Well — our first full day in NH was Saturday July 5 and it’s Opening Day for the Wilmot Farmers’ Market. We can WALK there – I am SO excited about that. The kids asked if they could take plastic bags to pick up trash along the way (!!!) and off we went. Sadly, we filled a bag of trash on our short walk (Note to our local beer-drinkers: Find a trashcan. ps: life’s too short to drink bad beer…Ditch the Bud. Yours, MM.)

Being this far north we’re just starting the summer harvest season. We scoped out the yummies and planned supper. We bought: kale, garlic scapes, and leaf lettuce from Two Mountain Farm, and the most gorgeous semi-boneless leg of lamb from Fruit Cake Farm. At Autumn Harvest Farm we picked up some potted basil, thyme and rosemary to transplant (since I hadn’t had a chance to get any started back in Maryland) and a dozen eggs that were soooooo good. The kids fell in love with honey sticks from Cutting Farm, too. I was a little taken by the abundance and quality of the food — next thing you know I was buying an $8 loaf of french bread. Don’t get me wrong – it was great bread but even in DC and NY you don’t pay $8/loaf for the best, freshest, most authentic Italian and French bread there is (except for the stuff in, well, Italy and France.) Thankfully I found more reasonably priced bread at another local market.

I am really looking forward to Local Supper Nights each Saturday as I am calling them.

The following Tuesday we celebrated being partly unpacked (yeah, I know — any excuse for a party but we needed a pick me up) and I made a fresh (and local!) lob-stah dinner, complete with fresh (and local!) corn and a salad of leaf lettuce, pine nuts, fresh goat cheese from Twig Farm dressed with some gorgeous peppery olive oil my mom brought back from Tuscany last Fall, sea salt and fresh ground pepper and a squirt of fresh lemon juice. It was fabulous until I realized our nutcrackers were at my friend Deb’s (left behind at the last crab feast on the Chesapeake) and we had no butter. Ah well — we muddled through and I had the best leftovers ever…a fresh lobster roll for dinner the next night.

We’re still drowning in boxes but some rooms are more or less unpacked which gives us a respite. The kids are adjusting beautifully — for which I am so thankful — and we’re looking forward to our trip to Maryland at the end of August for A’s birthday and my girlfriend Renee’s Labor Day Bash. Working with the relo company to sell the Maryland house is proving to be an absolute nightmare (they say Sirva, we say Satan…) but this too shall pass…eventually. The latest bugaboo is that when we repaired some drywall in the basement we apparently disturbed some mold spores so we now have “bad air” which must be remediated and reinspected by July 31. Or else they won’t buy the house. Sigh. Well, we’ll get through it, I’m sure…