Tag: #food

The Jetty – A Place Where our Dog Carmen and I can Both get a Drink

The Jetty – A Place Where our Dog Carmen and I can Both get a Drink

I’ve never ever heard someone say “Man, I can’t stand The Jetty”. In fact, it’s just the opposite. It’s one of those places that has found a way to appeal to old locals, new locals, people passing by, and tourists. As a bonus, dogs are allowed on the outdoor deck, which makes it one of Carmen’s favorite places as well. Every town should have a place like The Jetty Restaurant and Dockbar, but many don’t.

Cathy and I have been stopping at the Jetty for the last ten years. It’s on the way to our house at the Bay, and a great place for lunch. Two hours from home (and about 45 min from The Bayhouse), it’s the perfect stopping point.

The first time we went to The Jetty was with friends Pat and Bob, and Becky and Jim. Cathy mentioned to her girlfriends we were going to the Bay, and maybe we could meet them for a drink along the way. Becky said to Cathy “What about meeting at the jetty?” Cath answered “Becky – which jetty? There must be ten jetties in that stretch along the water.” Becky answered “Not a jetty, THE Jetty – it’s a bar”. And so we were introduced to this wonderful beach bar.

The Jetty has a great location on Kent Narrows.

Located in Maryland, just over the Bay Bridge on the Eastern Shore, the bar has a great view overlooking Kent Narrows. In the spring, summer and fall, the outdoor tables on the deck stay full, while in the wintertime, the indoor bar and restaurant fill up. With all of the glass “garage type doors” for the bar, the view from inside is almost as good as sitting outside.

With all of the roll-up windows, The view from inside the deck bar, is almost as good as from outside.

When stopping for lunch, we know a nice selection of cold beers, excellent Bloody Marys or tasty Crushes are there waiting for us. The food is decent, and this being the Eastern Shore, the crabs in the summertime and oysters in the winter are always excellent. Good burgers, fish sandwiches or tacos, a great Crab Cake, and excellent salads are all on the menu. This is bar food at it’s best… If you are looking for something more substantial, there’s always several wonderful seafood dinners on the menu as well… As a bonus, dogs are allowed on the outdoor deck, which also makes it one of Carmen’s favorite places. They always bring her a bowl of water, and if you are inclined, you can order special doggie “meals” off the menu for your fourlegged companion (we don’t). She always enjoys barking “hi” to the other dogs on the deck.

The mental transition to vacation mode starts pretty quickly when sitting on the deck, looking at the water and relaxing with a drink. A beer, or two, along with a sandwich makes that last 45 minutes of driving time to Tilghman pass pretty quickly.

Getting in vacation mode….

I’ve seen bikes, motorcycles, cars, trucks, and one year on St Paddy’s Day, a bus parked outside. Many folk also arrive by boat, docking in one of the slips.

We’ve also met friends there for drinks, or for dinner. It’s not a bad way to while away a few hours on a sunny afternoon. On weekends, they often have a band. Our friends, Pat and Bob live just three or four miles from The Jetty – in Pat’s words – “The Jetty is practically our every Friday happy hour go-to bar. Such a beautiful setting, especially the gorgeous sunsets.“

Every town should have a place like The Jetty, but many don’t. The water and view certainly help, but the way they appeal to everyone, local or not, is what makes the difference for me. I’m glad it’s on our list of local watering holes and places for a meal. If you happen to cross the Bay Bridge on Route 50 heading to the Eastern Shore or the Atlantic Ocean, make sure and give The Jetty a try. If you’ve been making the trip for awhile, you probably already knew that.

Addendum:

– Thanks to our friend Pat for reviewing and providing input for this blog.

– Note – this isn’t an advertisement for the Jetty and I was provided no money (or drink) in exchange for writing this blog! It’s a local bar/restaurant we just really like.

Visiting Home

Visiting Home

It had been a long time. Too long, to be honest. Life, “stuff” and Covid all managed to intervene. Finally, after a couple of years away, we were making a trip back to Illinois to see family and friends. The feelings of anticipation were palpable.

We started with visits to old friends – dinner out one night, ribs on the grill another; laughter and tears; telling old stories and making new memories. From there, it was lunch, beer and tenderloin sandwiches with another old buddy. Finally, it was on to family time and staying with each of my sisters, Tanya and Roberta. Again, more laughter, tears, dinners out, favorite foods* and stories from our youth.

Old Friends…

Everything led up to the last day, and a family picnic at my sister Roberta’s home. Counting my Uncle Don, mom’s last surviving brother, we were four generations strong – Uncle Don and his friend Diane; Roberta, Tanya and I and our husbands and wives; our nieces and nephews and their spouses; and of course their children. The oldest person was 80, the youngest about 14 months old. There were perhaps 30 or 35 of us.

