Emergency Dessert

Julia and I were invited out for dessert a couple of days ago. The idea was that we would bring something to share. Julia had planned on making one of her fresh fruit pies. This involves making a bit of fruit sauce and pouring over uncooked fruit which is on cream cheese in the bottom of a cooked pie shell. She has made this with any kind of berries.

But the #&@!! oven wouldn't light so she couldn't bake a pie shell.

Julia had already made the blueberry sauce that goes into the pie. AHA! We could go to the local convenience store and get some cake shells for shortcake. No go. They don't carry them, so she got some plain doughnuts instead. The result: the Bristol Doughnut Shortcake.

Mike Stevens suggested we add ice cream, but would that be too decadent?

How'd that there hole git in that doughnut?

Did you ever wonder where donuts came from (in a historical sense)? The Portland Press Herald ran a great piece about the origin of the donut - more specifically, the origin of the hole that makes a doughnut a doughnut.

Hansen Gregory - a Rockport, Maine, ship captain - regaled the invention in an interview with The Washington Post on March 26, 1916:

"Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted. I don't think we called them doughnuts then -- they was just 'fried cakes' and 'twisters.'

"Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion."

"Well, I says to myself, 'Why wouldn't a space inside solve the difficulty?' I thought at first I'd take one of the strips and roll it around, then I got an inspiration, a great inspiration.

"I took the cover off the ship's tin pepper box, and -- I cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!"

Read the entire article from the Press Herald:
Maine's historical firsts include a leap of doughy inspiration

It was quite a challenge finding the doughnut info. Most of the donut history websites have nothing to do with donuts except for the name of the site. Am I missing something?

Weather -- or Not?

We have been having a run of beautiful weather here in Round Pond - the usual result of storms in the Gulf of Mexico pumping dry Canadian air down into New England. Our hearts go out to the folks in Florida who got 26 inches of rain last week and to all the evacuees from New Orleans this week.

Next week will be the last display of the Blue Angels in Maine. The Brunswick Naval Air Station is being closed and the squadron shifted to Jacksonville. I think it's a mistake myself. With the military presence gone from northern New England (bases in Limestone, ME and Portsmouth, NH, closed a few years ago and the base in Bangor a few years before that) there is nothing to keep Canada from invading Maine and annexing us to the Maritime Provinces. They pretend to be polite and self-effacing but can you trust them?