Author: James Cooper

The North High School Band

A tribute to Les Susi

Ask anyone who played an instrument about their experiences at Columbus, Ohio’s North High, and they would be sure to mention Les Susi first thing. While North High had plenty of gifted teachers, Les was a unique influence on so many lives. He was a teacher, a leader, a coach, a fine musician and a good friend. Let me tell you about how I met Les Susi.

In the spring of my 9^th grade year at Crestview Junior High, Les came to all the junior high schools to audition kids for the high school band and orchestra. There was also a Junior Band for those who weren’t quite ready. I was thrilled to learn that I made it into the Concert Band and amazed to learn that included being in the marching band during football season.

Practice for the marching band began in the last two weeks of August, two weeks before school started. We rehearsed from 8am-noon 5 days a week for two weeks, learning how to march and play together. Unlike New England where late August begins to cool off, the last two weeks of August in central Ohio were really hot! So, we did our outdoor practice first at 8am when it was cool and came inside later to work on music.

If you’ve watched military parades, the soldiers basically walk using the same sized step, usually around 30 inches, or 6 steps in 5 yards (180 inches). Marching bands mostly march using shorter 22.5” step, so you get 8 steps in 5 yards. This gives you time to pick up your feet higher, giving a flashy effect called the “piston step” or just “8 to 5.” It also matches the number of beats in 2 measures of a march.

Similarly, the military “about face” just means that you put one foot forward and pivot on the ball of your foot to reverse directions. But a common marching band about face is essentially “one-legged,” where you rotate on the ball of your left foot, while swinging your right leg around to give the momentum that creates the turn. This takes a bit of practice but looks pretty cool.

Marching together means that you all take the same sized steps so that each row marches down the field in a straight line. We practiced this a great deal. Our band had 9 rows of 8 players each, grouped by instrument section. The squad leaders marched on the outsides of each row checking that everyone stayed in line and calling them out if they got ahead or behind. This too took some practice.

The Music

But once it got hot out, we came inside for a break followed by music rehearsals. We were, I think, the first class to benefit from the new air-conditioned band room. (Thank goodness!) All the music we played had to be memorized. We didn’t carry music at all. So, we had to learn our parts for the school march, Polar Pep, the loyalty song (a tedious hymn) and the Star-Spangled Banner in both Bb and Ab, (the arrangements were different, not just transposed) and the National Emblem march.

Once we got beyond the basics, we started learning the music (and the formations) for the first half-time show. Again, we not only had to memorize the music, but where we stood in each formation and how we got there. We were in 9 rows of 8 players each, and unlike the Ohio State model, we were not an all-brass band. In addition to trumpets, trombones, baritone horns and tubas, our band included flutes, clarinets, and saxophones (I think both alto and tenor saxes). And of course, a whole row of percussion: bass drum, cymbals and snare drums for sure. Sometimes other percussion instruments sneaked into the half-time shows, too.

The rows had letters, and we were arranged alphabetically but only some letters were used. My row was R row, and we were all clarinets. I think the trumpets were in front. R row was second from the back. When Les gave out the charts for each formation, we were identified by our row letter and number, I think I was R3 the first year. The next year, I was an Asst Squad Leader in R8 and my senior year, I was the squad leader at R1.

So, for every formation, we got a drawing of the field and where each of us stood relative to the yard lines and the hash marks that help officials center the ball. It helped us center the band on the field in the same way, and we knew to head for a spot near a yard line and hash mark. When we first stood in the positions for these formations, Les would sometimes move people a bit to make the formation clearer. We noted that and memorized our positions.

Les was particular and insistent on excellence in our formations, our marching and our playing and let us know if we weren’t doing what he expected. During outdoor rehearsals, he carried a power megaphone to tell us on the field what we needed to do better. He was not above the occasional “dammit” when we screwed up but tried to remember that that carried into the classrooms in the building behind us, and to not swear into the megaphone.

To make sure that we didn’t let our attention wander, the band had several “I Goofed” signs to award players who made errors where they should have known better. I only got one once: I think my Junior year, when I was simply not paying attention. We were supposed to wear them all day, but I soon found that people pulling on the sign and could choke me, so I put it into locker and returned it the next day.

Every half time show had a topic, and we usually had a theme that we played when marching to each formation, as well a song segment we played while in position. We had to memorize all this music each week, but usually these were pretty short. I remember Les’s arrangement of “South America take it Away” was only about 16 bars long.

