Pass the Mint Julip?

A Christmas Song Can't Be Wrong, Can It?

There is a side to New Hampshire that really is like what you see in the popular Yankee magazine or Yankee Candle and all that very romanticized, sentimental New England stuff. Christmas is a HUGE deal up here in New Hampshire, and New Hampshirites take their Christmas decorating very seriously. (Check out this video from the local news that made big headlines when someone swiped an inflatable Santa from a New Hampshirite's front lawn.) Imagine my surprise then, given all this, when my wife decides to roast some chestnuts and our neighbors looked at us like we offered them some nummy squirrel brains. Now, as a wee lad, my father used to get me a small white paper cup of roasted chestnuts from corner street vendors in the main town for our region of New York state, and I know years later you could still buy the same on the streets of New York City itself, although admittedly, there the chestnuts tended to have a carbon monoxide flavor, courtesy of the buses and yellow cabs. I mean, come on people, even Wayne Newton sang about roasted chestnuts by the fireside! Chestnut trees are native to New Hampshire, although a blight many years ago put a big dent in their numbers. A few weeks ago while in Portsmouth on the ocean, we watched a couple collecting their own scallops and shucking them by the dock; what's so strange about picking up chestnuts and roasting them? You'd think a tradition-crazed state like NH would be all over the roasted chestnuts thing, but no, I'm afraid roasted chestnuts in New Hampshire have been surpassed as a Christmas tradition by the likes of marshmellow peeps. In a futile attempt to restart a good old tradition, I offer this page for a recipe. Enjoy.

New Hampshire = Not Summer

We really do have summer in NH. Sometimes. Well, for about 3 months each year. But in those three months it can get downright hot here, and with the nearby ocean you also get hyper-humid air, which mixes nicely with the often 90 degrees + temps to cook us like lobstahs. This is why getting a spot on the Hampton beaches during those months is as iffy as cell phone coverage in NH. This year June was extremely rainy and New Hampshirites went around complaining they had fungus growing in their armpits, but then came July and the killer heat. The fungus went away, but so did about two-thirds of our bodies' water mass. A surprisingly large proportion of New Hampshirites still have an English ancestry, so what you got here in July and August was a bunch of embarrassingly pasty-white, sweaty and dehydrated -- and irate -- Yankees.

But alas, those days are behind us and we can go back to our tweads and wool sweaters. We have entered that season in New Hampshire known as "non-summer". There are two other seasons, spring and autumn, but those both last about twenty minutes each. Sometime after August, you'll just hear a popping noise outside and if you're quick enough to run to a nearby window, you'll see the trees have all changed colors and dropped their leaves in one dramatic gesture. It's very pretty, but you have to be quick. Once the leaves have hit the ground, the scenery changes from stunning reds, oranges and yellows to a sort of brown-gray hybrid. That's the official color of non-summer, a dull non-ending streak of of brown-gray that uniformly wraps the landscape with the exception of the many evergreen trees, but even they try their best to blend into the scenery, at least as we get closer to Christmas.

Anyway, we have entered that part of the year -- lasting some eight months, give or take -- called non-summer here in New Hampshire but non-summer has a surprise it likes to spring on you. (No pun intended there.) Non-summer is allowed, just about any time it wants, from its inception in September until May, to suddenly and inexplicably dump lots of white stuff on us. That's right, non-summer is snow season, and it is going to make that point again this week -- just before Halloween -- when even here in southern NH, we're expecting 2-4 inches. This time non-summer has been nice enough to give us a little heads up (via the local news, WMUR), which provokes a mad rush to get porch plants and garden hoses indoors, but there have been a few times when we were caught off guard, with unpleasant consequences. That mad scramble is upon us now, so if you'll excuse me, I have to go find the car window scrapers in the basement.

Spring in New Hampshire

It is early May and I can finally say with certainty that the snow is gone. We did have a snowstorm in later April that dumped several inches of the white stuff on us, but it didn't stick around long. Now, flowers are blooming, the trees are green, the Merrimack River is bulging with melted snow and spring showers, the Forsythia bushes are screaming bright yellow, and I've been squawked at by the blue jays who have moved back into our yard. I know parts of the country to the west have gotten more than their fair share of rain recently, but our rainy days have been interpolated by enough dry, sunny days over the past few weeks that even our bedrock-ridden granite surface ground has been able to soak it all up. There was some flooding up in the northern-most counties where snow was still a couple feet deep in the mountains but for the most part, this New Hampshire spring has been decidedly pleasant. In fact, for the first time since I've moved here, I've repeatedly seen a rainbow out my home office window. Not a bad start to the year, and we're looking forward to our first warm-weather outing to the coast. Portsmouth, here we come!

