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March 13, 2026

Centreville Spy

Nonpartisan and Education-based News for Centreville

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Food Friday: Reliable Chicken

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One of our household gods, Anthony Bourdain, said: “Everyone should know how to roast a chicken. It’s a life skill that should be taught to small children at school.”

I have always loved chicken. It’s not fancy. It does not need to be complex. It is steady and reliable. It is a blank canvas, ready to take on your vision. It is ready to nurture your fragile soul. It is adaptable, versatile and eager to please.

I knew growing up that my favorite birthday dinner of baked chicken and rice would be reliably crisp, juicy and delicious. I knew the summertime chicken legs, that my father always nearly incinerated on the back yard hibachi grill, were going to be blackened and juicy and scalding hot, but I happily gnawed away at them anyway, gingerly, with newly seared fingertips. On family summer vacations I would eat all the Howard Johnson’s crunchy fried chicken I could get. In college I was a reliably cheap date, because I would always order the chicken dish. Old reliable, that’s me!

I did not entice Mr. Sanders to marry me with the viral chicken recipe currently running rampant on TikTok, though we are rather fond of roasted chicken, grilled chicken, chicken Schnitzel, fried chicken, stir-fried chicken and barbecued chicken. Not to mention chicken Marsala, chicken piccata, chicken kabobs, chicken salad, chicken tacos, chicken and waffles, and chicken pot pie. And we will certainly give the flashy TikTok Marry Me Chicken a whirl – even though it is based on an old, reliable recipe from 2016 in Delish.

Marry Me Chicken 2023 TikTok

Marry Me Chicken 2016

There is a chicken dish for every season, every mood, every whim, every budget. As we move from summer into fall, it’s time to take the chicken off the grill, and bring it back inside. Sheet pan chicken meals are an efficient method for preparing chicken, a veg and a starch. Make a salad, light the candles and pour a little wine; ease your way into dinner.

Roasted Chicken Legs with Potatoes and Kale

Chicken, Sausage, Peppers and Potatoes

Lemon Chicken Drumsticks with Potatoes and Kale

Sheet Pan Garlic Herb Butter Chicken & Potatoes

If you are hard-pressed for time, but want to bring comfort home, stop and pick up a rotisserie chicken. With just a little imagination and a modicum of effort, you can have a comforting meal tonight, and can be clever with leftovers: Rotisserie Chicken Ideas from Food52

Since I work from home, I have plenty of opportunities to get the jump on dinner. I think we will prepare Bourdain’s roast chicken, and reap the benefits over the weekend. Maybe we should video the dinner prep and give Marry Me Chicken some competition. It will a nice way to remind Mr. Sanders that he is still adorable.

Anthony Bourdain’s Roast Chicken

“The ability to properly prepare a moist yet thoroughly cooked bird, with nicely crisp skin, should be a hallmark of good citizenry—an obligation to your fellow man. Everyone walking down the street should be reasonably confident that the random person next to them is prepared, if called upon, to roast a chicken.”
-Anthony Bourdain

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

A Bull & Goat Meet in Centreville and Make Beer

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A proverbial toast:

There are good ships, and there are wood ships,

The ships that sail the sea.
But the best ships, are friendships, And may they always be.

Jake Heimbuch and Jeff Putman

Buddies Jake Heimbuch and Jeff Putman, long employed in the inflatable watercraft industry, met years ago at a boat show, found they worked well together, and then, after a short phase of hobbyist experimentation in the ancient art of crafting beer, decided to go into business as partners and open a brewery in Centreville called the Bull & Goat.

Turned out to be a decision worth raising a glass to.

After that first year or so of learning by doing, once Jake and Jeff brewed what they call their first “drinkable” batch, the light and flavorful Frank Amber Ale that they still produce, figuring out a way to sell their beer began to feel like the logical next step.

Encouraged by friends and family, the pair got to work. Brewing equipment is expensive. They put together a budget for a small single-barrel system. Found a spot where they could get started, and maybe if they were lucky, someday expand. There were legalities to consider, regulations and zoning codes and such, but the guys found governmental support for their business plan to be significant and encouraging.    

Allies jumped into help. The equipment’s not just costly, it’s heavy, too. Moving and installation, not to mention keeping everything running, can be an all hands on deck operation. To furnish the tap room, a well-wisher donated tables, chairs and couches. Gifts of art and decorations were offered and accepted.

It was in the process of transforming a garage into a functional space for both the brewers and their potential customers that the personalities of the principles developed into the name of their business. Jeff, the elder of the two by more than needs reporting (He was a QACHS classmate of this writer), would advise slowing down, reassessing where they were and where they were headed. Jake would laugh and call him an old goat. Jeff, as old goats are inclined to respond, would say, well, just go ahead and bull your way through then.

The Bull & Goat Brewery’s Grand Opening was held on October 29, 2016. Located at 204 Banjo Lane, the Tap Room was originally open one day a week, with only growlers for sale. Between that and selling from their beer cart at the Centreville Farmers Market, the brewery’s namesakes were, according to Jake, “making just enough money to keep making beer.” Today they make that beer from a seven-barrel system, are open four days a week, and have built an impressive distribution network for local retail sales.

Beer lovers can find Bull & Goat kegs and cans in about a dozen neighborhood liquor stores and some favorite local restaurants the Bay Bridge to Rock Hall. One pale ale, the Ballroom Blitz, is only available in the brewer’s taproom and at Kent Island’s Knoxie’s Table/Chesapeake Bay Beach Club.