Les wrote his own arrangements for all the music we played on the field in his inimitable jazz-inflected harmonic style, which often include chords you never heard before in those tunes, including ninth chords and even thirteenths! They were always fun to play once we got our arms around them.

The high school football season was usually 11 games on successive Friday nights, with about half at home and half away. We had to have a new show for every home game, but when we went to away games, we usually repeated last week’s home game show.

When Les started at North in 1953, he brought his experience playing in the Ohio State Marching Band to North, including the pregame ceremony. The band members marched in line into their rows in the endzone to a drum cadence. Then, called to attention, they played the fanfare that starts Polar Pep. You can listen to it here, as recorded by us in 1960. Note the interesting harmonies in the fanfare, clearly written by Les Susi. At the end of the fanfare, during quick chords, the drum major struts through the middle of the band to the front, and then blows his whistle to start the band marching down the field playing the fight song. North was at the time the only high school with an original fight song, composed in the 1930s. But this arrangement clearly had Les’s touch, including a countermelody in the trombones and baritone horns.

When we got to the end other field, the other team’s band joined us, and we played one of two versions of the Star-Spangled Banner, and then marched back while playing National Emblem. At the end of the field, the drum major tossed his baton over the goal posts. During my Junior and Senior years, the drum major was my good friend Jim McDonald. We’d done some theater together and I knew that he was very talented indeed. I don’t think he missed the catch of his baton from those throws more than once in the two years we had him. Jim went on to study music education at Ohio State and eventually became the choir director at Crestview Junior High, and then moved up to assistant choir director at North, and finally became the choir director for a number of years until North was closed in 1979.

One unique formation Les developed for us was Script North, where the band spells out North in script with the drum major leading the way, and players dropping off the line to stand where each letter is formed. It took a lot of practice to get it right, but we always did it at Homecoming, at least. As far as we know, we were the only local high school attempting a script formation at the time.

After working together for 2 weeks in August and 1-1/2 hours every morning, we were a pretty tightly bound group and very proud of our band. In fact, I don’t think any of our competitor high schools quite reached the standards that Les had set for us, and that we mostly achieved.

Concert Band

Football season came to an end just before Thanksgiving, and suddenly we became a Concert Band, not a marching band. We come in at 8:45 for first period instead of at 8am for marching practice, and we are no longer excused from gym classes.

But concert band was a whole new experience for some of us. Les’s musical standards were very high and the music much more complex: it requires fingering and breathing techniques we never had time for on the field. Les said more than once, that it took him at least a month to get us to make the transition to more serious music making.

Instead of playing every Friday night, we now were preparing for Winter and Spring Concerts. And while some of the music is lightweight: some selections from Broadway and Folksong Suite, we also tackled more serious pieces like Gustav Holst’s Suites #1 and #2 for Military Band. We did the first suite my sophomore year and the second suite as part of concerts my junior year.

Here’s a professional recording of Suite #1. The first movement is called a Chaconne, which I gradually learned is a piece where the bass line repeats throughout the movement, as harmonies and other melodies slowly build on top of it. This style of music originated in organ pieces, but Holst shows how well it works for concert band.

We quickly learned that playing indoors in a concert band means playing less loud and more carefully in tune. And the music is considerably more challenging: we spent weeks woodshedding the Holst #1 that year.

Oh, and did I mention State Contest? Each year in the spring, the band jumped on busses to go somewhere to play for judges and get praise and criticism. And a rating. Les’s North High Band consistently received nearly all 1 ratings. Some of our sister schools usually went as well but few scored as high as often as we did. We played a piece of our choice, a piece that was required, and then were asked to sight read a piece we’d never seen before. The conductor was given 3 minutes to study the score, and 3 more minutes to tell us what to watch out for, and then we read through it as best as we could. But because of Les’s skill we often got 1’s in that section too.

During my Junior year, we tackled the Holst Suite #2, which presented different challenges, including a Fantasia that mixed the Irish dance tune, the Dargason with Greensleeves. By this time, I really began to truly appreciate classical music. When you slowly learn a piece as a group and see how it is put together, you begin to see the great power and beauty of classical music. On the other hand, we also played selections from the Music Man that year.

Our Senior year, Les dropped an enormous challenge on us. The American composer Vittorio Gianini was well known in classical band circles for a series of significant compositions, and in 1957 had just published Praeludium and Allegro. We begin tackling this modern, dissonant piece and initially hated it every day. But after a month or so, when we had gotten through its technical challenges, most of us fell in love with it and felt it was one of the best things we’d ever done. Here’s a professional recording. Here’s another version that is closer to our interpretation. Note how the Praeludium theme resurfaces under the Allegro about 6 minutes into the piece. We played it at our Spring Concert and thrilled the audience with it, and took it to State Contest, and got all 1’s.

