❤️Baby's first Edible East End blog post ❤️

As seen on www.EdibleEastEnd.com

Seafood and Barbecue at 

All for the East End Fund-raiser

Comment | August 21, 2013 | By Gianna Volpe | Photographs by Gianna Volpe

                               

Smoked oysters on brioche with whipped cream cheese, cauliflower foam and fresh dill from the Inn Spot on the Bay.

A sea of smiles and sweet tunes rolled into Riverhead Monday night for the All for the East End event at Martha Clara Vineyards, which brought a thousand-plus guests to the Sound Avenue farm to dance and nosh the night away in the name of the region’s thousand-plus nonprofits.

Local vendors, including The Wandering Palate, Foody’s and Blondie’s Bake Shop, lined the event’s perimeter for general admission guests in need of something to snack on, but a VIP ticket allowed its owner access to a separate food tent, where a host of East End restauranteurs served up heavenly hors d’oeuvres. Picture-perfect seafood plates made up the majority of the bite-sized samples, including theNorth Fork Table & Inn’s, which prepared a delectable poached shrimp with red Thai peppers, lemongrass emulsion, green papaya and peanuts.

                                

Cindy Halloran, left, and Claudia Fleming of North Fork Table and Inn.

The seafood plates were all superb and thematically appropriate to the strictly East End affair, but because Riverhead’s Maple Tree BBQ strayed from the sea, they were a welcome addition to the line-up as my taste buds became fatigued with fish, and, in my mind, the barbecue joint served two of the evening’s most delicious dishes.
“For the first dish, we put smoked baked beans with an Alabama-style barbecue chicken on crostini with a white horseradish-based barbecue sauce, topped with red hot barbecue sauce,” said Maple Tree’s Sean Judge of their Monday evening offerings. “Our second is herb crusted potatoes, North Carolina-style barbecue pulled pork and white horseradish-based barbecue sauce.”

To transition my tastebuds back to seafood, I stopped at the table of “Cheffe” Collette Connor of the Inn Spot on the Bay, where I was able to sample the best of both worlds. The Hampton Bays eatery served smoked oysters on brioche with whipped cream cheese, cauliflower foam and fresh dill, which Connor said was just for garnish, but I ate the entire sprig anyhow. (I love dill.)

“The oysters are local, and so are we,” said Connor, who coined the term for lady chef, “Cheffe,” with Inn Spot on the Bay co-owner, Cheffe Pamela.

Gianna Volpe is a freelance multimedia reporter on the East End of Long Island and one of 2013′s New York Press Association Rookie Reporters of the Year. She received her bachelor degree in journalism with an emphasis in photojournalism at the University of Missouri in 2010 and grew up at the foot of the Palisades in New Jersey, which overlook New York City. She now lives in Riverhead. Follow her on twitter @agentjanefox

Filling in the gap

Now that I've downloaded the blogger app for my iPhone, I'm sure I will begin using this more frequently (rather than next to never.)

Let me update you: I am currently one of the four New York Press Association "Rookie Reporters of the Year," an award I won the Suffolk Times for my reporting throughout 2012.

This is something I'm incredibly proud of - especially because two of the four rookie reporters are from the Queens Courier, where crime actually occurs now and again.

Obviously I'm being a bit facetious and truth be told, I am incredibly proud I received this honorable award.

So don't worry, I have made sure to tell every living creature that has crossed my path in the past few months that, "I'm one of the four New York Press Association 'Rookie Reporters of the Year.'"

I celebrated the win by consistently scooping a former colleague with crime stories, which was fun!

Now I've turned to freelancing stories, mostly for magazines and newspaper supplements.

This is something I've been avoiding (along with living in New York City.....until I have enough money to actually LIVE there..... because if I'm going to just scrape by I would rather do it with some leg room), but at this point in the game I'm beginning to wonder why.

Something I finally said out loud today while pondering why it felt like Denise Civiletti had just stabbed me in the abdomen when she suggested I turn my sights toward magazines is that my training as a newspaper writer and photographer may have led me to look down on magazines.

The gloss, the flash, the color, the broader brush employed through their diction induced a recoiling reaction from me.

I was so busy learning to kill my voice that I couldn't even think about marrying it to my facts, which is why features were actually more difficult for me when I was starting out!

Now I write features like it ain't no thang and during my tenure at Times/Review, I certainly wrote a lion's share of those bad boys.

Nowadays I get steady work with the Sag Harbor Express, will hopefully continue writing/photographing for Edible East End and the other gorgeous Edible magazines, and have just begun my relationships with the Southampton Press, Long Island Business News and Dan's Papers.

Barbaraellen Koch, a local veteran photojournalist for whom I have the utmost respect, thinks it's time for me to somehow get into The New York Times, maybe by writing a column about the two weeks I just spent being homeless on the East End or by breaking a big story............ So yeah, if you are the Long Island serial killer, hit me up at agentjanefox@gmail.com and offer me an exclusive because I'm not sure if The Grey Lady prints columns written by veritable nobodies!