Life is too short to drink bad beer.

In a space much expanded from their original 200 square feet, Bull & Goat now typically offers a beer menu with seven standard choices and three rotating seasonals. Two of their most popular are the smooth and balanced 67 IPA and, with its Frankenstein motif, the original Frank Ale. Though the partners share responsibilities of running the business, Jeff is the primary brew master who oversees production.

Part of that division of labor and being involved in every aspect of their enterprise is spent in the front-of-house. There are two employed bartenders, Roland Jennings and Katie Hollis, but because both owners believe it’s important to represent their venture in person, patrons are just as likely to find one of them manning the kegs and high quality classic cocktail station. “We know almost everybody who comes in,” says Jeff, “and if not, we introduce ourselves, ask about what brought them in – we old-school meet people. If you’ve been led to believe that there’s more that separates people than brings them together, you’re wrong. It’s good to be reminded of that”

May the very best of your past be the very worst of your future.

As the Bull & Goat tap room transitions from summertime tiki bar to a Fall Foliage Festival theme, Jake and Jeff are gearing up for autumn with not only their three seasonal beers – a hoppy West Coast IPA, an earthy English ESB, and a blackberry sour – they’re also installing a new highball system that serves up to 12 different cocktail mixes out of two taps – whiskey or vodka – to which such flavors as sangria or ginger can be added.

Speaking of spirits, in 2020 the operation expanded with the opening of Old Courthouse Distilling where the partners have started to make whiskeys, rums, and tequilas. In just three years they’ve expanded from a 12-gallon still to a 100 gallon production capacity.  In November, Old Courthouse intends to release a couple hundred bottles of their aged bourbon.

Also, every Thursday from now through November 9, Bull & Goat will host live music featuring popular regional musicians with food available from the locally based Blue Monkey Street Tacos.

And, on Sunday, November 19, in cooperation with the other members of the Queen Anne’s County Brewers Coalition (Big Truck, Cult Classic, Patriot Acres and Ten Eyck), Bull & Goat is participating in The Backyard Brews With Benefits 2. This “Localist Beer Fest,” is a rain or shine indoor/outdoor event to be held at The Kent Island Resort from 11-4. Tickets can be purchased online or at the various participating breweries and each brewery will support a different area charity. Bull & Goat is teaming up with Chesapeake Bay Environmental Center while other recipients of funds will include the American Saltwater Guides Association, the Animal Welfare League, the youth group Giving the Edge Foundation, and PERF, an organization that supports veterans, law enforcement officers, and first responders. There will be music and other live entertainment, food trucks, and a cornhole tournament. Visit your favorite brewery’s website to find out more.

Good beer combined with giving back to the community?

Well, we’ll sure enough drink to that.   

Bull & Goat Brewery Tap room is open Wednesday – Friday 3-9 p.m. and Saturday from 2-9. Visit them at 204 Banjo Lane in Centreville and online at bullandgoatbrewery.com.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: It’s Time for Apples

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We drove out to a large farm stand a few days ago, in search of atmosphere for the front porch. It seems that autumnal decorations are de rigueur, even if it is just barely autumn, and not even October. Halloween has arrived. Our neighbors have had corn stalks and cascades of pumpkins decorating their entry way for more than a week. Fabric ghosts flit around a fence, and skeletons sit in rockers, flanking their front door. We look positively Grinch-y with our meagre display of flamed-out summer geraniums and limp coleus. It was only good manners to add a little fall color to our porch, and gain some cred in the suburbs.

We had a pleasant drive, playing hooky for an afternoon, shooting past harvested corn stubble, and still-green expanses of soy beans. We marveled at cotton fields and gawped at tobacco farms. We sped past solar farms, past well-maintained cottages, and tiny, tidy family burial plots. Past abandoned, vine-covered rural outposts, and the folks who keep their Christmas decorations up all year long.

The farm stand we visited was a bonanza of autumn: hundreds and thousands of pots of blooming chrysanthemums, and many stacks and heaps of pumpkins. I can’t say there were acres of mums, but I have never seen such an abundance of mums in one spot before. There were tables, and racks and aisles, and miles of aisles of mums: white, yellow, pink, rust and copper colored mums. The farm was an undulating rainbow of chrysanthemums. A small child pulled an unsteady red wagon out to the parking lot with the family’s chrysanthemum choice – a single, Brobdingnagian plant that towered over the boy – more of a tree than a potted flower. We made a more modest selection: two one-gallon-sized yellow-flowered plants to go in the planters on our top step. Plus we selected one ghostly white pumpkin, hastily plucked from a hallucinatory assortment of gourds. And poof! We were seasonal and au courant.

It is going to take a little bit more than window-dressing for us to leave summer behind. Visiting a farm stand is one way to feel in the moment, and so is tasting something familiar and evocative of fall. When was the last time you sat down with a nice, crisp apple? And not a warm, lumpy, bumpy one that has rolled around inside your lunch box for a week. When did you last enjoy a shiny, fresh Maryland apple?