In case you think that band is all Les did, you might be surprised to learn that he also taught the orchestra, a dance band and a woodwind ensemble. He also taught theory classes, and while I couldn’t schedule that class, he gave me some valuable advice when I got interested in music composition.

In Conclusion

Les Susi was and still is at 94, an amazing musician, teacher and leader. He helped us all grow as musicians and as leaders and taught us a lot about music we would never have learned any other way. When Whetstone High School opened in 1961, Les “was moved” there by Whetstone parent demand. He continued teaching there for 16 years and then was asked to lead the Fort Hayes Arts and Academic High School. He retired in 1986 but was already a member of the Brass Band of Columbus, as cornet soloist, associate conductor and chief arranger. Not only is he the person I remember most from North, he was probably the most demanding and got remarkable results. As my friend Sandy (Helm) Robert said to me, “he strove for perfection and frequently achieved it.”

Sage apple sausage

You can make your own breakfast sausage in just a few minutes and get just the flavor you want. In our version, we leave out the common onion, garlic and hot peppers, which are great in dinner sausages but overpower eggs or pancakes. Instead we add a bit of apple to the sausage, which adds moistness and an interesting accompanying flavor.

We mix the spaced together in a mortar and pestle that we liberated from our chem lab decades ago, but you can easily buy them online. Lacking one, you can chop the spices together with a knife on a cutting board, or use a blender.

1 Tb dried sage
1 Tb dried thyme
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp brown sugar
1 ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt.
1 lb ground pork
1 tart apple, peeled and cored

Mix the dry ingredients together in a mortar and crush them with the pestle, until the spice blend is uniform.
Using your hands and/or a wooden spoon mix the spices into the ground pork in a medium bowl.
Mince the apple pieces by hand or using a food processor and mix the apple into the pork mixture. You may not need all of it.

Use a ¼ cup measure to scoop out the amount of meat for each sausage.
Cook the sausages on a 375˚ F griddle for 4 minutes per side. Press them down so they are flat. You might want to set a timer to keep from over cooking them and drying them out. The sausages are done when the internal temperature is around 145˚ F.
Keep the sausages warm while you prepare the pancakes or eggs to go with them.

This doesn’t take much longer than cooking frozen sausages, and the flavor is really terrific! Form all the remaining sausages into patties and freeze them in layers, separated by wax paper in a plastic freezer container. Makes about 1 dozen good-sized sausages.

Spaghetti alla Nerano

Nerano is a charming Italian fishing village south of Naples on the tip of the Sorrento peninsula, just across from Capri. It is here the Spaghetti alla Nerano was invented in the 1950s. Stanley Tucci introduced flocks of American fans to this classic dish in the first episode of his “Searching for Italy” series, And recently the New Yorker published a definitive recipe for this fabulous dish. We tried it a couple of times and have some suggestions to make it work a little better.

While the ingredients are just spaghetti, zucchini, cheese and maybe a pat of butter, there are some details in the recipe that make it work so well. First of all, the zucchini slices are deep fried, not pan fried, and you want them to get quite brown, nearly burnt to develop the flavor in an otherwise pretty tasteless vegetable.

Confronted with the need to thinly slice three or four zucchini, we resorted to our Cuisinart food processor, using the 2mm slicing disk.

Probably the most important thing about this dish is assembling while everything is still hot, so the cheese will melt. In professional kitchens. Two people assemble this dish. We’ll tell you how we did it with only two hands below.

The basic ingredients are:

3 medium zucchini
8 oz spaghetti
Deep frying oil: sunflower or canola
2-4 oz grated cheese (Parmegiano Reggiano or Provolone del Monaco or Caciovavallo)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 bunch basil leaves, cut up
Pat of butter

Grate the cheese in a food processor, and remove to a bowl
Slice the zucchini into thin, uniform slices. We used a 2mm slicing disk.
Deep fry the zucchini slices, until quite brown. For 3 zucchini, we divided them into 4 batches for frying.
Put the zucchini on paper towel on a plate to let them drain.

Bring a couple of quarts of salted water to a boil and add the spaghetti all at once, stirring with a pasta fork to make sure it submerges.
Heat the zucchini and garlic in a skillet.
If your spaghetti requires, say, 4 minutes to cook, scoop out a cup of pasta water around the 2 minute mark.
Put about 10% of the zucchini in the bottom of a medium bowl, stir in a handful cheese and add hot water to help melt the cheese into a creamy sauce.

