blueberry sauce – Eat, Play, Love

I had planned to save my favorite Maine recipe for last. You know that old save the best for last thing, but this dish is just too good to hold back, and more importantly it goes perfectly with the blueberry sauce. I’m calling it a handmade shortbread, which I again adapted from the cabin’s cookbook Lobster Rolls & Blueberry Pie by Rebecca Charles and Deborah DiClementi.

This recipe comes from the author’s grandmother, so I didn’t change-up the ingredients too much. I mean who am I to mess with a grandma’s recipe. In my experience, they know their stuff. Really the biggest change I made was in the preparation. The book uses a mixer to create the shortbread, but given the ingredients’ similarity to a pie crust and my love for making them…I decided to make this one by hand.

I started by cutting up two sticks of unsalted butter and sifting together the dry ingredients. The key here is to use room temperature butter for the shortbread. Continue reading →

Shhh! No one make a sound!

Can something so good be so easy? Yes. So easy in fact, that every night we were in Maine, after the kids went to sleep — usually after a short drive to “look for moose” or “watch the sunset” since that was the only way we could get Miss A to fall asleep — I made dessert. As parents, when you’re on family vacations, you do what you need to in order to get your kids to sleep and enjoy a few hours of alone time; even if that means driving for an hour at dusk because otherwise you’ll be awake with a three-year old until midnight. After that night, we took no chances.

Prior to our visit to the Pine Tree State I could take or leave blueberries. I typically only eat them in yogurt parfait. The kids on the other hand, love blueberries. They’d eat them straight-up at every meal if they could. So since blueberries grow wild all over Down East Maine and the kids love them, I figured I’d feature them in a few desserts. The first one I tried was again inspired by the book, Lobster Rolls & Blueberry Pie by Rebecca Charles and Deborah Di Clementi – Blueberry Sauce. Continue reading →