I will start updating this ol' boy with my work - I swear! So people can um. You know. Read my stuff. And things.

That's all I got, so signing off, this is special agent Jane Fox aka Gianna Volpe.

Over and out

Missing historic gravestone returned to Jamesport Cemetery

Missing historic gravestone returned to Jamesport Cemetery

GIANNA VOLPE PHOTO | George Penny replaces the footstone of his ancestor Nathan Penny to its rightful location at Jamesport Cemetery Monday as Mattituck historian Norman Wamback watches.

It has been nearly thirty years since the 18th century footstone from Nathan Penny’s grave mysteriously appeared on a back doorstep at the Mattituck-Laurel Historical Society’s Main Road campus. But what was called “the footloose footstone” finally returned to its proper place on Monday with Mr. Penny’s great-great-great-great-great grandson George working the shovel and patting down the soil surrounding it.

“It’s amazing to see it back here after all these years,” said Mr. Penny, a former Southold Town Board member, looking down a now-uninterrupted line of footstones in the Jamesport Cemetery. “I assume that mischievous kids dug it up, but that makes no sense because it’s, pardon the expression, in the dead center of the cemetery.”

Mr. Penny, who has spent years researching his family’s genealogy, called Norman Wamback, the historical society’s curator and historian, to ask for the stone shortly after the Suffolk Times ran an article about it in 2003. But close to a decade passed before Nathan Penny’s headstone was discovered in Jamesport.

“I had no idea where he was buried but found references that said he both lived and was buried in Jamesport,” Mr. Penny said. “My friend Dana Davis knew where the spot was because he had seen it around the time of the article, but we failed to pick up the footstone when we were looking for the spot last week. Once you see the distinguished shape of the footstone, you know to look for a headstone that’s similar, but we didn’t do that. It took us an hour and a half to do it the dumb, old-fashioned way – looking and scratching and scraping.”

The oldest recorded ancestor in Mr. Penny’s genealogy is Nathan Penny’s great-grandfather, John, one of Southold’s original pioneers.

Nathan Penny, George Penny said, is the first of his oldest ancestors that he’s come to know anything about. Mr. Penny has a copy of Nathan Penny’s will, written near his death on May 16, 1768. At that time, what’s now Riverhead was still part of Southold, which extended all the way to Wading River.

In the will, Nathan Penny described himself as being “sick and weak.” He bequeathed his 15 acres of land and buildings, purchased from Ezekiel Petty Jr., to his wife, Mary, and son, Joseph, who became Captain Joseph Penny and had 13 children.

“He basically populated Aquebogue,” Mr. Penny said. “Half of the children went to Hampton Bays, known then as Good Ground. So half of them went to the South Fork and then some of them came over here and settled on the North Fork. That’s when Captain Joseph Jr. went to Greenport and married his cousin, Harmony Squires. George Gilbert, Joseph Jr.’s direct descendent, lived on Shelter Island and married Esther Cheryl Havens, so there’s a whole Havens connection with the Havens House on Shelter Island. That’s my next stop.”

Nathan Penny also had five daughters: Mary, Katharine, Hannah, Esther and Pergis.

“I’ve just got to find out more about him now,” Mr. Penny said after replacing the footstone. “It’s all part of a continuing saga of research. I’ve got to count on people like Norm here to give me more information.”

gvolpe@timesreview.com

Long time, no talkies!

Hello blog!

I have failed to update you for a long while, but as a staff multimedia photojournalist of the Times/Review NewsGroup, my work (written and visual) has been consistently published on the web at both

The Suffolk Times and The Riverhead News-Review websites

and of course, in the newspapers.

Occasionally, one of my pieces will make it onto The Shelter Island Reporter website or in the print version of The Reporter, but much less often than when I was a staff reporter there last year.

I regularly do the police report for The Suffolk Times, as well as write features and news, shoot video and photograph for both the Suffolk Times and News-Review, as well as write and photograph for our supplements, such as the Wine Press, the Vacation Guide, the senior sourcebook, Home and Gardening, Health & Fitness, etc.

A photograph of mine will actually be the cover of the upcoming Wine Press issue, which I'm very excited about! I hear that a synthesis of my cover stories about this year's harvest will also be featured in the magazine. We'll see!

I will try to remember you more often, blog.

You're a good man. Stay that way.

A Veteran Helicopter

GIANNA VOLPE PHOTO | The Flying Tigers were one of the first Marine Corps helicopter squadrons to be sent to Vietnam in 1963. The Flying Tigers are the second most decorated helicopter squadron in the United States Marine Corps, as well as the third oldest squadron.