As soon as spaghetti is about done, lift a little out of the boiling water and mix it into the bowl. Do not drain the spaghetti: it will cool too quickly, just lift it right out of the hot water.
Then in several layers, add zucchini, hot spaghetti and cheese and stir, adding more hot pasta water when you need it. The zucchini and cheese tend to clump together, so this layered mixing helps distribute it throughout the pasta. You may not need all the spaghetti. But when you have mixed all the zucchini and cheese with some of the spaghetti, stop and arrange the mixture on a serving plate.
Top with a pat of butter and the basil leaves and serve right away.

You can serve this as a main dish or as a side dish. Here we illustrate a side dish serving with a few meatballs to make the meal. You will be amazed at how good this simple meal can be!

Shrimp and cherry tomato aioli toasts

It doesn’t take long to put together this shrimp aioli dinner. All you need is shrimp, crusty bread, some garlic mayonnaise (aioli) and a few common spices. We made ours using red Indonesian shrimp because they looked the best that day, but any fresh shrimp will do.

1 lb fresh shrimp
2 cups cherry tomatoes, stems removed
3-4 slices crusty bread
Olive oil as needed, probably 4-5 Tb.
3 garlic gloves, thinly sliced.
1 Tb wine vinegar
1 ½ tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
½ tsp red pepper flakes
Chopped parsley

The Aioli

2 egg yolks
1 Tb fresh lemon juice
1 tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt
1 large clove of garlic, mashed and minced (or use a garlic press)
½ cup extra virgin olive oil

You can make this in a bowl with a whisk or use a blender. The blender is faster.

Put the egg yolks lemon juice, salt and garlic in the blender, and with the blender running, slowing pour in the olive oil. Let it run another 10-15 seconds and top. You should have a nice mayonnaise. Put it in bowl in the refrigerator while you prepare the shrimp.

The Shrimp

Place the shrimp on a plate and dry them off. Sprinkle with kosher salt and let rest while you make the toasts.
Put 2 Tb olive oil in a cast iron frying pan, and heat to medium high. Put in 2 slices of toast and brown. Turn the toasts and brown the other side. Drain on a paper towel and repeat with the other slices, and drain.

Add more olive oil and cook the shrimp for 2 minutes on one side, and turn and cooka bout 2 minutes more. Remove the shrimp to a bowl.
Add more olive oil and all of the cherry tomatoes. Cook at medium high until they brown on the bottom, about 4 minutes. Turn them all over and cook another minute or two.

Add the vinegar, sliced garlic, paprika, cumin and ½ tsp red pepper flakes and 2 tsp Diamond Crystal salt. Cook, stirring until some of the tomatoes begin to burst. Add the shrimp and stir until heated through.

Spread the aioli thickly on the toasts and spread the shrimp and tomatoes on top of the aioli.
Decorate with parsley and more pepper flakes and serve at once.

I fell back in love with my Rollei SLR

In high school, I had a Yashica 6×6 and a Minolta 35mm. And while they were good for their time, my high school had a Rollei Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) for use of the photo group, and I just had to upgrade and get one of my own after using it.

My father bought me a used Rollei 3.5 for high school graduation and I held onto it and used it for nearly 40 years. If you want the complete list of cameras I owned, along with some pictures, I wrote about them a couple of years ago.

But in the 1990s, I started to see that my Rollei TLR images weren’t as sharp as they used to be. I felt that it would probably be too expensive to repair and sold it. Then I put together (quite) a bit more money and bought a slightly used Rolleiflex 6008 Integral SLR along with a grip and an extra film back (shown at top of article).

It has an f/2.8 80 mm PQ Planar (Zeiss) lens with leaf shutter up to 1/1000 of a second (for PQS lenses, and 1/500 for PQ lenses.) PQ stands for Professional Quality. This model was made from 1995-2002, and I believe I bought mine around 1997-8. And unlike the venerable TLRs, this camera has a huge variety of interchangeable lenses made for it.

The reviews of this Rollei SLR were really positive and still are. The camera has shutter priority, aperture priority manual and fully automatic exposure settings. It also has several TTL metering settings: center weighted mullti-zone, 1% spot and multi-spot metering. And since the film advance is battery driven, you can take multiple exposures a half second apart. These features put it far ahead of the competing Hasselblad.