Here is a handy dandy list you can print and take with you to the farmers’ market or your favorite farm stand. The very names are filled with poetry, travel, and adventure: Courtland, Crispin, Empire, Fuji, Gala, Ginger Gold, Jonagold, McIntosh, Mutsu, Rome, Stayman and York. Maryland Apples:

Every food site in the universe is bursting with apple recipes right now. Even the New York Times is willing to suggest the best apple peeling device on the market, which is the old-fashioned, hand-cranked one we all grew up with. I like to try to peel an apple in just one piece with a paring knife, and very rarely am I successful. But it is just fall, and early in the season and I am a little rusty. Come Thanksgiving I will be ready for the annual apple pie challenge. In the meantime, I will hone my skills on apple dishes that are not so high stakes.

This apple tart looks awfully pretty, and will be good practice for Thanksgiving: The Easiest French Apple Tart

Garden & Gun has an even more forgiving apple recipe: Apple Fritters You can have apples and cider, all in one.

King Arthur Flour has the easiest of all, with the added bonus of deelish frosting, because if we are bent of plumbing our childhood memories, we must freely admit that frosting is the main reason to eat any sort of cake: Old-Fashioned Apple Cake with Brown Sugar Frosting

There are many smells that remind me of my childhood, and apples instantly bring me back to school days and lunch boxes and trying to eat apples when I had lost my front teeth. Fall reminds me of my misspent youth, and healthy snacks, and cool weather with falling leaves. I like to remember the Gilbreth family from Cheaper By the Dozen. Mr. Gilbreth, an efficiency expert early in the 20th century, with twelve children, was keen not to waste a single minute of any day. He ate apples in a very efficient, though, odd fashion: “When he ate an apple, he consumed skin, core and seeds, which he alleged were the most healthful and most delectable portions of the fruit. Instead of starting at the side and eating his way around the equator, Dad started at the North Pole, and ate down through the core to the South.”

The neighbors’ festive fall decor isn’t looking so out-of-place to me now that we are participating in a modest fashion. Maybe after eating a few apples I will start feeling more nostalgic. Happy October!

“Someone once asked Dad: “But what do you want to save time for? What are you going to do with it?” “For work, if you love that best,” said Dad. “For education, for beauty, for art, for pleasure. For mumblety-peg, if that’s where your heart lies.”

― Ernestine Gilbreth Carey, Frank B. Gilbreth, Jr.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

From Rush Hour to Reflection: Rethinking the Bay Bridge Conundrum by Rob Etgen

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True confession: until my recent retirement I was one of those drivers who followed my GPS and used the backroads of Kent Island to jockey around traffic at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. My justification was that I was a local (Queenstown), but the reality was that my timing was always tight for meetings or picking up my daughter from daycare. Now that I am retired, I force myself to obey the signage and just sit in traffic. I use the time to call friends or look for birds.

Summer 2023 has been brutal for Bay Bridge backups. I have heard it described as “Thursdays are the new Fridays,” “west bound is as bad as eastbound,” and “forget about crossing if there is rain or wind or an accident.” The bridge traffic misery index for Eastern Shore folks is definitely way up.

Should we support building a new Chesapeake Bay bridge – presumably at the current bridge location? I think that reasonable minds can be for and against. Personally, I am against a new Bay Bridge. My reasons start with pollution of the Chesapeake Bay and sprawl on the Eastern Shore. But I also see a new bridge as an overly expensive and temporary solution for a complex regional problem demanding future learning and innovative solutions.

In the short term, we need choices and incentives which encourage efficient use of the current bridges. As individuals, we should avoid backups whenever possible by using phone apps like Google maps and Waze. During backups grab a coffee at Yo Java Bowl in Chester and get some work done. Governments should be using accepted tools like congestion tolling (higher tolls during high demand), high occupancy vehicle incentives and telework policies.  Governments should also explore innovations already in use elsewhere including real time management of contra flow lanes and access limits for the entire congestion corridor. 

Over the long term, we must take a much harder look at mass transit alternatives, and look beyond our borders for partners and solutions.  A decade ago, I understood that high speed rail up and over the Bay on existing tracks in Delaware (with upgrades) could get passengers to the beaches from Baltimore in under an hour.  There are other transit solutions similar to rail emerging around the world.  These future leaning solutions are much more expandable as demand rises, are solid wins for climate change, and are better suited for our children who are increasingly urban and proudly car free.

Please don’t judge me for peacefully sitting in Bay Bridge traffic. I know this is a luxury of retirement, and one that few can afford.  But if you are not fighting a time crunch, take a deep breath and look around at our beautiful Bay, and think about what this scene might look like through the eyes of our grandchildren.

NOTE:  The Md. Transportation Authority is hosting several open houses for public comment on the new Chesapeake Crossing. Please let your voices be heard. See: www.baycrossingstudy.com. 

Rob Etgen retired in 2021 after a 40 year career in conservation – the last 31 years as President of Eastern Shore Land Conservancy. In retirement Rob is enjoying family and working on global and local sustainability issues with Council Fire consulting out of Annapolis.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: End-of-Summer Tomatoes

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It’s the end of the line for summer. Today is the last day of what some have said was the hottest summer on record. I believe them. I spent the season scurrying between air conditioned spaces, or dashing around the yard, repositioning the sprinkler to keep the tomatoes hydrated and the new pachysandra bed alive. I did a lot of sweaty running in the heat, while I was dodging the constant clouds of marauding mosquitoes, and avoiding the troop maneuvers of more ants than I have ever seen.

