Lakeville, Connecticut

Sometimes, very rarely, if invited to a place like Lakeville, Connecticut and if I am cooked for all weekend, provided the opportunity to eat tomatoes picked right off the vine, savor temperatures never over 90 degrees, and allowed to explore the glories of pastures, haystacks, hammocks, and Ferraris, I'll write a whole entry about it. In this case, it's fairly easy to make an exception to traditionally restrictive blog-worthy categories like "top 100 restaurant" or "BBQ place in Oklahoma," particularly if the inviter exerts a bit of pressure as to the likelihood of a blog entry being created. I'm not entirely averse to being coopted.

My first trip in and out of Connecticut took me and my hospitable friends deliberately to the Red Rooster, my first of many celebrations of Americana in Connecticut (correction: a loyal New Yorker reader let me know I was, in fact, in New York not Connecticut). With no-frills burgers and fries, delicious peanut butter milkshakes, and al fresco dining (fancy picnic benches with paint that cools in-the-sun metal in a mulched courtyard), we were better able to gird ourselves for the requisite amounts of energy it would take to regularly sun ourselves, eat, and decide on which types of wine we would drink for the next four days.



















A few hours later, me and Jane Austen were here.


Foreign to an amateur food writer was the dearth of restaurant-going: we had ice cream at Sweet Williams and of course, the Red Rooster Drive In and Mini Golf, but we focused our culinary attentions on preparing a variety of delicious meals. I was on vacation so didn't know where my phone was most of the time, reducing my propensity both to remember and be able to take photographs of my meals. But, if there is little difference between the quality of the dish when I randomly remembered my camera and the culinary highlights of the weekend, that delta means my meals were uniformly delicious.

We had swordfish steaks and fresh corn...


















And caprese salad...


Double cheeseburgers...


And our final evening, a tiki-lit dinner in the middle of a field...


I did a fair amount of slow meandering and engaged in a bit of casual pensiveness.



















In the equally superlative tier of what else was good to eat was the garden, the source of the best parts of meals: fresh rosemary in the potatoes; tomatoes on the sandwiches, in salads, and absconded on the way to the pool; mint in the cocktails and water; and basil in the salads.






































We also stuffed tomatoes with Black Cats for post-meal shows (we needed shorter wicks for in-air explosions; the contiguous cans of Whoop Ass gave a more reliable show).


In between all the relaxing, we managed to find a few spare moments for a trip to the races. Ferrari, not horse. We saw the pretty Ferraris...



















And the ones emanating heat, just having completed their laps minutes earlier.



















For a cinematic, automotive masterpiece, watch this (it will make you feel like Dale Earnhart, William Wallace, and a Roman gladiator all at once):



Top 100, I'll be back tomorrow.