Nana’s Date Bars. Photo by Hallie Flint Gilman At the back of the derelict 1856 farmhouse my husband Ned and I have been stewarding since 2019 is a gaping hole of an attic room, full of potential, with three broken square windows facing due east toward the Kennebec River and the sunrise. We hope to have a bedroom there one day, but in the meantime, we mostly visit it to check how badly the chimney flashing has leaked (pretty badly) and to try, as winter approaches, to close up the house to the elements.
The cold wind makes our knuckles ache and the sills are a chaos of wasp remains, but I don’t ask Ned which elements, exactly, he hopes to keep out with the rough boards screwed across the cracked panes. Some logic is better left unexamined. If you’d like to contribute to Home Plates, send a recipe and a story telling us how you came to cook it, who you cook it for and why it’s found a place in your life to pgrodinsky@pressherald.
com . Also, please tell us a little bit about your life as a home cook, include a photo of the dish, and yourself, possibly together, and let us know the source of the recipe. Witness, for example, how recently, in the more civilized (read: heated, plumbed, electrified) environs of our city kitchen in Portland, Ned did not ask why I was compelled to test a stack of date bar recipes, documenting each version with notes and photos and orchestrating a family-wide taste test.
My paternal grandmother spoke reverently of tomato aspic, which is like B.