"Our cooking is a Downeast Maine take on Mexican home cooking and taquería food," Rossney says. "We use avocados, limes, and cumin, we make pork tinga and carne asada, but also blueberry salsa and blueberry agua fresca, crab quesadillas, local halibut tacos, and lobster burritos. It doesn't have to be all the way Mexican to taste Mexican."
Helen and Scott Nearing, grandparents of the back-to-the-land movement, moved around the corner from Sargentville to Brooksville in the early 1950s to garden, play music, haul seaweed, build stone walls, write books, and live simply off their land. Since then much of this harbor-lined and farm-dotted peninsula has become an unlikely destination for connoisseurs of locally grown food.
The Blue Hill Co-op, a hippie haven in the increasingly tony but still relatively untouristy town of Blue Hill is basically a mini Whole Foods Market with a locally grown kitchen garden of a produce section. They have been selling all manner of wholesome everything since 1975 and are still going strong. Brooksville gardening gurus Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch hobnob with chefs, grow the most exquisite produce this side of the Santa Monica Farmer's Market, and write authoritative texts about growing your own.
Bread bakers, winemakers, forest foragers, a raucous country fair, and a thick web of small organic farms keep the community flush with everything from pasture-raised pigs to raw Jersey cow milk. For a quick taste of the peninsula drive up the dirt driveway to The Blue Hill Wine Shop for wine and beer and lively banter with cellist turned wine curator Max Treitler, and then barrel down to El El Frijoles, where you can crack the beer, uncork the wine, bat around the badminton birdie, and stuff yourself with Maine Mexican.
Treitler's place is a dimly lighted shop in a post-and-beam barn behind an old farmhouse on a knoll over looking the bay on the outskirts of town. Treitler, 38, has a nimble sense of humor. He stirs his coffee with a pen and tussles with Jeeves, his tufty-eared Maine Coon cat.
