Peaks Island

Amrys has already posted a pretty good recap of the Peaks Island weekend of a few weeks back, but here are a few of the highlights:

• Margaritas courtesy of the Margarita Mistress. Truly without peer in the beverage world. Aren't you guys glad I made us buy a gross of limes at Sir Sav-a-Lot?
  
• Garlic & scallion mashed potatoes. Uber-delicious. High butter content. Disappeared before I could get a second helping. "Damn, I made them too delicious."
  
• Bacon-wrapped sausages. Although the theory has been bandied about for some time in culinary circles, the first known attempt at bacon-wrapped sausage came about on this very trip. On Saturday morning Josh woke up bright and early and cooked up a gigantic breakfast jam for the house full of guests and our gracious hosts, Amrys and Paul. Josh, possessed perhaps by the spirit of Brillat-Savarin, took it upon himself to create a breakfast delicacy combining our breakfast sausage and bacon. He partially fried up the sausage, then wrapped it in partially-fried bacon. Once he had each link cozily wrapped in a coil of edible bliss, he fried it up in a growing pool of sizzling bacon and sausage fat. To bite into a bacon-wrapped sausage is - and I am not one for hyperbole - to come as close to the presence of God as we mere mortals can hope to achieve on this earth.
• Raspberry pie made from freshly-picked berries
  
• Whiffleball
• The Peaks Island Military Reservation. This was a very cool bit of history. The Reservation existed from 1906-1943, providing harbor defense for Portland during the two World Wars. After Pearl Harbor, the Army enhanced the existing searchlight shelter, generator and bunker with more bunkers, towers, a mine casement, gun emplacements and two enormous concrete batteries, built to house 16-inch guns normally found on battleships. These behemoths, long since dismantled, were able to lob a 2,000-pound shell up to 26 miles. We investigated Battery Steele, now a desolate concrete shell covered in overgrowth and vandalized by half a century of idle youth. The walls were covered in graffiti; the inside bore the remnants of typical teenager amusement - beer cans, trash, a burnt mattress, a dismembered wicker bench. It was a curious ruin indeed on a tiny island off the coast of Maine, but it was very important for a brief period during WWII.
• The Amtrak Downeaster. I really enjoy traveling by train.
  

Photographs.