While the camera performed well optically, it was plagued by the terrible batteries that Rollei provided. They didn’t hold much charge or last that long, and new batteries, which were expensive, were no better. So, I put it away and concentrated on a series of Nikon digital cameras: D70, D80, D7200 and now a Z6.

Not long ago, I thought I might be able to sell that Rollei and get a TLR instead. Of course, I had to make sure it worked. But of course, both batteries were dead and no longer chargeable. There are now after-market replacement batteries available, some of which simply welded in new rechargeable AA cells in the original Rollei battery case. But, most of them required an expensive new charger. Finally, I found a replacement battery system complete with charger on eBay from a user with the id mignon1. It works flawlessly and comes with a plug-in charger so you can recharge the battery without removing it from the camera!

I didn’t need a darkroom!

So, I took a few rolls of film on my “new” Rollei and was simply astonished at what a great camera it still is. My first rolls were using black and white film: TMax-400, Ilford HP5+ (ISO 400) and FP4+ (ISO 125). I developed them in my basement darkroom, loading the film into the developing tank inside a big changing bag I bought from Adorama. This bag is 25” x 22” x 17”, so you have plenty of room to unroll 120 film and spool it into your developing tank reel.

And, while I have a complete darkroom, it turns out that with a new Epson v600 scanner, I really never needed to fire up the Beseler enlarger. While the scanning software provided with the Epson scanner is perfectly adequate, you can get faster scans and a bit more flexibility by buying a copy of Silverfast. For black and white, it seems to manage resolution better, and it does a better job color rendering from color negatives than Epson scanning software does. The detail is amazing and the color quite stunning. I sent that roll to The Darkroom to develop the negatives, but did the scanning and printing here at home. It turns out you can also buy color C-41 developer kits quite cheaply, and there are only two baths rather than the old 5 or 6, so it is as simple as b/w processing.

Scanning

But does scanning do as good a job as analog enlargement? I ran some tests by printing out the same photo both ways, and could not see any difference at all! Scanning a 6×6 cm negative, gives you around a 100 megapixel scanned image: more than you’ll ever get from your digital camera, and the gray scales are identical as well. In examples below, the left hand image was scanned from the original negative, and right hand image was printed in the darkroom using Ilford Multigrade paper and a #3 contrast filter. They are essentially identical results even when printed at 8×10 inches.

Negative printed on Ilford Multigrade with #3 contrast and scanned from print.

(I will have to say that I can probably knock out 8×10 prints in the darkroom faster than going through all that scanning and printing, but photographic paper is way more expensive than printer paper, and I don’t have to wash out the trays afterwards.)

This Rollei SLR is built like a tank. Heavy, sturdy and well made and will probably last for many years. It does however, weigh nearly 5 lbs and the best way to carry it around is in a padded gadget bag that distributes the weight across your shoulders. I keep a tripod in my trunk, as well. If you are used to taking hundreds or thousands of shots a day, the Rollei makes you rethink your composition, since each roll has only 12 shots. You will find that every shot is likely to be a winner. Think of the Rollei as a more portable view camera that can get the high-resolution pictures you really wanted.

So I’m not selling my Rollei 6008! It’s the best “new” camera I ever bought!

The Benjamin opens in Ridgefield

Four of us went to dinner at The Benjamin last weekend, and found it quite enjoyable. The restaurant’s name honors Benjamin Franklin, who brought back many of France’s best culinary ideas to the states while he was ambassador. The Benjamin is located in the building formerly occupied by Bernard’s. It opened just this July, managed by Rob Moss, Dave Studwell and BJ Lawless who own and operate Washington Prime and BJ Ryan’s Restaurant Group in Norwalk.

The new Benjamin décor is similar, but much refreshed with the formal restaurant on the left as you enter, and the bar and some high-top tables to the right, looking out over the gardens. The upstairs has more restaurant seating and there is outdoor dining available in good weather accessible from the main floor, and an additional small patio seating up to 24 off the upstairs dining room.

The menu by Executive Chef Benjamin Travers, formerly of The Modern and Café Boulud in New York City, is styled as “uniquely American and French-inspired.” You will find four salads, two excellent soups, two raw bar items and 6 appetizers, nearly all seafood based, but including a seductive sounding charcuterie for $34. There are eight entrees: scallops, duck breast, halibut, lobster risotto, rack of lamb, roast half chicken, filet mignon and a Wagyu hamburger. There is also a vegetarian saffron risotto with wild mushrooms.

