Jean, 1: Deer and hornworms, 0, and other stuff

This post is a conglomeration of various topics, as you'll soon see.

I'll start with the "other stuff."

Here we have a lobsterman, out checking his traps just off shore near the Lobster Shack in Cape Elizabeth.

Ken and I went to the Lobster Shack one day last week, a Monday, in fact. thinking we wouldn't have to fight the crowds to place our order.

We were wrong. Apparently the tourists don't all go back to their respective states once Labor Day has passed. We waited in line about 30 minutes before ordering, then sat at a picnic table while our order was being prepared. The wait was worth it, though. Delicious lobster rolls.

After leaving the Lobster Shack on Two Lights Road, we drove out to Portland Head Light on Shore Road in Cape Elizabeth. It's called "the most photographed lighthouse in the world," and I know I've done my share of that abundant photographing. It's a lighthouse that looks beautiful in any weather, so it's fun to capture its beauty on each visit.

I thought we'd head home after leaving the light house, but Ken suggested we drive into Portland to check out the cruise ship currently in port. It was the Celebrity Summit, and it was large. Ken assured me, though, that much larger cruise ships come into Portland Harbor over the course of the summer and fall.

We checked out the stern....

...and the bow, and we watched its passengers wending their way from the shops in the Old Port back to the ship. There were hundreds of them.







So that was a pleasant late-summer day, a chance to squeeze out a last bit of Maine summer beauty before facing the winter ahead.

This photo, completely unrelated to the above, obviously, is here merely to give you a chuckle. It's what happens to the simmering spaghetti sauce when one thinks she'll dash to her computer for a quick little browse and gets lost in the maze that is cyberspace.

If only I'd thought to put the cover on the Dutch oven before abandoning it!

Remember my concerns about the deer who wandered dangerously close to my garden, and about the hornworms who took a shine to some of my tomato plants?

Well, I won! As you can see by the tomatoes and green peppers here, my garden was a success. The items here in the photo are only the final vegetables I picked; I've been canning tomatoes, making spaghetti sauce (as you saw above), and chopping and freezing green peppeprs. I've also made and frozen two large batches of dynamites--not the explosive kind, but the eating kind.

I like honesty, though, so I suppose I should confess my garden wasn't a complete success. The cucumbers and zucchini stopped producing way too early, the pumpkin plants yielded only three pumpkins, the beets I planted never did come up, and a little critter of some kind, possibly a mouse, took a liking to one of my butternut squashes, eating a large hole into its very core, for heaven's sake. But all in all, my garden did pretty well despite the heavy, drowning rains we got for over a week right after planting in June.

Finally, I thought you might like to see my assistant in all things culinary. If I'm in the kitchen, she's there, too. She usually sets up a roadblock, like this one, which means I have to carefully step over her as I move about the kitchen. I wouldn't dream of asking her to move. I've even been known to say, "Excuse me, Molly," when I carefully step over her.

So that's that. A mish-mash of topics.