Here, late in September, the pachysandra have taken root, and the tomato plants yielded a modest crop. We were not carried away by the flying monkey-sized mosquitoes, and the ants’ mission remained top secret: they seem to have moved on. With the cooler afternoon temperatures, Luke the wonder dog and I have resumed our afternoon walks, so life is good. We aren’t trapped in the air conditioning, and we can stretch our legs again. The neighbors’ bushes have never smelled so sweet, or so I gather.

While I tend to whine about the summer heat and humidity, I am keenly aware that it is almost the end of the growing season for some of our favorite foods. Soon we won’t be able to hunt and gather our locally grown tomatoes and corn. It is time for all the wretched pumpkin-spice-flavored everything. I am preparing to transition. Last weekend we made a delightfully spicy tomato pasta dish with local cherry tomatoes. I am hoping it will taste as good, and feel as warming as the scorching days of August, in December, when all we have to choose from will be hot house tomatoes, or those trucked in from California for a king’s ransom, and a guilt-inducing carbon footprint. Mr. Sanders said that he preferred it to Martha’s One-Dish Pasta, which is in regular rotation for our Monday night pasta dinners. This is good dish to add to that rotation, albeit one with a more autumnal vibe. Plus you get to use four cloves of garlic. Yumsters!

Pasta with Simple Cherry Tomato Sauce

As usual, I made some changes to this recipe as I went along. Our humble grocery store does not carry orecchiette-shaped pasta. (Their summer-long sale on Woodbridge chardonnay more than compensates for that tiny inconvenience.) So I substituted penne rigate, which seemed to be sturdy enough for the sauce. You might experiment with Dan Pashman’s cascatelli pasta, which is also sturdy and can hold the bold sauce in its nooks and curvy crannies. And I skipped the pine nuts, because I am on a budget, and so are you.

Everything else we had on hand, no extra shopping required. For once, I am proud to say, we had a shallot in the vegetable drawer, because Mr. Sanders cooked a fussy and fancy chicken piccata last week. Chicken Piccata It was deelish, too. One of our back porch basil plants came through the summer magnificently, and is busting out with lush greenery. I have to figure out if we have a bright and sunny corner in the house where so I can keep it happy through the winter, because nothing kick starts a tomato dish like fresh basil.

Ingredients – we halved this because it is only the two of us. Sorry, Luke. You have plenty of kibble.
¼ cup olive oil
1 small shallot, thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
Kosher salt
12 ounces pasta, such as orecchiette,
1/2 to 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 pound small, sweet cherry tomatoes, halved,
1/2 cup grated parmesan
4 ounces small mozzarella balls (I cubed fresh mozzarella, left over from last week’s pizza night)
1/2 cup fresh basil, thinly sliced or more to taste
Black pepper – to taste

Bring a large pot of water to a boil.Pour olive oil into a large skillet, warm, and add shallot and garlic. Add a pinch of salt. Turn the heat to medium high. When the oil begins to shimmer, stir the shallots and garlic, cover, and turn the heat down to low. Cook for roughly 5 minutes, or until the shallots and garlic get soft. Keep an eye on the garlic, which tends to burn to an incinerated cinder the minute you turn your back on the stove.

Be sure to add a handful of kosher salt to the water when it boils. Boil the pasta to al dente. Meanwhile, uncover the lid of the pan with the shallots and garlic. Add the crushed red pepper flakes and stir briefly. Raise the heat to medium, and add the tomatoes. Cook for 5 to 6 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes begin to burst and break down. Add 1 cup of water, and bring the sauce to a gentle simmer.

Before draining the pasta reserve a cup of the pasta cooking liquid, just in case. Drain the pasta. Do not rinse. Transfer the drained pasta to the tomato sauce pan and stir to combine. Turn heat to low.

Add the parmesan cheese and pepper to the pasta. Add some of the reserved pasta cooking liquid if the sauce has thickened too much, we didn’t need it, but it is always wise to prepare for emergencies. Then add the mozzarella and basil, stir to combine, and serve immediately. Have a big bowl of grated parm on the table. Break out the salad, some still-on-sale wine, candles and some focaccia. Yumsters. And easy peasy.

It’s not greatly different from Martha’s One-Pan Pasta , but the heftier pasta makes it seem like it will be an excellent dish for cooler weather. And maybe we will get some soon. Enjoy the rest of your summer!

(The clever cooks at Food52 have another end-of-season pasta dish you might want to try: Tomato Tonnato From Botanical)

“Our bathing suits, waving like summer flags on the clothesline were begrudgingly packed away, and replaced with long-sleeved sweaters and woolly socks.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Mid-Shore Education: Facing the Challenge of Maryland’s Blueprint with QAC Superintendent Patricia Saelens

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As part of our ongoing conversations about public education on the Mid-Shore, we sat down with Queen Anne’s County Public Schools Superintendent Dr. Patricia Saelens, last month for an update of that county’s challenges and opportunities as one of the most robust public school systems in the state of Maryland.

One example of this distinction was the news this week that U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona recognized Church Hill Elementary School and Matapeake Elementary School as National Blue Ribbon Schools for 2023. Those two schools beat out more than 9,000 schools nationwide to make that list. 

That kind of recognition is common for QAC schools. Year after year, the school district continues outperforming other schools on both the Eastern and Western Shore. 

And yet, as Dr. Saelens notes in our Spy interview, it’s not always peachy even in QAC. After taking the job in the middle of the COVID crisis, which Saelens considers the most challenging years of her professional life, she and her peers are still having to find their way in negotiating the unanticipated challenges that have come with the implication of the state’s Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. In our chat, the superintendent highlights the positives and negatives of the multi-billion dollar effort to improve public education, including the funding formula and its impact on county budgeting.

