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2010 Rosemont Market Calendar is a beauty
Local food every month of the year
The 2010 Rosemont Market Calendar is gorgeous. I am particularly looking forward to the oysters of January. After staring at the Great Wall of China in December 2009, courtesy of a National Geographic calendar, I look forward to thinking locally. I look forward to thinking about local seasons and about local dinners, and about how many Mainers make a living with local food, whether growing wheat or lettuce, or raking blueberries or oysters, or herding sheep and goats and milking them, turning the milk into cheese, or mucking out beef cattle, or collecting eggs, or butchering heifers and pigs, or driving that stuff around Maine (thank you Martha Putnam) or selling all of that stuff, including sometimes lamb chops, as Rosemont Market does so splendidly.
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Or writing about the wheat, lettuce, blueberries, oysters, sheep, goats, cheese, beef, eggs, and lamb chops. Joe Appel, manager of the Munjoy Hill Rosemont, is the author of the unattributed words of wisdom below the photographs as well as the market's newsletters. A former reporter, an excellent baker, Appel knows those oysters taste of the cold Maine water that they've grown fat in, in the tidal trunk of the Damariscotta river.
Or photographing the glorious stuff, as Russell French has done for this calendar, or designing the layout, as Lucian Berg, owner of LU Design, has done for this calendar, or paying for the printing, as the owners of Rosemont Market have.
The calendar ($15) will get you in the mood to visit Harbor Fish Market in Portland for some Pemaquid oysters, or to brood in front of the cheese counter at one of the Rosemonts, on Brighton Avenue or on top of Munjoy Hill in Portland or in Yarmouth, wishing the goat cheeses over the month of July had been identified. If you spend a whole month looking at food, you want to eat it. The goats are from Little Falls Farm, but the aged goat's-milk tommes are likely from Seal Cove Farm, owned by Barbara Brooks. Her tommes are rarely sold in stores, but can be specially ordered – off the Web site or at the farm store at 17 Milky Way or 202 Partridge Cove Road, Lemoine (near Ellsworth) open from May till November, according to Sally Brown, Brooks's daughter, who sometimes works on the farm. Sally said there were still a few of the little tommes left from the last milking season for anyone wanting to order one from Seal Cove Farm's Web site, mainegoatcheese.com. And they just might have to order some to sell next July at Rosemont Market.
John Naylor, owner of Rosemont Market along with Scott Anderson and Lisa Childs, knows exactly how many pies you can bake in one season, though next season there will likely be more, if Bakery Manager Erin Lynch can orchestrate it. She said she oversaw about 160 blueberry pies made in the summer of 2009. The apple season, thanks to heirloom varieties revived by John Bunker, below, and others we never forgot to cherish, is still going strong. Northern Spies are for sale this week at Rosemont for the apple tart or tart Tatin that will end your Christmas feast with the best flavor you can find in the world, saturated with the Maine summer and the strength of trees that endure nor'easters without a qualm.
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