Bread is not provided free at The Benjamin, but you can order their Signature Bread Service for $9, consisting of whole wheat sourdough bread with 3 butters. We didn’t try it.

We started with the soups: we tried the Potato Leek Soup ($21) which comes with lump crab, smoked trout roe and a chive. The service is lovely: they bring you a bowl containing the roe and what is essentially a small crab cake, and then pour the soup around it in the bowl. We agreed that this was outstanding.

The other soup is a Chilled Pea Soup ($17) with grilled spring onions and brioche. Rather than the heavy puree you might expect, this is a lighter soup with actual peas in it, along with the spring onion, pea sprouts and pieces of brioche. Again, an excellent choice.

Our companion who ordered the Olive Oil Poached Halibut ($39) praised it highly. It is served with herbed couscous, fennel, picholine olives, pistachio, and beurre blanc. He noted that it was a good-sized portion and was particularly drawn to the fennel flavor. It certainly looked delicious.

Several of us were drawn to the Rack of Lamb ($49) served with charred eggplant, baby zucchini, piperade lamb jus, and mint. There certainly was plenty of delicious lamb there, but served on a big cutting board, the chops quickly cooled and by the time we got to the last two, they were pretty cold. Since lamb fat congeals above room temperature, many restaurants serve lamb on warm plates. This would have been better.

You will note that none of the dishes on the menu come with much in the way of vegetables or starches. Instead, like a steakhouse, you can order side dishes from the menu. But their choices are minimal, and things like mashed potatoes, beans, carrots or broccoli are absent. You can only order French fries, truffled fries, mushroom fricassee, truffled fingerling potato or roast breakfast radish and red onion.

And consider the lowly hamburger (albeit Wagyu), which is already $25 by itself. With fries, you’d be paying $37! That is a bit much.

Phobe Damrosch, in Service Included her delightful diary of working the first year at Per Se, listed among Diner’s Rights, the right to salt and pepper. At The Benjamin, they will bring around a giant pepper mill and grind where you point. And while they let you touch the salt mill, they whisk both away so you have no chance to add salt or pepper later in the meal. A little dish of salt would help here.

Desserts

There are eight desserts from Pastry Chef Melissa Knauer, formerly of Arethusa A Mano in Bantam, CT. The two we had were excellent.

One dessert we ordered, chocolate mousse with caramelia chocolate and caramel sauce ($14), was quite showy and spectacular, and big enough to share a bit. The other, Strawberry Profiteroles ($13) was quite a surprise. The two “cream puffs” were filled with a delicious, smooth strawberry mousse and served with sliced strawberries and a shortbread crumble.

Overall, we enjoyed our visit to The Benjamin, but the entrée prices are high for Fairfield County, with most of them in the high thirties, and the lobster risotto a eyebrow-raising $58. Only the burger (without fries) and the vegetarian entrée were under $30. The outdoor dining option on the first floor is an elegant little grove to the right of the building, but the upstairs patio is quite plain by comparison, especially considering the elegant interior.

Nova Cafe opens in Wilton

Nova Cafe opened in Wilton just a few days ago and it seems to already be a big hit judging from the steady flow of customers. A sister to Ridgefield’s Tazza Cafe, Nova has a similar but not identical menu.

Nova Café’s menu includes a variety of breakfast sandwiches, oatmeal and overnight oats dishes with various fruit and granola toppings, acai bowls and pastries for breakfast. For lunch, they offer some very interesting wraps like Buffalo Chicken and Chicken Gorgonzola, hot pressed paninis like Monte Cristos and Chipotle Chicken and signature sandwiches including roast beefs and smoked turkey and brie. They also offer sourdough cheese melts and about a dozen creative and delicious sounding salads.

We had breakfast there today, a little after the rush, around 9:30, and were impressed with the pleasant and hard-working staff and the delicious breakfast sandwiches.

One of us had the Bacon Egg and Cheese sandwich ($6.95) on a croissant (they were out of the hard rolls, but the croissant was delicious. In fact, it clearly had 2 eggs in it.

Our other choice was called Power Start ($7.95) and it was my favorite, made from eggs, ham, cheddar on toasted multigrain bread. As you can see from the picture, they did not skimp on ingredients. It was great!

Nova has a selection of their own coffees for sale as beans, or you can grind them on the spot.

One display case shows some of the pastries available, here mostly muffins and scones. Earlier they had a wider selection of pastries. The other display case shows the sandwiches and wraps prepared for the lunch rush.

