here still keeps boats in the harbour. North of Chéticamp, there’s only wilderness inland and small fishing settlements along the coast. The Cape Breton Highlands can get up to 20 feet of snow and the ONE main road, the Cabot Trail, can close quickly. Now picture driving the school bus twice a day from the top of the island to five miles south of Chéticamp in Terre Noire where the consolidated school is. The district finally got wireless communications for the bus drivers a few years ago after one of them got stranded in a storm with a bus full of kids. The last actual town going north into the Highlands, Chéticamp is 45 miles and an hour’s careful drive south to Inverness on rough roads and sometimes the winds get so strong they have a name for them: Suetes or “southwest winds.” One almost toppled my substantial body right over on Christmas my first year here.

Chéticamp is an isolated, mostly French Acadian community, with organizations and events that celebrate their culture and history. It’s also a town whose economy depends on fishing and tourism. For that reason, I was surprised to find that, unlike the smaller stores in Margaree Forks and Inverness, the Chéticamp Co-op is a cave of riches. It’s big. They can sell you anything, including lumber, hardware, housewares, and of course, the liquor store is right next door. This was the closest I’ve been on the island to a supermarket and this was largely Mr. Doucet’s doing. His energy pretty much built Chéticamp’s recent economy through co-operative enterprises that expanded into many other areas. You can even listen to a Co-op radio (CKJM) with local DJs all day long and have a co-op funeral home send you on your final journey. For several weeks, the Oran has reverberated with eulogies talking about how important he was to the community and what a gentle and kind man Raymond Doucet was in an outpouring of love and admiration for a life well lived. I’m sorry that I never met him.

A lot of daily life here reminds me I’m not in America and honestly, that’s an unimaginable relief. I am weary of savagery, greed and fear being the main economic motivators in our ‘Untied’ States. Cooperation is worth studying because it WORKS. We need a new, inclusive economic model. It’s about time and it’s not as though we as individuals don’t care about each other in the States but maybe it’s time to say it out loud, to band together, to speak in unison, to cooperate for the common good. Canada has a lot to teach us if we’re humble enough to learn.

8-18-2020 – Who Really Owns Canada?

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

So, amidst all the chat about glorious Cape Breton, perhaps it’s time to discuss the insect life up here. There are bugs, and they are large. There are also very small insects that manage to get through the screen. Most of them bite. Somewhere in the middle, there are pesky mosquitoes and what Bob calls “midges” and I call black flies, similar to when the butch Canadian weather service predicts “flurries” when what they actually mean is “probably under ten inches of snow.” So, I repeat, if it’s small, black, flies around, and bites me, it’s a damn black fly, right? I have several bites in places I shouldn’t have them. Really, hmm, never mind. And the middle of my big toe?

It’s late August, so we have fewer mosquitos, especially as it’s a dry year. Even the breeze blowing across the yard doesn’t quite protect me from black flies, but, annoying as they are, the deer and horse flies outrank them. Horse flies like to bite just before a storm. I knew this, having grown up near the woods. Deer flies just like to BITE, period. They hover over your head, just out of sight, often alighting there to scope out the territory. Little triangular stealth bombers.

If, like me, you have an exaggerated histamine response to bites, there are interesting ways to protect yourself from aerial attack. DEET and non-DEET sprays work with variable efficiency. Wearing a hat whenever I’m outside also helps. I even bought one of those floppy khaki LL Bean sunhats I swore I’d never be caught dead in. Upside is that it protects the back of my neck from attack and I can configure it to look like an Aussie when I get bored. I’ve looked for other protection online and found a variety of hilarious, ugly beyond words, and nastily effective prophylactic solutions.

The nasty first was a baseball cap with a sticky deer fly trap on the top of it. I approved of the idea – get them before they can bite you. But you just know I would have put my hand up there without thinking and, well, we can all picture me stompin’ my hat into the ground and screaming because they’re not dead – just stuck there and buzzing like hell!!!

Then there are the gentler solutions which don’t spray me with stuff that’ll strip the varnish off my fiddle or turn me into a human flytrap. I model and demonstrate two of them below. But allow me to digress for just a moment to make it clear that these are not actually laughing matters. The mosquitoes and black flies here in May, June and part of July are mighty. Prodigious blood suckers one and all, we are their food, a thin-skinned, walking smorgasbord. I stepped out of the car in northern Maine in May of last year for less than ten seconds and I almost couldn’t breathe or see for the black flies trying to fly into my mouth, up my nose, and into my eyes and ears.

There are true stories of trappers losing their minds in the northern wilderness, dying of blood poisoning from scratching the bites. Some were smart enough to follow the native practice of smearing rendered bear fat all over their bodies in biting fly season. I guess it must be kind of like garlic. You’d all have to use it to forget about the smell. This year at the very same spot in August (photo of Aurora ME marsh lookout), I saw no black flies, not even a mosquito.

I love to garden and would spend even more time doing it if bugs didn’t drive me inside. We looked in a lot of places and finally found exactly what we needed at the Inverness Co-op, a grocery, general store, sporting goods, hardware emporium, and garden centre in the middle of what was once a coal-mining town, with tunnels running out under the sea. Today, Inverness is a summer golfing and tourist destination with a beautiful accessible beach for the chair-bound, a gorgeous boardwalk, and glorious sunsets. While the Co-op veggie bin can be uninspiring in winter, you can almost always find whatever else you need there. I did, and it does the trick. So, so stylish, don’t you think? Tennis, anyone? It’s a AA-battery hand-held zapper. The final photo is for for light bug days!

