Nutmeg Nuggets 2025

Recently, several Mexican restaurants have opened up in the area and  friends   recommended La Catrina in nearby Bantam. It  is owned and operated by  husband and wife, Enrique and Consuelo Estrada, who worked in the restaurant industry for decades before deciding to open their own place. Enrique learned cooking by watching his mother in the kitchen, and this is one of the reasons the food  is  much more than your typical Tex-Mex.  He has also incorporated his love of Asian - infused cuisine into the menu, so you can get  dishes such as Asian duck tacos, Mexican inspired rice bowls,  and  miso glazed salmon.  For lunch, we started  with the spicy guacamole, then Sunny had the shredded chicken rice bowl which came with  shredded roasted chicken, black beans, sofrito rice, pico de gallo and avocado. The dish was delicious as well as very filling and Sunny ended up taking half of it home. I started with the Asian duck tacos w...

One of our favorite places to go for a walk is Topsmead, a 510 acre state forest in Litchfield. While there are numerous walking trails, a butterfly garden, and places to watch a variety of wildlife, the main attraction is an English Tudor style  summer home  that was built in the 1920’s.  Edith Chase’s father, who ran the Chase Brass and Copper company in nearby Waterbury, gave  her 16 acres of land  in 1917, and over the years, Edith built the cottage and gardens, established a working farm,  and bought an additional 500 acres of surrounding land. When Edith died in 1972, she left the property to the state to be used as a state forest. Today, the cottage, including its contents and gardens are pretty much what they were when Edith lived there and you can tour the cottage twice a month when it is open to the public.  Connecticut has a number of state forests and parks and Topsmead is just one of many in the area which are fun to visit.  Interesti...

Three years ago, new owners took over the Stonybrook golf course which is just a few miles up the street from us in Litchfield. We had heard that the restaurant was quite good so when my sister  Susan visited with us for the July 4th weekend, we decided to go there for lunch. It was a beautiful, sunny, but hot afternoon so we ate inside rather than  on the deck which offers a great view of the course and countryside. Given it is a 9 hole public course, we were pleased to find a casual, yet upscale dining room and a menu with a number of interesting options. The chef is a fan of Asian infused food so there are a number of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dishes.  As a shared appetizer, I  selected pork belly bites as this is not something you usually see on a menu in New England. It was crispy bites of pork belly in a soy, sesame peanut sauce, which were quite tasty, but also quite heavy- probably better suited for the winter.  For our main courses, Sunny had the su...