 

This video is approximately ten minutes in length.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: Challah for the Holidays

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Shanah tovah! A very happy New Year to you! Rosh Hashanah begins tonight at sunset. It is the first of ten high holy days, a time of reflection and celebration. We at the Spy Test Kitchens are always eager to honor cultures and faiths with food, and traditionally Rosh Hashanah is observed with many festive dishes.

You can begin your Rosh Hashanah meal with sliced apples dipped in honey, with the honey symbolizing the sweet possibilities of a new year. You can serve apple slices to dip in honey, or you can incorporate apple cider into a beef brisket. Apple cider brisket

It’s still a little too warm outside for me to think about cooking, let alone eating, brisket, but there is always a place at the table for Apple and Honey Muffins. Or you can bake some challah.

You might think of challah with candlelight, wine, family and blessings on Friday nights. It is a flavorful bread, almost a brioche, and makes divine toast. I baked a test loaf of challah last weekend, because we can never have enough carbs. There is a lot about bread baking that I have to learn, in tiny incremental stages. Like finding a reliable recipe. For my very first, time-consuming loaf of challah I tried the Youtube-famous “Challah in a Bag” which was indeed fun to do – but it produced an awful loaf of bread.

It turns out that kneading is necessary, and so is the correct oven temperature. I measured, weighed, poured and shook the ingredients. I heated water, then dipped and submerged the bag o’dough. I spent a lovely, sunny afternoon glued to my stool in the kitchen, waiting through various proofs and bag flips. Then I dusted with flour, rolled, pinched, and plaited. I let it rise again. I washed the surface with egg. I dutifully set a timer for the 40-minute baking process. I was amazed to peek in the oven and see a nicely shaped, almost-raw, beige pile of dough. The recipe had said to bake at 300°F. (Nothing is going to brown at 300°F. Silly me.) I popped the temp up to 350°F and the loaf finally browned, but the damage was done. It tasted like lightly-singed pile of Play-doh. Read your new recipes closely, she typed sagely. Don’t take anything for granted on the internet. Bon Appétit and Food52 have folks who proof read and test, and re-test, all of the recipes they publish. Careers can be ruined by a typo. Self-published sites are a lot more casual about these details, which can make all the difference in how your time and resources are spent. Challah in a Bag

Thank you, Food52: Honey Challah I wish I had found this recipe first, which also incorporates symbolic honey, before being lured by the siren song of Challah in a Bag. Baking temperature: 375°F.

Thank you, Bon Appétit: Challah Baking temperature: 325°F – 400°F.

La Boite has a very ambitious and beautiful Holiday Challah, which includes niches for bowls of honey and apple slices. Baking temperature: 400°F.

And a kosher recipe from Kosher.com: Best Challah Ever (This recipe is HUGE! It make 6 challahs. This is in case you need to feed the masses this holiday season, or if you want to bake loaves ahead of time and freeze them. Baking temperature: 350°F.

Happy baking, happy new year!

“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.”

–M. F. K. Fisher

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Food Friday: Weekly Challenges

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Oh, I am going to miss those slow, lazy days of summer. When there was some time to think; I miss the time we had for making choices. School has started and we are back in our familiar, though swift-moving, routines. We leap out of bed to shower, Hoover up breakfast, gather lunch, dash out the door, work, learn, play, volunteer, weed, grocery shop, home to chop, slice, dice, cook and scrub. Whew. Not to mention getting ready to do it all again tomorrow. And laundry.

This is when we have to get strategic, and plan ahead, just a bit – even if the future only means saving enough time and energy to read a chapter of Lessons in Chemistry before bed. And maybe we’ll talk to our family while doing all the food prep. How else are we to experience teen angst all over again, if not through our children? (I’ve noticed it is hard to be glued to an iPhone when you are chopping onions, too.) We can conduct our own Cordon Bleu school of cooking – where else will you be able to experiment with different methods for peeling garlic? They certainly will never acknowledge us in the moment, but the children will learn more through osmosis and experience in your kitchen than from YouTube. As Julia says: “…no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing.”

We like having a couple of recipes on our steady weekly meal rotation: Monday is pasta, Friday is pizza. I’m usually happy and ambitious on Mondays, and by Friday I can barely drag the stand mixer out of the pantry to make the pizza dough. If Monday is frantic we will have a simple, no extra-shopping-required pasta, like spaghetti with butter and garlic, or Cacio e Pepe. Recently the New York Times published a Baked Spaghetti lasagna-type casserole which is one of its most popular recipes. It is insanely easy, and has the added benefit of being perfect for left-overs: for dinner or lunch. Baked Spaghetti.

Baked spaghetti is as satisfying as lasagne, without the terrifying process of layering slippery, boiling hot, ribbons of lasagne in a pan, or remembering the proper order of sauce, mozzarella cheese, Parmesan cheese, ricotta cheese, hot pasta, sauce, which cheese? And with baked spaghetti you don’t have to make enormous commercial-kitchen-size pans of baked spaghetti. You can adapt it to the moment and the number of folks home for dinner tonight. This Sunday I am going to assemble a pan of spaghetti to bake on Monday night, to have again for lunch on Tuesday, and for dinner (again) on Thursday. I’ve never been able to re-heat Cacio e Pepe satisfactorily, so once we get this dish into the meal rotation it will simplify life. Which will save time and aggravation and will give us a brief moment of breathing space.