While they clearly do a significant take-out business, there are a few tables in the main dining room and quite a few more tables in the airy secondary dining room. Considering the early, enthusiastic response to Nova, they will certainly need all those tables.

Our bill for the two sandwiches, coffee and tea with tax, and 15% tip was $25.50. We’ll be back for lunch sometime soon! Hours at their 200 Danbury Rd address are 6:30am to 6:30pm Monday through Saturday and Sunday from 7:00am to 6:00pm.

Welcome to Wilton, Nova Cafe! We wish you well!

James Beard’s Tomato Pie

I came across this really simple recipe for a savory tomato pie, published in Sarah Leah Chase’s newspaper column in the Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror. Chase and others trace the recipe back to Ruth Reichl, but I haven’t found anything with Beard’s imprimatur. However, a lot of Beard’s writing was collections of other people’s recipes, so we may never know who first made this really simple and delicious pie, which amounts to a biscuit dough crust and about 4 other ingredients. All I can tell you is that it was a hit at a group picnic/party I took it to recently, and so I’ll pass it on to you.

Basically, you make a batch of buttermilk biscuit dough and press it into a pie pan as the crust, fill it with a layer or two of sliced tomatoes, and top with a mixture of mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and bake it.

This recipe works fine with ordinary hothouse tomatoes, but it will probably excel with fresh garden tomatoes as well. We’ll soon find out!

First make the biscuit dough

2 cups flour
1 Tb baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
6 Tb cold unsalted butter (3/4 stick, or 3 oz.)
1 cup plus 2 Tb buttermilk
Chopped parsley

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Then cut up the butter into little cubes by slicing the stick of butter lengthwise along two long axes and then cutting it into slices along the short axis, which will each fall into four pieces. Then blend the butter into the flour with a pastry blender and toss in a small handful of chopped parsley, and mix in the buttermilk. No need to roll the dough out: just press the whole ball into a 9-inch pie pan and spread it to fill the pan and up the sides.

Then make the tomato pie

4-6 ripe tomatoes, in thick slices
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1 ½ cups mayonnaise
Fresh basil leaves, chopped
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.
Spread the tomato slices on top of the biscuit dough, filling the pan, and sprinkle with salt and pepper, and sprinkle the chopped basil on top.
Mix the mayonnaise and cheddar cheese and spread over the top of the tomatoes.
Spread some more chopped basil leaves on top.
Bake about 35 minutes.

Let it rest for 10-15 minutes and serve warm, or chill it and serve it cold. Cold, it is a great addition to a picnic or party.

Easy popovers in less than an hour

Even though popovers are really easy to make, they have the reputation of being difficult and in the domain of expert chefs instead of a simple dinner roll anyone can turn out in very short order.

For some years, we have been using this somewhat elaborate recipe by Marlene Sorosky Gray first published in Hearst papers some 10 years ago. It even requires overnight refrigeration, but makes great popovers. However, Gray’s text suggest that almost any of a dozen common variations work just as well, so we set out to find the easiest one.

We started with this really simple King Arthur Baking recipe, since their bakers have a way of simplifying things for the average user. And we must say that recipe is a winner too, and terribly easy to follow. There are only 5 ingredients in their popovers (and ours) and the recipe is so simple, you’ll have it learned in no time.

4 eggs
1-1/2 cups milk
1-1/2 cups flour
3 Tb melted unsalted butter.
1 tsp salt

There are three tricks we use to make these popovers work.

Start with warm ingredients, no cold milk or eggs.
Use non-stick spray on the popover or muffin pan.
Cook at 450˚ F and finish at 350˚ F.

Making Popovers in a Popover Pan

Preheat the oven to 450˚ F. Place an empty cookie sheet on the very top shelf to keep the tops of the popovers from burning.
Place the 4 eggs in a bowl of hot tap water for 10 minutes, to bring them to room temperature.
Heat the 1-1/2 cups of milk in the microwave for 75 seconds to make sure it is warm.
Melt the 3 Tb butter in the microwave for 1 minute at 50% power.
Empty water from the bowl, dry it slightly and reuse it to mix the batter.
Break the eggs into the bowl, and beat them with a whisk, and then add the milk and beat briefly to mix the eggs and milk together.
Add the flour and salt and mix with a whisk until uniform. Small lumps are OK, but beat the mixture for a minute or so until the batter is somewhat foamy.
Mix in the melted butter.
Spray the popover pan cups with non-stick spray and then fill each cup about ¾ full.
Bake at 450˚ F for 20 minutes, without opening the oven.
Reduce the heat to 350˚ F and bake for 20 minutes more, without opening the oven. If you bake them at 350˚ F for only 15 minutes, you will get fluffy popovers that deflate a bit as they cool, but are very tender. At 20 minutes, you get a firm shell that will hold its shape.
Take the popover pan out of the oven and serve the popovers hot, right away, with butter or butter and honey.