She’s an actual piece of American history and for the time being, she’s airborne.

The “Gracious Lady” Bev, a Marine Corps (Sikorsky) UH-34D helicopter that saw three tours in the Vietnam War is currently being stored in a potato barn in Jamesport for winter.

She functioned mainly as a medevac helicopter and according to Neil Dembinski, a member of the charitable organization that cares for her, saved countless Marine lives.

He said the Marine Corps Aviation Museum wants the historic bird badly, but the organization is hoping donations will keep her airborne so the public can continue to see, touch, and learn about her, the Vietnam War, and the military in general.

“We don’t want to see her in a museum,” Mr. Dembinski said.

You can find out more information about this aircraft or make a donation to the Helicopter Squadron 361 Veterans Association, Inc., by visiting here.

The Gracious Lady will be viewable from the South side of Main Road in Jamesport in mid April or May, weather permitting.

Jeff Fabb: From Mattituck Drummer to Opening for Ozzy

Jeff Fabb with his first music teacher, Mark LaRosa

Mattituck native Jeff Fabb is a drummer who went from playing the school variety show in junior high to opening for legends like Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Zombie and Megadeth with the chick-fronted metal band In This Moment.

Mr. Fabb is currently drumming for “American Idol” alumnus James Durbin, who released his first album, “Memories of a Beautiful Disaster,” on Nov. 21. The album found its way to No. 36 on the Billboard 200 chart the first week it was released.

We caught up with Jeff for an interview while he was home for the holidays.

Q. Did you ever imagine you’d get to where you are now when you were growing up in Mattituck?

A. Honestly, I always envisioned it in my head. Every night I would go to sleep as a kid and I’d put my headphones on and be listening to Metallica or something and really seriously envision playing on stage. Maybe this girl who I had a crush on at the time would be watching me from the audience, you know what I mean — just dreaming about it. I would like to say I always knew I was going to do this, but not really. It’s just what I loved more than anything in my life. I didn’t grow up playing sports. I was a skateboarder. I played music. I grew up with a single mom and didn’t have a father figure in my life. I wasn’t really turned on to sports and things like that.

Q: How did you get into playing the drums?

A. At 11, I started taking drum lessons from Mark LaRosa, who my family knew because I think my sister had taken lessons from him. I’m not sure, but when I met him I felt that connection. It was like, “Oh I can relate to this guy. He loves music, too, and he wants to sit and jam.”

I continued getting lessons from Mark for seven or eight years, a little before I left for California. He made it really fun to get lessons and really, that was the first person I ever played music with. I’d never sat down with another musician and just played.

That was priceless. I learned more from that than reading from a book.

Q. What was your first gig?

A. The variety show at Mattituck High School, which was a pretty cool first gig because the whole auditorium was packed. I was in seventh or eighth grade and it was with Alternate Exit. We played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Guns n’ Roses’ version, and “Enter Sandman,” Metallica. It was cool, too, because those two songs were just out, so everyone knew them. That was a really awesome first gig, actually. The place was packed with parents and kids. It was fun.

Q. Did you play in the high school band?

A. No, I never played in the band. I played in rock bands. I played in Alternate Exit, Delirium Tremens and I was in a band called TripFace, too, a Long Island hardcore band.

Q. How did you meet James Durbin and why do you think you and Blake [Bunzel, rhythm guitarist for In This Moment] were chosen for the spot?

A. I was in the band In This Moment at the time. Our previous manager, [Ozzy Osbourne/ex-Rob Zombie bassist] Blasko, was no longer with the band. He and I are friends. One day when In This Moment was not touring, I was in Jersey City recording with a friend of mine, Tommy Vext. Blake was also there with me. I received a call from Blasko saying, “I know that this guy James Durbin is looking for a drummer and a guitar player for this band. Would you be interested in trying out?” And immediately I was like, “Who’s James Durbin?” I don’t really watch “American Idol” or any of those shows. I don’t really watch much TV at all to be totally honest with you.

Q. What is your advice to a young band?

A. In This Moment got started on Myspace. We put a demo out there and started adding friends. When I was younger, I wish I had YouTube and Facebook. You can get things out to the masses now through the Internet, instead of “I’ve got to move to L.A. to meet some other musicians.”

Q. You filled out a survey in 2007 that said, “When I look back on my life one day, I would like to be able to say …” and you wrote, “That I fulfilled all of my goals.” What are your goals at this point?

A. To be at peace with myself and to be grateful for the things that I have.

First story I pitched @ Suffolk Times; it went something like:

                         Local booksellers hope to ride the ‘niche’ wave

GIANNA VOLPE PHOTO Ms. Mott at Antiques and Old Lace in Cutchogue, New York shows three rarer finds from her collection.