I can’t begin to contemplate dense and complicated fall and winter casseroles, and while this is warm meal, this pasta dish isn’t just for winter weather. It bakes for 40 minutes, so we won’t be heating up the kitchen too long. And it doesn’t require much in the way of fancy techniques or ingredients: it’s not Boeuf Bourguignon or Baba Ghanouj. It is warm, satisfying, and it re-heats well, making leftovers an added treat in our busy week.

If you have time on your hands on a Sunday afternoon, as I did last week, go ahead and bake this chocolate cake. We have been doling out pieces for lunch every day, and the cake just gets better as the week goes on: Ruth Reichl’s Giant Chocolate Cake https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017692-ruth-reichls-giant-chocolate-cake?unlocked_article_code=TkDK1ae-xVzuIIpW28vv9oEDVKoUiJaoio5wmt3_MpWXHF4UTRDT8sxmjrvUxmSrstkKld723jhGp65Gy0zI_v1REzz8m_JJjn3-IODZo-YEnjC-cyOnrhtRyQ__WDOSydOPSOgaocLjMbnCJMzZS0XwRFCf1l64lt4fe6fNOax8l_oudo9aLlXNamlwkNrAoL8zH4t5_pBhyY1OYqrJ682VVZFxQoUIc3UeuLKyyZ2jT9H3XCiEk2YvO5_SQjG3bPQlRChjooMrDaX8d64zvgPHEYE-PHVB2JAcrYa3sHMYj-v4L_sOjdYvgZu4pQBpBmN0EvzEBukqQ0EZrGmOjywk06fzYQ&smid=share-url I made it as a sheet cake, not a layer cake, and I halved the recipe, because we didn’t need that much cake tempting us every day. Deelish.

It helps to read the email notes from NYT readers who have already cooked the recipes. They tend to be amusing, acerbic, and insightful. One reader suggested substituting ziti for the spaghetti noodles – they thought the spaghetti dried out too much during the baking process and ziti stays moist and hefty. One other of the notes: “Classic! Whenever I use marinara from a jar, I rinse the jar out with 1/2 cup of red wine, which I add to the sauce. It transforms any off-the-shelf marinara.” That is pure inspiration. I love it when folks openly admit to buying jarred sauce. We are not alone.

“‘If you are careful,’ Garp wrote, ‘if you use good ingredients, and you don’t take any shortcuts, then you can usually cook something very good. Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day; what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love. Cooking, therefore, can keep a person who tries hard sane.’”

― John Irving

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The Journey of Needle’s Eye Academy

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Nicolle Moaney during Easton’s 51st Waterfowl Festival 

In April 2020, almost at the start of the pandemic, Jaelon Moaney, a recent political science graduate from Williams College in Massachusetts, asked a friend and former classmate, educator Nicolle Vittini Cabral, to help build a curriculum for an idea he had been developing. During his time in college, Jaelon had established a cohort program that had brought together high schoolers and Williams students to discuss, in small groups, a single book each semester. Since he was returning to the Eastern Shore, Jaelon thought a similar program could work in Talbot County.

He was right.

A Leadership Team was formed, comprised of the now-married Jaelon and Nicolle and joined by Jaelon’s sister Mikayla (Mika). They shared a dream – to spark a love of reading and civic participation in young people who rarely see themselves in textbooks. This vision became the heartbeat of Needle’s Eye Academy (NEA), which is described on their social media as a “multilingual, multinational means of unapologetic literary empowerment for the Black & Brown youth of MD’s Eastern Shore.”

In 2021, Cohort One launched as a virtual three-week summer experience for students of color entering ninth grade at Easton and St. Michaels High School. Their first book was a collection of short stories, Fresh Ink, edited by Lamar Giles. “We wanted to provide them an opportunity to engage with texts they might not otherwise have access to,” said Nicolle, Director of Academic Strategy. 

Cohort Two, which began this summer, evolved beyond its initial scope with an addition of social-emotional learning and community-building components, overseen by Mika, Director of Belonging and Impact. NEA also expanded the admissions to eighth, ninth, and tenth graders. “We’re trying to engage folks that wish they had an opportunity to participate in something like this, with the ultimate goal of boosting their appetite or even their enjoyment of being civically engaged,” said Jaelon. This engagement, Jaelon hopes, will extend to their immediate community and ultimately to Talbot County and beyond.

NEA recognized during the 2023 Light of Literacy Awards. l to r- Nicolle, Jaelon, and Mika Moaney

In this, Jaelon leads by example, and his dedication to the Eastern Shore community is palpable. As a 10th-generation Talbot County resident, he has an impressive curriculum vitae, which includes serving on the Talbot County Board of Education during his high school years, working as a Regional Director for US Senator Chris Van Hollen, and being appointed by Governor Moore to the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture.

With such a rich background, Jaelon does not rule out running for political office in the future, and his involvement with NEA might be a good breeding ground for that possibility–he truly cares about the people in his community. Elaborating on his approach as Director of Authentic Partnerships, he said: “We want anything that we’re building with another person, another family, another organization to be mutually beneficial, and ultimately, to uplift the people.” 