If you must let them sit and cool, you can reheat them in the microwave for 1 minute (this keeps them soft) or in the oven for 5 minutes (this hardens the crust somewhat.)

Some people serve popovers with things like chicken salad and scoop the salad into the popover shell. We think that’s nuts. Serve the hot popovers alongside the cold salad, so they stay hot to spread with butter (and honey).

Leftover popovers, still make a nice shell for breakfast and lunch dishes. We reheated a popover, split it open and filled it with scrambled eggs.

We also make a nice cold meatloaf sandwich with a cold popover. You could even use them as hamburger rolls! They are also great snacks with jam or with peanut butter!

Cooking time in various pans

We baked popovers countless times in various pans to give you the details. We used three different sized pans.

The standard popover pan holds 5 oz. of batter and makes six towering popovers. Just follow the recipe above.
The large muffin pan holds 2.5 fluid oz. of batter and makes a dozen moderate sized popovers.
The small muffin pan has 2 oz. cups and makes a dozen modest popovers.

Large Muffin Pan

Making popovers in a muffin pan with only 2.5 oz. of batter is much the same as using the big popover pan: you just get smaller popovers. Be sure to spray the pan well with nonstick spray as the nonstick coating is probably not as effective as the popover pan’s is.

We found that you need to reduce the cooking time at high temperature (450˚ F) from 20 minutes to 15. We tried several different times at 350˚ F: 10 or 15 minutes gave you light puffy popovers that sagged a bit as they cooled. But at 20 minutes, we got a firmer shell that is probably better for serving a group, or for filling the inside.

Smaller Muffin Pan

In the small 2.0 oz. muffin pan, you have a lot less leeway, since the muffins are smaller. As before we found that 15 min at 450˚ F worked well, and 15 minutes at 350 ˚F gave you nice puffy popovers that deflated a bit when cooled. But if you went to 20 minutes, the popovers were quite dark and firm although not quite burned. Stick with 15/15 for this size pan, although you could try 15/17 if you wanted to experiment. Of course, ovens vary and these times may be different in your oven.

Minimuffin pan

Our minimuffin pan holds 24 small muffins, with each cup containing only 1.5 oz. So after a couple of tries, we found that you get perfect mini-popovers by baking for 15 minutes at 450˚ F and for 10 minutes at 350˚ F. They are puffy but fairly firm and would be great for a party.

So, you can see that it’s easy to make popovers in any kind of pan and the baking is little more than half an hour. Have fun impressing your friends!

The Proprietors — Imaginative cuisine

The Proprietors Bar and Table at 9 India Street on Nantucket is always worth a visit to sample Chef Michael LaScola’s imaginative a playful cuisine. You can order a large plate and an appetizer sample a number of the smaller plates instead. Between us, we did both. The menu changes frequently, so you may not order what we did, but the food is surprisingly good.

Right at the top of the menu was a Cream Puff filled with chicken liver mousse and rhubarb ($14). We split one. Not only was it quite filling, it was probably the biggest hit of the night for us: smooth and flavorful.

One of us opted for the Green Salad with buttermilk dressing, quinoa, rye crumb and aged Gouda ($25), and an exemplary salad it was.

We also tried the Pretzel Parker Rolls with Kobe’s duck pastrami, and sour cherry mustard ($29). This looked great on the plate, but the duck pastrami was so thin we never got a good taste of its flavor. We imagined we were supposed to make little sandwiches of the pastrami and sour cherry mustard, and that worked very well together.

One of us tried the seared scallops with hot and sour vin, caramelized shiitake, endive and turnip ($49.50) and found it excellent.

The other offering was narrated to us in a really noisy environment so we may have the title wrong. It amounted to Gnocchi with rabbit stew and onions ($39), but there may have been other descriptors we missed. The gravy and gnocchi were delicious, but there were but a few shreds of rabbit to be found. However, the overall taste was outstanding.

For dessert, we split a single Banana Bread Sundae, served with chocolate and caramel sauce and cherries ($20). It was terrific, but so filling we couldn’t (sigh) finish it.

Our bill with two glasses of wine with tax but before tip was $220.95. While there were some misses, the cuisine was overall unforgettable.