Dining at Ocean Point Inn

Maine Picnics

You may think that Picnics is an odd topic for January! Well, start dreaming of an oceanfront Picnic at Ocean Point Inn. When I lived in Vermont, we often backpacked a picnic lunch on a cross country ski adventure even in below zero weather. It was delightful.

Another type of winter picnic is great for mothers of young children. Let them have a Beach Picnic inside. Don bathing suits, put beach towels on the floor and have a picnic in front of the fireplace!! Read a book about the beach and do a shell craft. Blow up lots of blue balloons to cover the floor and hide little sea creatures under the balloons. Pretend to be wading in the ocean looking for sea creatures. This is also a fun way to have a birthday party for young children.

Picnics evolved from the traditions of elaborate outdoor feasts the wealthy. Having picnics is credited to the Europeans but today it is enjoyed around the world. The word picnic can be traced back to 1748 in a 16th century French text.

Hundreds of years ago picnic meant a pot luck. By the 1860s it started meaning everyone eating outdoors but not bringing food. By the mid 19th century Americans developed an interest in picnics.

Picnic foods tend to vary according to regions of the country. New Englanders love a thermos of clam chowder, southerners love barbeque and mid-westerners like chili and biscuits.

If you are staying at the Ocean Point Inn, think about having picnics on the rocks, at the beach, at a lake, on a mountain or on a dock. Life is good at a picnic!! You can order box lunches at the Inn’s Front Desk the night before and designate the time you wish to pick them up. The East Boothbay General Store is also a great source of picnic food and drink.

Children love to go on picnics. The following food are favorites with children.

opi-picnic2 ABC Pasta Salad
Nutrella on Crackers
Melon Swizzlers
Fruit Salad in an Ice Cream Cone
Fruit Punch with Fruit in Ice Cubes
Sandwiches cut with Cookie Cutters
S’More Bars

Pack the kids lunches in beach sand pails with a shovel. They will have a toy to play with after the picnic. Don’t forget antibacterial lotion and hand wipes.

For an adult picnic on the rocks, you can easily pick up the following while traveling:

Fresh Bread
Cheese
Cold Meats
Fresh Fruit
Wine

Create a gourmet picnic with your own imagination, maybe with some Maine lobster salad.

If you are close enough to Ocean Point, a picnic on the rocks in the winter is fun as well. Bundle up! If it is too cold and windy to eat out on the rocks, park your car next to the ocean where you can enjoy the view and hear the surf from your car. The following foods are great for a winter picnic:

Hot Soup
Hot Chili
Hot Cider
Hot Cocoa
Energy Bars

Make picnics a part of your next vacation at the Ocean Point Inn.

Traditional Maine Foods

As guests come to Ocean Point Inn, they bring questions about “Maine Food.” They want to know “what the locals eat!” The questions have me thinking about what foods are traditional Maine foods??

Of course, everyone thinks of Maine lobster - steamed, baked stuffed - like our house recipe for Linekin Bay Lobster, lobster rolls, lobster stew, lobster salad and more. Steamed clams and mussels are often served with the lobster. Folks also look for a good fish chowder, commonly made with haddock in this area, and served with chowder crackers and sweet pickles. Our Ocean Point Inn Crab Cakes can’t be beat - made with fresh Maine crabmeat. Oysters, farmed right here on the Damariscotta River, are great raw on the half shell, stewed or fried.

The most common dessert with a Lobster Dinner is Blueberry Pie, the Maine State Dessert, made with wild Maine blueberries. Our Ocean Point Inn pies have people coming back for more! An older blueberry dessert that I love is Blueberry Dumplings. You boil the wild blueberries with sugar and drop the dumpling batter into the berries to cook - delish with homemade vanilla ice cream. Blueberry Cobbler, Crisp and Grunt are wonderful. Do you know the differences among them? Grunts, Pandowdy and Slumps are varieties of the Cobbler. Bettys and Buckles are made with a batter similar to cake batter. These desserts are served with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream. The names sound unusual but, trust me, they are all delicious.

Needhams, which were first made in Portland, Maine, in 1872 by Reverend Needham, are a wonderful candy treat. Believe it or not, they are made with mashed potato. You would never know it to eat one! The coconut and chocolate are the flavors that you taste.

Whoopie Pies have always been an old Maine favorite but are now popular in more of the country. Williams Sonoma even sells a pan for whoopee pies! Chocolate with a white crème filling is traditional but pumpkin with a cream cheese filling is yummy in the fall.

In addition to beautiful foliage, fall in Maine brings Baked Bean Church Suppers. Some bake the beans in the ground. They are traditionally served with “brown bread” which was originally a very dark bread with raisins that was baked in a coffee can. As a child, the round bread showing the rings from the can was fascinating to me.

Venison, deer meat, shows up on many Maine tables during the fall hunting season. There are sometimes fundraisers offering a “Wild Game Dinner” which includes venison and more exotic meats like moose, bear and raccoon.

New England Boiled Dinner is popular in the fall as the root vegetables are harvested from the garden. Cabbage, carrots, turnip, beets and potatoes are cooked with corned beef. The flavors blend together for a delicious meal.

As the temperatures rise in March, the maple sap starts to run and maple syrup season is underway. “Sugar on Snow,” hot maple syrup poured over the frozen snow makes a sweet sticky candy that is served with doughnuts and dill pickles. Hard to tell how that combination got started!

Once the grass is growing, the dandelions pop up. Many Mainers love to pick the early dandelion greens before they flower. The greens are traditionally cooked with salt pork and served with vinegar.

Fiddleheads, a member of the fern family, are also popular.
These days they are readily available in the grocery stores. They are fun to pick and pickled with dill they make a very tasty appetizer.

How many of these traditional Maine foods have you eaten? Look for them on your next trip to Maine, staying with us at Ocean Point Inn!

Lobster History and Amazing Facts

When the first settlers arrived in North America there were so many lobsters they would wash ashore and pile up two feet deep. They were considered “poor man’s protein.”

Native Americans used lobsters for fertilizer and fish bait. They baked them under seaweed over hot rocks, thus starting the New England Clambakes we enjoy today.

In the beginning lobsters were gathered by hand. In the late 1700s boats called smacks with saltwater tanks were used to transport live lobsters. The men who ran these boats were called “smackmen.” In the mid-19th century lobster traps were first used in Maine.

Lobster were so inexpensive they were fed to prisoners, apprentices, slaves and children during colonial times. These people became tired of being fed lobster!

The first lobster pound started in 1876 in Vinalhaven, Maine. By the 1880s lobster became popular in Boston and New York and the prices started to rise.

American lobster, or Maine lobster, can weigh more than 40 pounds and be up to 3 feet long. The largest lobster on record was caught off Nova Scotia and believed to have been over 100 years old. It weighed 44 pound and was 42 inches long.

The lobster stands out for its unusual anatomy. Its brain is located in its throat, nervous system in its abdomen, teeth in its stomach and kidneys in its head! Lobsters hear with their legs and taste with their feet. They can be right-clawed or left-clawed and favor that claw.

If crowded into tanks they become cannibalistic and eat each other. Their claws need to be banded to prevent this situation.

Lobsters are a very healthy food with fewer calories than an !equal portion of skinned chicken. They offer healthy omega-3 fatty acids, potassium and vitamins E, B-12 and B-6. Maine Lobster is on or menu nightly at Ocean Point served many delicious ways from our famous Lobster Stew, to Linekin Bay Stuffed Lobster.

What amazing creatures they are