As folks arrived, we greeted each other with smiles and hugs. We hadn’t seen some of our nieces and nephews in four years. There were also great nieces and nephews we’d never before met. There was much laughter and love with each new greeting.

It was a great day – we were talking with everyone, telling stories and catching up… There was a huge potluck lunch, and I ate way too much. Our niece Diane is the curator of mom’s potato salad recipe, so I had to have two helpings of that. After lunch, we followed the kids to the creek and had water balloon fights. Then, it was on to the raft at the pond, where swimming, sliding down a slide, jumping in and diving off the raft all ensued. I managed a backflip off the dock, and to laughter from the grand nieces and nephews, only slightly smacked my face on the water. It was a fun and wet afternoon… 😉

Clockwise from upper left: Uncle Don, Laying out the picnic, At the Creek, In the Pond, and Cathy about to be hit with a water balloon…

We all know all good things come to an end, and people eventually loaded their cars back up with kids, coolers and leftovers. Another set of hugs and kisses, and promises to try and see each other more often. Eventually, the only ones left were Berta and her husband Jack, along with Cathy and I. We finished cleaning up and bringing things into the house. We were, perhaps, a bit quieter than we’d been just an hour or two before. Jack had to go to work early in the morning, so we said our goodbyes to him that night.

The next morning, after coffee, Cath and I hugged Roberta goodbye and departed. I’m not one for long goodbyes, so we left a bit earlier than planned. After a quick stop to briefly visit our parent’s graves, it was on to O’Hare Airport and home.

One of the prices Cath and I paid by joining the Army and moving away all those years ago, is we have missed so much of our friends’ and families’ lives back home. That is a part of what makes these trips precious. We didn’t really get to see our nieces and nephew grow up, except for scattered visits, and history is of course repeating with the grand nieces and nephews. This is true for Cathy’s side of the family as well. We love our lives and have no regrets about the choices we’ve made over the past 40 plus years, and yet…

As I’ve become older, I often have a certain sense of bitter-sweetness about these get togethers with friends and family. The time goes by so quickly, the highs of the greetings and the lows of the departures blend together in a strange set of feelings that don’t easily mesh. There are shades of love, along with the happiness and sadness that accompany love. The passage of time in our lives continues to speed up.

I know (and pray) we will have many more wonderful times together in the years ahead. For me, along with the joy, there will also always be a bit of wistfulness.

Good times … Tanya, me, and Roberta…

Addendum:

* Favorite foods are always an interesting topic. A couple of the things that remind me of home are Tenderloin sandwiches and Sam’s Pizza. You can’t find the sandwiches outside of Iowa, Indiana or Illinois and they are killer good. And Sam’s? Well, it’s Sam’s. GREAT pizzas there…. both make me (and many others) nostalgic for our home town of Ottawa.

Comfort food for sure….

– Thanks to my niece Diane Schott, along with sisters Roberta Gourley and Tanya McCambridge for supplying several of the photographs included here!

Moules, Pernod and the Brussels Seafood Market

Moules, Pernod and the Brussels Seafood Market

The other evening, Cathy and I made some Mussels Pastis (Mussels with Pernod) at home. It was delicious. It was a new recipe with plenty of Pernod in it, which made it quite good and strongly flavored. The strong flavor caused me to reminisce about Brussels, Belgium and an early morning trip to the seafood market there.

Mussels Pastis – the Wonderful Dish that Brought Back the Memory

It was early in 1988. Although stationed in Germany, I was spending chunks of time in Mons, Belgium. We were upgrading the communications systems at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE), also known as the Headquarters for NATO. My boss, Rich, was there almost full time, while I was dividing time between Germany, Mons, and another HQ in High Wycomb, England.

When in Mons, if there over the weekend, we often made a day trip to Brussels, which was only about an hour away. The city has a great history to it, and it was fun to see the sites, including the Grand Canal, and the famous Manneken Pis, which is only about two feet high. There was also of course the famous (infamous?) Red Light District of Brussels, with women on display in storefronts. I suppose it gave a whole different meaning to the term window shopping.

What we really enjoyed was wandering the Rue des Bouchers in the Quays District in the early evening. Here, there were numerous restaurants with outdoor seating, and they also set up temporary wooden “bars” where you could buy a drink, or something lite to eat. We’d walk from place to place having a Belgian beer or French wine, along with some oysters, mussels or shrimp croquettes. Several of the places also served frites (french fries) to die for. Usually, we never sat down at a table for dinner – we’d fill ourselves at the little bars as we ambled along.

