Nantucket

The POPS

August 12, 2014 By Caroline 1 Comment

I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, POPS Saturday is one of my favorite days of the year! And this year was maybe my favorite year of all the years I have gone. On POPS Saturday, everyone seems to be in a better mood from the second they wake up in the morning because they are so excited for the evening’s festivities. On POPS Saturday, 7,000 people gather on Jetties beach with their picnics, beach chairs, family, and friends to enjoy a night spent together eating yummy food, singing, dancing and most importantly giving back to their community, specifically the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. As always, the Boston POPS orchestra comes over to the island to play a fantastic benefit concert for us. Along with the orchestra comes a guest performer and this year Nantucket welcomed an ABBA cover band called Arrival from Sweden! They were outstanding. If you closed your eyes, you would have thought it really was ABBA up on that stage. We just had the best time and I already can’t wait for next year. I wonder who the guest performer will be!

^^We spotted Tim in a crowd of thousands! How could you miss him?

^^Holly Finnegan of The Nantucket BlACKbook hosted the preshow and was kind enough to ask us to be her interviewees! She asked us what POPS means to us and Emily gave a beautiful response. She said that the Nantucket Cottage Hospital is everyone’s hospital. Whether you live on the island year round like she does, or you live on Nantucket in the summertime like me, or you are just vacationing on the island for a few days…the Nantucket Cottage Hospital is our one and only safety net. Everyone’s safety net. Without them, we would have to somehow get off island to the nearest hospital in the case of an emergency. We are so happy that we are lucky enough to have such a wonderful facility so close by. That’s why this event that supports the hospital is so important to us.

^^There we are on the big screen! Ah! Thanks for the pictures, Steve!

^^We had a cheese plate, some veggies and hummus, and my mom’s famous corn bean salsa dip to start.

^^Then, we had some fried chicken, orzo salad, and kale salad.

^^There was some flying fried chicken involved too!

^^And for dessert we had a variety of cookies and cheesecake in little mason jars! (Be sure to check out the recipe that will be posted next week!)

^^ To end the night, we watch fireworks light up the sky right above our heads. It’s pretty magical.

In last years post, I warned everybody that this event was not for the faint of heart with a disclaimer saying this:

**Warning: This event is not for the faint of heart. Preparation begins in the morning with cooking food. Then, around 3 o’clock you need to head down to the beach (and park about a mile away because streets around the concert are blocked off) to score a spot for a concert that starts 4 hours later. And then after the concert, you have to lug all of your belongings back to your car parked a mile away. But, it’s totally worth it!

Well, I thought I should let you all know that the boys take their jobs of staking out our spot very seriously. There is a written plan of attack and everything. They also spent all year looking for the perfect wagon to help them maneuver through the crowd and the sand. And they have found it! Here it is in all it’s glory.

^^Photo Credit: Tom Olcott

Thank goodness for those boys. What would we do without them?!

Filed Under: Caroline, Nantucket 1 Comment

The Hunter Gatherer Dinner

August 5, 2014 By Allison 1 Comment

Last week, Steve went fishing and caught and brought back this AMAZING Striped Bass. So the next day we decided that we were going to cook that freshly caught fish for dinner!

Earlier that day, Emily and I went on our Ivy Adventure, the one that Emily goes on everyday. We were walking along and talking about what we were going to make with the fish that night when we came across a woman looking in the brush along the side of the trail. Annie (we later came to find out her name) informed us that “the berries are out”! (Emily and I looked at each other, both wondering what she talking about!?) Well, it turns out that there are wild blueberries and blackberries growing along the walk we take Ivy on everyday! We would always see Ivy going into the brush and eating something but we just assumed that she was eating the leaves off the plants like she usually does… but she was actually eating yummy berries!! We got so excited that we gathered up a whole bunch of berries and took them home with us (well, a whole bunch got eaten along the way too)!

We thought this is what men and women must have done back in the day… We were really proud of ourselves and deemed our dinner that night, “The Hunter Gatherer Dinner”!

Emily thought it would be best to keep it simple. She salt and peppered the fish (generously) and then cooked it on the flat top (it was raining that night so we couldn’t grill). She then melted butter and lime zest together, spooned it on top of the cooked fish and then topped it with fresh basil and cilantro!

We made an easy salad of greens, cucumber, radishes (from Bartlett Farm) and avocado with a fresh citrus dressing that Caroline whipped up from our favorite Forest Feast Cookbook!

We served it with cous cous AND the famous Stever Cocktail (recipe to come)! It was the most delicious meal! And those hydrangeas are from our Mom’s garden! It was a very rustic and very homemade meal :)

Then it came time for dessert! We decided to make a galette… I knew how to whip one up because I had made one a few weeks before! (Click here to see the Apple Galette I made!) It was so easy. I washed the berries, mixed it with a little sugar, flour and lemon juice. Spooned it on top of an unbaked, store bought pie crust, folded over the edges and baked!

It was the best way to end that meal! A big thank you to Annie for letting us in on her Nantucket secret!

And here is a little video of our Berry Picking Adventure on our Ivy Adventure… I didn’t have that much footage but you’ll get a feel of the experience :)

Filed Under: Allison, Food, Nantucket Tagged With: Berry Galette, Life on Nantucket, Nantucket Striped Bass Dinner 1 Comment

Nantucket Harbor Cruise

July 30, 2014 By Allison 2 Comments

The family (minus Emily who was manning the store) went on a cruise around the Nantucket harbor last week. The Westmoor has a beautiful boat, named Belle, that charters cocktail cruises during the summer and we love to hop on board whenever we can! We had some fun snapping some shots from our cruise around the harbor… Take a look!