New Hampshirites in Tights!

There is a comedic scene in Mel Brooks' 1993 film Robin Hood, Men in Tights in which local villagers joining Robin Hood's Merry Men are forced to line up cafeteria-style to receive their official Merry men uniforms which include, among other articles, large green plastic eggs containing green tights. They hen cut to a scene of the Merry Men emerging from their changing rooms in their new green tights and doing a song-and-dance number about manly-men in tights. Very funny stuff, typical Mel Brooks.

Well, imagine my surprise recently when I found myself purchasing panty hose. Now, these weren't for my wife and I haven't taken up any strange habits that might provoke a divorce. Believe it or not, they were kind of hard to find. My neighbors had all also decided they needed them. The local news even suggested them, not in their fashion segments -- which is good because I am NOT shaving my legs -- but in the weather.

The problem was an odd combination of unusually large amounts of snow, coupled with alternating periods of warming and (re-)freezing during which ice dams formed on roofs, causing water leaks inside New Hampshire homes in February as the warmth of houses melted these ice dams which forced their way beneath tiles. Suddenly everybody in New Hampshire (present company included) had to own a roof rake -- yeah, I'd never heard of one either -- to rake off the bottom 2 feet of snow or so to allow proper ice melting. The local news also suggested taking magnesium chloride -- which is a slightly more environmentally-friendly form of rock salt -- and stuff it into panty hose, tying them tights off sausage-style. We then were told to lob these things on our roofs, aiming particularly for high ice-build up areas like corners and crevasses. Did it work? I don't know for sure, but all my neighbors did it (as well as I), and he ice dams seemed to have melted. and when a few used panty hose fell off the roof, I told me wife she can use them, to further their environmental friendliness by recycling. She, however, was not impressed by my green suggestion.

Cold

Every winter, you just know it's coming. Yes, it's winter and this is New Hampshire, so you know it's cold, and for the most part that's OK. Keeps the snakes and the bugs small. But in mid- or later January, you just know it's coming and there's no way to really prepare for it: it's that mid-winter arctic blast that shows up and hangs around for a week or two before going away, leaving us with the more normal winter temps of mid-20s or 30s, with the odd 15 degrees at night here and there. I really wasn't ready for it this year, so when it finally came, it really snuck up on me. (Is 'snuck' really a word? Am I supposed to say 'sneaked'?) Anyway, sure enough, earlier this week the temperature dove down to the minus degrees. Let me tell you about the joys of starting a car and scraping it at 5.30 in the morning -- in the dark -- when the temperature is -22 degrees Fahrenheit. For our Canadian readers, you'll be interested to know that 0 degrees Fahrenheit is -18 degrees Celsius, and that both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales actually converge at -30 degrees. To illustrate what that temperature is like, a fellow New Hampshirite sent this video into the local news of this person tossing a cup of boiled water into the frigid air so that you can watch it freeze literally as it hangs in the air, before it hits the ground.

Now, this isn't North Dakota or Siberia where they'd snear at a mere -22 degrees Fahrenheit, but still -- it's best to sip one's hot cocoa inside. Seriously, don't lick any metal poles until at least next week.

New Hampshire Comfort Food

One of the advantages of being cooped up in your home for months on end in the winter is that you start getting a little creative with your cooking. New Hampshire Yankees have centuries' worth of winter inspiration for a lot of great comfort food recipes. Now, with our modern comforts and technologies we're not so cooped up anymore but this has only provoked competition as some Yankees have emerged from their winter cocoons early to discover their neighbors have also been fiddling in the kitchen. Some of the cleverer among them have organized formal competitions. Just such wise souls exist at the New Hampshire Dairy Farmers Association, who organized a macaroni & cheese bake-off today in the state's capital, Concord. Mac & cheese is, I think, the ultimate comfort food and the prospect of going from booth to booth in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn, spoon in hand, and sampling dozens of different macaroni & cheese recipes is very close to my idea of heaven. I wasn't alone; long lines snaked around the hotel lobby. There were traditional takes and more adventurous recipes (e.g., with apples, or Caribbean spices, maple syrup, potatoes, different cheeses, etc.) All in all it was a fun event and three winners will be announced, based on both a panel of professional judges and popular votes.