Rue des Bouchers

The mussels (Moules) were particularly awesome, and I think Brussels is where I really developed a taste for them. There were soooo many ways they served them: Moules Frites (mussels with those famous Belgian fries), Moules Marinière (mussels in a white wine sauce), Moules à la crème (mussels in a cream sauce) and Moules Pastis (mussels with a Pastis, such as Pernod the anise flavored spirit) were probably the main ones we ate.

There was one place we went to a couple of times and came to know the guy working the “bar”. We were talking with him about seafood one night, and how good and fresh it was in Brussels. We asked where was a good place to buy fresh seafood, if we wanted to take some back to Germany with us. He told us our best chance was at the wholesale seafood market that ran every day from 5AM to about 10AM, but you needed to arrive early, as the vendors ran out of their prime seafood early. The other catch was, it was a wholesale market, so you had to find fishmongers willing to sell in smaller amounts to individuals. Rich, our coworker Steve, and I talked about it and decided we’d try and take a haul of seafood back to Germany when we could.

The next time I went to Mons, I took our cooler and stopped by Rich’s house to pick up his. About a week later, we were finishing up the current portion of the project and all of us were returning home. We made the plan to pick up the seafood early on a Thursday morning, and have a big seafood dinner/party on Friday night, at Rich’s home.

Allowing ourselves plenty of time, we woke about 2:30AM and were on the road by 3:15. We arrived in Brussels an hour later, but the seafood market wouldn’t open until 5. We locates an open bistro and went in, where we joined some late night partiers, ending their evening; a few men having breakfast before going to work; and several “Ladies of the Night” who were apparently finished for the night and having coffees and brandy. We sat at an open table and ordered some coffee and fresh croissants.

Just after 5AM, we left the pub and walked over to the market. It was huge, and already quite crowded. We wandered among the stalls and trucks for a while looking to see what was available. To be honest, there were so many choices, it was a bit overwhelming. We started talking to a couple of vendors, however when they found out the small amounts (by wholesale standards) we wanted to buy, they quickly ignored us. Eventually, we found a guy willing to deal with us, and we bought everything from him – a couple kinds of fish, some lobster, and of course, plenty of oysters and mussels. Someone went back to our car for the coolers and we loaded them up. The guy was nice enough to put plenty of ice in the coolers as well.

At the Market

We arrived back at our hotel in Mons around 7:30AM and caught a couple hours of sleep, before driving back to Germany later that day. You have to remember this was pre-Internet and pre-cell phone, so it wasn’t until we returned, when we started calling people for the seafood dinner planned for the next night.

Friday night came and we all met at Rich’s house. In addition to Rich and his girlfriend Lynn, there were Cath and I, Steve and his wife Sabine, a few coworkers and Rich’s boss, Ray Sauer and his wife. It was quite the event, with grilled fish and lobster, Moules Pastis, oysters on the half shell, and fried oysters. We washed it all down with plenty of good German Pils, and some of our local dry white wines. A bottle of Sambuca, along with multiple cups of espresso may have made appearances later in the evening as well.

I hadn’t thought about that market trip, or the subsequent party for years. The Mussels with Pernod meal Cathy and I cooked, brought the memory flooding back. For me, good food has never been just about the taste of the food itself. It has always been defined as much by the place and time, and those who we are sharing the meal with. Our taste buds learn to recognize sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami. Our minds and memories complete and complement our sense of taste. If you are lucky, years later out of nowhere, the taste of a new meal suddenly blesses you with a remembrance from your past.

For me, Good Food is Never Just About Taste

Addendum:

• Cathy and I had another memory from late ‘88 or early ‘89. I was back in Brussels to present a paper at a conference, and Cathy came with me. We were staying at a nice hotel downtown. We went out for a dinner at a nearby bistro and had Moules Frites. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at a small bar for a nightcap. While having our drink, several “Working Girls” came in and sat at another table. They ordered wine and champagne, seemed to be enjoying themselves and were in a good mood. As it was earlier in the evening, we speculated they might be on break, or getting ready to go work.

• Pastis is an anise-flavored spirit and apéritif traditionally from France. Two of the best known are Pernod and Ricard. If you are looking for a substitute, Ouzo, Sambuca, Herbsaint and Absinthe are other anise flavored liquors, all with different flavor profiles.

• We’ve made Moules with Pernod at home before, but I never had the same flashback. The previous recipe only had a bit of Pernod in it. This one used a full half of a cup. I think it was the stronger flavor that triggered the memory. The recipe is from a wonderful little cookbook we have called “Cuisine of the Sun”, by François de Mélogue. I like the recipe just the way it is, but if not familiar with Pernod, you may want to cut it just a bit. Here’s a copy of the recipe:

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