8-17-2020 – Hawks and Eagles

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

Today is our last day of quarantine. For me, quarantine hasn’t been that different from the past five and a half months of lockdown. Bob was our designated shopper and I rarely left the house/yard in Massachusetts. Here, we’re both sequestered for two weeks but there’s almost three acres and it’s a full time job just to pull things together both in and out of the house when you’ve been gone this long.

Bob has been tidying up the homestead and I’ve been taking expired canned goods out of the pantry for review. Bob taste-tested a six year old can of Del Monte peaches yesterday and lived to tell the tale, so we may check the others out as well. I have a feeling there will be some real estate available in that cupboard when we’re done.

What is markedly different here is the landscape, the beauty outside my window, every window, for that matter. Yesterday in the glorious afternoon sun, we watched from the deck as a battle between a hawk and an eagle played out in the sky above us. First they yelled at each other, raising their voices louder and louder and then the hawk flew higher and stooped, diving at the eagle, which met the hawk with talons up. There was some short infighting till the hawk put a little distance between them. Not done yet, they continued their challenge for about five minutes as we watched them fly in tandem to the northeast, still cussing each other out! Mesmerized, we couldn’t look away.

Besides the two itinerant moose last fall and resident canid Mr/Ms Fox, there are the ravens who roost in the trees and sometimes on the roof. I appreciate their noisy intelligence and their voices are among the only birdsong we hear up here. I’d love to be able to translate their conversations. Ravens, crows, robins, nuthatches, jays, maybe one woodpecker, the raptors, and fresh and salt-water birds are all I’ve seen in our travels and at home here. We hear or see no finches, sparrows, starlings (which I don’t miss). But there are also no bluebirds, no thrushes, no wrens, no liquid oriole song, no mockingbirds or catbirds (which nested in the hemlock next to our Athol porch). There’s very little song, which makes the caw of crows or the “keeROOONK” of ravens, or the aural battle between eagle and hawk, an event rather than a morning and evening backdrop.

Bob has, over the years, done battle with the local critters to keep what he grows for his family. I wandered into a skirmish the first time he brought me to Cape Breton. Maybe my third morning here, I looked out the window and told Bob I saw two rabbits in the garden. A few minutes later, he walked by me with a shotgun and said, matter-of-factly, “I’ll be right back.” Standing on the back porch, he took aim and popped that snowshoe hare. One shot. Total sang-froid. A few days later, he got the other one. I think there might be some MacGregor in his line. Whatever it is, hares have never returned and we don’t fence the garden.

I hesitate to bring the garden demons down on me by saying I haven’t seen a dead woodchuck by the road in Cape Breton. I believe in diversity but woodchucks are the devil. At least deer are cute and you can eat them. I’ve spotted roadkill skunks, raccoons, and deer, of course, but no whistle-pigs. Maybe they got et when they tried living here. Good! I hear they are tough eating, though, as my daughter Molly Hebert-Wilson told me when her boyfriend Alex shot one at work, dressed it out and had it cooked when she got home. Yeah, at work. So it seems she, like me, will survive the zombie apocalypse.

Living so close to the woods, though, you really have to watch out for the flora. Nature stalks you. You don’t want a spruce tree within falling distance of your house or outbuildings. And right now, just outside my window, we have evidence of a floral takeover. One year you have a paved walkway and the next year you have Rudbeckia squatters. What walkway, lady? I don’t see no walkway here!

8-16-2020 – Lobster Bisque

August 23, 2020 by DonnaHebert

Today it’s all about food. What does Cape Breton have that other places don’t have as much of? Lobster and mussels (more about mussels another day). A friend wanted my recipe for Lobster Bisque, so here it is . . . I love the ‘waste not, want not’ aspect of this recipe, boiling up the lobster leavings. Just add a cup and a half of heavy cream and a splash of dry sherry, et voila! La bisque d’homard!

Lobster Bisque

Take all your leavings – shells, even the legs after you sucked the meat out. You’re gonna boil it all up anyway. Do this in the big pot you cooked the lobsters in, using the same liquid. Do not add salt but do add a cup or two of water to almost cover the shells. You may not need to add much salt (if any at all) to this and should wait until the final seasoning to add any. Simmer the shells, everything, for about 30-45 minutes. Strain the liquid carefully (shells can break a tooth). You can refrigerate the stock after this step and make the bisque the next day. Save about a half cup of lobster meat for the bisque.

For four cups of strained stock, saute 3/4 cup of minced onion, then skin and mince two Roma tomatoes (best flavor) and saute until they break down, then add the stock to both. You can use a tablespoon of tomato paste but I don’t like that flavor as much. I use crab boil for the original lobsters, adding other savory seasonings to the stock like a dash of dry mustard and paprika and a bit of cayenne. Add seasonings as you saute the onion so they have time to flavor everything. I love Penzey’s Ozark seasoning and use that, which does have salt in it. If I add it, it goes in here. Keep tasting after the flavors bloom so you don’t over-season it. Add salt only if necessary at the very end, after adding the cream.

When the stock is hot, almost to the boil, add 1-1/2 cups of heavy cream and turn down the heat. When it comes back to a boil, take it off the heat, stir in about 2 tablespoons dry sherry, put it in bowls and garnish with lobster meat. Personally I like the bisque as much or more than the actual lobster. Makes it worth all the shell-picking.

We live in the woods, so Bob takes the shell leavings into the forest for the fox and the other critters. One of the joys of living up here is we don’t throw food garbage in the landfill and a compost pile anywhere near the house is an advertisement to bears and coyotes. Instead, Bob takes all our food garbage into the woods for the wild things. Mr/Ms Fox stops by to say thanks occasionally.