It is New Year's Eve! Happy New Year everyone!

New Year's Eve is traditionally amateur night for drinkers. Christine and I like to find a happy home locally to get together with friends, cook good food, have a few drinks to celebrate the greatness of last year and happily bring in the hopes and dreams of the New Year.

I am making a dish that I cooked at a competition a year and a half ago. Even though it did not score that great with the judges, it is an amazing dish. Lime marinated scallops, wrapped in prosciutto on rosemary skewers.

As a competitor on the BBQ trail, I have had my fair share of highs, lows, and "Should Have Beens". While getting started in BBQ, some of the teams associated with NEBS (New England BBQ Society) will mentor rookies testing the waters. Originally, I was allowed to cook with Andy King and The Bastey Boys. I have become a Bastey Boy. I was fortunate enough to cook with Michelle Taft, Terry Sullivan, and Sully (no Gary Taft this time) of Lunchmeat at the 2011 Roc City Rib Fest in Rochester, NY.

As a mentoring BBQ cook, I cooked only one category. Being the coastal rat that I am, I selected scallops as my entry. Competition is tough in Rochester. Fifty BBQ teams converge on the shores of Lake Ontario for Memorial Day. These are not your run of the mill teams. The competition is some of the toughest around.

Our usual Saturday adventure was almost entirely displaced today by the very important matter of replacing our backup conveyance. After 13 years of Chevy Malibus, your earnest and hard-working Pilgrims will be exploring New England in a Chevy Impala. Friends and relations of your ever-lovin' Pilgrim know how terribly conservative we are, but time marches on and there was no Malibu to meet our needs. This week's Saturday will be on Sunday, in the Impala!

I had to disable Search because it was broken. A behind-the-scenes software change in a module at the hosting site caused the Search function to break. I have an upgrade to fix it, and hope to get to it by the end of this week or on Sunday. I apologize for not having this valuable function!

For the longest time I always thought sausage came in two ways - either cased like a "sausage" or else in a patty. You could mix it with tomatoes to create nice gravy for your spaghetti, grill it to enjoy with peppers and onions, pan sear it for breakfast, or whatever. It was not until about a year and a half ago that I discovered Sausage Fatty. Google it, it is a real thing that can inspire much cooking creativity.

This weekend I competed with the Andy King and The Bastey Boys in a BBQ Cooking Contest at the Harvard Fall Festival  in Harvard, MA. There were two sausage contests; People’s Choice and New England BBQ Society (NEBS) Grilling. The past two years I have entered these events using a homemade sausage from the Sausage Lady on Rt. 27 Hanson. I would buy her Smoked Provolone & Roasted Red Pepper sausage and grill it, with excellent results.

It was a year ago that the rains of Hurricane Irene began and didn't stop. The roads and homes of Vermont were pounded and flooded and just plain wrecked. The people weren't.

After the storm, Bobcat Cafe and Brewery brewed their special Flood Suds Belgian-style Wit. It's Belgian-style, not Belgian, because everything in it is from Vermont!  The ingredients are listed on the bottle. Take that, Irene!

This is more than symbolic. Vermont needed lots of dollars to repair the damage wrought by Irene. Dollars spent locally strengthen the whole community, circulating from pocket to pocket until they leave to fatten some far-off corporation's bottom line.  The dollars that might have been spent on Belgian malt or noble hops from Europe went to local farmers, who spent it repairing their own properties.

Beyond that, Bobcat brewed a heck of a Wit. It's delicious. I gave it 5 stars on Untappd, and I don't do that often. We had it with a broiled haddock and greens (reds?) from the Heaven's Harvest Farm CSA and my favorite Greek salad. The beer was a perfect match for the summer fare!

I took a vacation day on a late summer Friday and spent it exploring Boston's North End.  I love the North End for shopping and eating, people-watching and just exploring. I love the narrow back alleys and the smells and the sounds, and the shops cluttered with all sorts of good stuff that I can't get anywhere else.

I visited a number of favorite shops, including:

We left the Sunday rain behind us and took the interstate highways to Quechee Gorge and then country roads to VT100 so we could explore that fine road through the middle part of the state as far as the Mad River Valley and Rte 89, and to see Montpelier. One of the most exciting things I saw was before we ever left Quechee.

There is a big complex at Quechee that includes a Cabot store, a huge antiques coop, a winery, and some other shops. Now there is a brand new building there: the new distillery for Vermont Spirits, makers of Vermont Gold and Vermont White vodkas. In the middle of the photo you can see the still with the tall, tall column.  

I am not a big vodka fan. I buy it sometimes to make vanilla extract, but I don't keep it in my liquor cabinet. So why get excited about the vodka distillery? Against the far wall was a big rick filled with oak aging barrels. Vodka doesn't get aged, so what's the story? I discovered that Vermont Spirits is aging a new apple brandy product!