Like her brother, Mika is an Easton High School graduate and now a senior at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City. She feels her experience coming from a small-town environment into a big city has prepared her for her involvement with NEA. “What drives my work at the Academy is making sure everybody feels seen, heard, and valued. And I think that drives my work in the community as well.”

After graduating from Williams College, Nicolle worked as an elementary school science teacher in DC. She lasted about two and a half years. “I was just so burned out. I knew I wanted to continue to make a change in education, but being in the classroom in the traditional way was not going to be sustainable for me in the long run. So now I work in teacher recruitment in DC, and l stay connected with the classroom by leading these cohorts.”

Despite their differences and similarities, the Leadership Team is deeply committed to those they have taken under their wing. And in that, they have a lot of support. Besides an impressive array of board members on their team, their partnerships have been the key to their success. Talbot County Public School (TCPS) has cooperated in recommending students to their program. As has the Chesapeake Multicultural Resource Center (ChesMRC), which helped expand the program to include multilingual cohorts. Victoria Gomez Lozano, Hispanic Outreach Coordinator for ChesMRC, found the program a great opportunity, particularly for those to whom English is a second language. Lozano also said the participating NEA scholar reported being enthusiastic about her experience. 

NEA is particularly grateful for the collaboration with Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM), which has given the students the opportunity to connect literary exploration with hands-on, real-world issues. Nicolle explained, “CBMM has allowed scholars to learn more about the rich maritime history right here in the Chesapeake region. They have also given us the ability to delve and make parallels into themes the scholars read, like climate change and community resilience, and then engage with resources from the museum to amplify their learning experience.” 

NEA believes that this unique approach, coming at a time when adolescents are in a critical phase of self-discovery, enables scholars to understand how literature directly relates to their lives and community, empowering them to use their distinct experiences and perspectives for positive change. The goal, said Jaelon, is to equip them with the tools and confidence to embrace their potential as change-makers. “We want scholars to believe that no matter what it is they believe in, what they want to fight for, that it is the power within them to be able to do so,” he said.

As NEA looks to the future, the Leadership Team has ambitious plans for expansion and scholar engagement. They foresee engaging more counties and year-round programming. “We’re also thinking about how we can incentivize participation and get scholars to say, ‘I’m going to participate in the Needle’s Eye Academy instead of trying out for the soccer team,’” Nicolle said.

Whatever the future may hold, the Moaneys are committed to ensuring that NEA remains a community of support and guidance for scholars. Mika said, “We want this to be a legacy, a resource for students, no matter where they are in their academic journeys and whether or not they go to college. We want to make sure that they always know they have people who are more than happy and willing to help, motivate, and give them mentorship and connections. And as a kid of color, that’s not always the case. This is not just for one summer. We want this to be for a lifetime.”

Coming up:

With September designated as International Literacy Month, NEA will be holding their 

inaugural fundraiser, ‘Coloring the Canon,’ on September 9, at the Harriet Tubman UGRR Visitor Center Pavilion from 2-3:30. The event is described as: “a ranger-led welcome followed by an afternoon of light refreshments, inspiring remarks from a Tidewater author of color and an opportunity to design your very own book cover art.” To learn more and register, go to: https://m-scf.networkforgood.com/…/58546-coloring-the…

On September 20, NEA is co-hosting a community dialogue, ‘Read the Room,’ with the Easton branch of the Talbot County Free Library.

Starting in September, the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture is launching a book drive in every county across the state. NEA will partner with Talbot County Free Library to support that initiative. 

Next year (date TBD), NEA will be a part of the Talbot Family Network Conversations on Race,

Look for NEA’s bookmarks at Black and Brown businesses, libraries, and bookstores. They will also be partnering with the Black Caucus of the Maryland Library Association on additional sets of commemorative bookmarks. 

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For more information about NEA and any of the upcoming events, go to: https://neaest2020.wixsite.com/maryland/about 

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Human Geographies on the Eastern Shore

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Before my memory begins, but not really so very long ago, the only way to cross the Chesapeake Bay was in a boat. Even after the first span of the Bay Bridge was built in 1952, a culture of geographical isolation persisted. Even after the second span was added, a trip to the Western Shore was a big, rare, deal in my growing up years in Centreville. As a result, pretty much everyone on the Eastern Shore lived a life deeply rooted in farming and immersed in the world of watermen. Even if you didn’t grow food in the soil or pull it out of the water yourself, blood or business linked you to those who did. Anyone you saw in the post office, be they teachers or bankers or car mechanics, were entwined in the specific geographies of this area in a material, dirt-beneath-your-fingernails, river-water-in-your-ears kind of way. 

The defiant old refrain, “Don’t give a damn ’bout the whole state of Maryland, I’m from the EASTERN SHORE” came from resistance to building the Bay Bridge, and reflected the pride and fierce insistence on retaining a self-sufficient existence entwined in community and developed over centuries. There were two sides to this coin, of course (or more, if you want to get inter-dimensional about it). Self-sufficiency and a deep sense of place and community in the “land of pleasant living” also meant insularity, a lack of opportunities and resources from the outside world, and new ideas coming as fast as molasses going uphill in January, as my mother used to say.

It’s a bit different today. I left, as so many of us do, and returned years later to find that change does come eventually, even here, where the culture and the landscape seem to measure time on an entirely different scale from the outside world. Nowadays, farms and fishing no longer connect the whole of the population to the rhythms of the seasons, the taste of brackish water, and the squidge of mud caked on tractor tires. People can live on one side of the Bay and work on the other. Retirees are drawn here, contributing experience and perspectives from illustrious lives and all kinds of careers in all kinds of places. And of course, a generation of digital nomads can live where they choose while working in industries that weren’t dreamt of, not so very long ago. 