By Gianna Volpe

The book market is in flux; it doesn’t take a bibliophile to notice it. Change is afoot, but some local booksellers hope those same changes will give business a boost — rather than be an element in their demise.In September, the death throes of the nation’s second biggest bookstore, Borders Group Inc., were witnessed locally when the Riverhead Borders closed its doors months after the giant filed for bankruptcy.

Librarian Ned Smith at Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead said, “Most of the book dealers that used to have shops have gone out of business or just do online business now” because “the availability of online books has made it difficult to compete.”

Borders Group Inc. formed a partnership with online seller Amazon.com in 2001 to help drive Internet sales. Borders ended that partnership in 2008 and began competing directly with Amazon. But it was too late. Ultimately, the paper book giant failed.

Amazon, whose company profile on crunchbase.com calls it “one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide,” now offers a “Price Check” app that allows people to scan books at a physical book shop using a smartphone, then search for the cheapest price available if they order through the Amazon website.

Kim Gavin of Portland, Ore., who runs the “Occupy Amazon” Facebook page, calls the app “a blatant stab at brick and mortar retail establishments.”

Republican Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine made a statement two weeks ago, calling the app “an attack on small businesses fighting every day to compete with giant retailers.” She said “incentivizing consumers to spy on local shops is a bridge too far.”

Last month, Amazon released the Kindle Fire, the latest in tablet technology allowing consumers to download and read books electronically. The Fire is currently listed as the “No. 1 most-gifted product” on the online store’s website.

These trends don’t seem to scare some East End antique book dealers.

David Hewitt, who was a Southold history teacher for over 30 years and just opened the On Track bookstore on Youngs Avenue in Southold, said the Kindle has “absolutely” affected physical bookstores.

“Although I personally do take credit for putting Borders out of business,” Mr. Hewitt joked in a recent interview.

He insists Borders failed because it did not adapt to new ways books were being made available to the public. The Kindle’s popularity, he said, is because the product “fits the lifestyle of a lot of people today. That is, not having stuff.”

Michael Kinsey, co-owner of Black Cat Books on Shelter Island, said people use tablet technology for “content” reading and shop at stores for interest-area needs and desires. Lawyers might research law on their Kindles, he explains, but “they still like the old leather-bound law books” to display in their home or office. This niche, he said, is what makes antique book businesses viable while new bookstores continue to close.

“You can read ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ on a Kindle but a signed [copy] is still a collectible,” he said.

Mr. Kinsey thinks as the cost of publishing a physical book rises, and electronic publishing becomes more and more popular, physical books will continue to be published, but in “limited batches … the way they still release vinyl, but most people download.”

Gene Mott, co-owner of Antiques & Old Lace on Main Road in Cutchogue, agreed that, based on the trend, peddling physical books is a good investment. “With everything going electronic, I would think books are going to become rarer and rarer,” he said.

With Borders’ recent closing, Mr. Mott said, “There’s going to be us diehards that want a piece of paper to read from.”

His wife, Patricia, the reason the couple peddles books, couldn’t agree more. Her passion for the printed word means carrying an item that some antique dealers don’t, “because [books] take up too much room and there’s not much return,” she said. “But it’s always been my love … the first time I rode my bike to the library [in Coram], I couldn’t believe I had access to so many books.”

Ms. Mott is responsible for each of the estimated 5,000 books for sale at the shop — most of them classics and history books. She buys them from tag and estate sales and when the couple buys an entire estate, she said, they go through every single book.

“Sometimes it takes days,” she said.

Ms. Mott said it’s very difficult to make a living by just selling books, which is certainly not the case at Antiques & Old Lace.

Antique dealer Peter Stevens, on the other hand, sells books exclusively. Owner of The Book Scout in Greenport for 31 years — 26 of them at its current Main Street location — Mr. Stevens said he hand-selected every book on his shelves, just like Ms. Mott.

“The cookbooks are in the freezer,” he said. And he’s not kidding. The cookbooks he sells are lined up in an old, unplugged store freezer. The name of his store describes his occupation, someone who “goes out and looks for books.” But an increase in other book scouts has made this task more difficult, he said.

“I used to buy and sell art books by the carton,” he said, but with more people out searching for books, “there’s fewer good books available.” Selling has also become more difficult, he added, because of a grim economic climate and the “advent of listing books on the Internet.”

When the market is flooded with copies of a book, sellers have to price the product competitively. Mr. Stevens said a man came in to sell him a nautical book, a popular topic for shoppers in a port town. He looked the title up online and found that the book was being marketed for 19 cents.

“People who sell a book for 19 cents make about 65 cents on shipping and handling,” he said, “You’d better be a large group with a big crew to sell a book for 19 cents.”

Mr. Stevens says he uses the Internet to sell a book only “if I have a valuable book and no customer for it.”

But he finds it discouraging to post books on sites like Amazon when 100 copies of the same book are already listed.

“Would you want to be number 101 on that list?” he asked.