Unequivocally, this is progress. Like all progress, it creates opportunities and uncovers gaps that didn’t previously exist… or hadn’t been recognized. It means things are different for the crop of farmers and custodians of the land who have been coming up into 21st century Eastern Shore life. They have access to resources, ideas, and possibilities unavailable to previous generations—but peers and colleagues are a little harder to find, and the average post office interaction is less apt to include someone who can tell you where to get a water pump for an old 1972 John Deere tractor, or how to navigate the paperwork for the newest USDA farm program, or how to ensure that the farm will still be here for your kids decades from now—that is, if the kids want anything to do with it. 

Enter Next Generation Land Stewards! 

NGLS is a new program under the ShoreRivers umbrella, conceived and created by two ShoreRivers staff members: Agriculture and Outreach Coordinator Laura Wood, and Director of Community Engagement, Darran Tilghman. Laura and Darran were each navigating this 21st century landscape with their families, and knew they couldn’t be the only ones asking the same questions and working through the same challenges. With a healthy dose of the hallmark Eastern Shore mindset of self-sufficiency, they recognized the need and invented a solution. 

Darran and Laura sent out a call for others in similar situations to join an inaugural cohort of up and coming land stewards, assembling a group of active farmers with a variety of interests and specialties, people with non-farm day jobs, and members of upcoming generations preparing for the responsibility of protecting and preserving family farms. With a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, they developed a plan for a new program offering support, community, and resources to people working to preserve and protect Eastern Shore land while making them productive, profitable, and joyful for current and future generations. The first year, a pilot, would feature four gatherings where the group would eat together, hear from local experts on relevant topics, learn about each other’s farms and properties, and get to know each other. After the first two convenings, the program is already, without reservation, a raging success.

The first gathering took place on a sparkling late spring evening on the historic Hermitage Farm, beside the Chester River outside of Centreville. Dan Small, a field ecologist and manager of the Natural Lands Project at the Center for Environment and Society spoke and answered questions about how he helps public and private landowners navigate the incentive programs and access available funding to help generate income and support wildlife and clean water by installing wetlands and habitat buffers. Wildly Native Flower Farm in Chestertown hosted the second get-together, on an unbelievably hot morning in July. Liza Goetz led a tour of the farm and answered eager questions about the intricacies of a multi-generational business including grandparents, parents, and adult children participating and living on site. Michael Ports and David Satterfield of the Eastern Shore Land Conservancy led a lively discussion about conservation easements. 

Common themes emerged from the earliest moments of the first event: Love of the natural beauty and native flora and fauna; hope that today’s children will feel as profoundly connected to the place as their parents, and that they’ll be able to make it work on the Eastern Shore if they choose to stay. The struggle to make a small farm a viable business, and the creative approaches people have taken to generate additional revenue, such as Airbnb-ing, events hosting, and other side-businesses—or, indeed, full-time day jobs. The challenges of multi-generational decision-making and maintaining relationships with stakeholders who may be faraway and may or may not understand the joys and miseries of protecting, preserving, and working the land. Concerns about climate change, sea level rise, and market fluctuations.

Connecting the future with the past

Farms and workboats are still iconic elements of Eastern Shore life, but unlike in years gone by, it’s perfectly possible in 2023 to to live outside the daily dirt-beneath-your-fingernails, river-water-in-your-ears experience that was a matter of course until so very recently. The losses and gains of such changes are part of a natural flow; humans have always moved around and explored. What is constant are the impacts: of humans on the land and each other, and of the specificities of environments such as the Eastern Shore on the people who inhabit them. Our lives are enriched in these intersections, and at the same time, what we lose in the process makes us pine for a past that seems to slip away just as we begin to appreciate it. 

Already, Next Generation Land Stewards seems to be charting a course between overcoming the challenges and embracing the possibilities of a forward looking vision. I foresee it becoming an enduring and essential source of information and community for upcoming farmers and custodians of the land as they find ways, in Laura’s words, “to navigate the responsibilities of multigenerational land stewardship,” in community with others who are also caring for the land with an eye on the future while managing it for financial and agricultural success in the present, and preserving the sense of timelessness and singularity that makes it feel so special. 

Laura and Darran are full of visionary ideas for growing Next Generation Land Stewards beyond this initial year. Indeed, based on enthusiastic requests, additional informal get-togethers are in the works for this year to give the the group more chances to connect, share, ask questions, and hang out without agenda. ShoreRivers has already applied for funding to continue the program next year., If all goes well NGLS will become a deeply resourced and ongoing element of the organization’s portfolio, connecting and empowering successive new cohorts of Eastern Shore farmers and land stewards for years to come. 

Maria Wood traveled throughout the country as production and tour manager for award-winning musician David Grover, with whom she co-founded a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing education and fostering positive social change through music and music-making.  She returned to school mid-career, earning a BA in American Studies and a Certificate in Ethnomusicology from Smith College. More recently, she has written and taught on the meaning and impact of the musical Hamilton, served as Deputy Campaign Manager for congressional candidate Jesse Colvin and was Executive Director of Chestertown RiverArts. She lives in a multigenerational human/feline household in Chestertown. 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.