Guest Blog: Nature Dave Meets Nature Boy

By Elaine Chase

This year marks our 2nd Annual Chase Family Reunion at Tyler Place. And yes, we are hooked and booked for next year, 2011!!!

Speaking of hooked, that is exactly what our 6 year old son is when it comes to fishing and nature exploration with Nature Dave. Blake has always been interested in the outdoors and Nature Dave has helped to foster this interest, especially when Nature Dave nicknamed Blake,” Nature Boy”, this year during the pond exploration field trip. Blake’s enthusiasm was contagious!

After our 1st year at Tyler Place, Blake spoke of the “2lb small-mouth bass” that he caught until we returned to Tyler Place this year. Now he has marked a page in his photo album that contains his favorite photograph, a photograph of himself with the “biggest catfish ever!” Coming in a close second is his Dad, Chris, with a small-mouth bass.

Blake enjoyed these fishing adventures with Nature Dave so much that he would beg his Grandpop to take him to the dock to go fishing before heading to the Clubhouse. Luckily Grandpop is an early riser! In the following photograph, sharing his enthusiasm are his cousins, Natalie and Ella.

Thank you Tyler Place and Nature Dave for reeling us in each year for awesome times and everlasting memories!

Check out our website for more information about planning a family reunion at The Tyler Place.

If you want to be featured as a guest blogger submit your blog ideas and stories to facebook@tylerplace.com with the subject "Guest Blog"!

TP Tradition: Staff vs. Guest Softball

By Sam Tyler

Here at the Tyler Place we keep this most American of traditions alive with our weekly Staff vs. Guest softball game at the TP diamond. Every Thursday afternoon, dozens of Staff and Guests from across the TP assemble to compete in this timeless event. Kids of all ages cheer for their parents and play catch along the sidelines, while Moms and Dads alike square off against the young men and women to whom they have entrusted the safety and well being of their children. As the fielders squint in the Northern Vermont sun, and the first guest steps into the batter’s box and squares off, the pitch is thrown and the game is under way! For the next two hours, the world shrinks to a couple of acres of sand and Kentucky Bluegrass in a remote corner of Franklin County. Tense minutes of silence, as beads of sweat begin to form across the brows of the competitors, are interrupted periodically by the sharp metallic cling of a clean hit and the roar of a crowd shouting instructions. Bare feet pound across the grass as the throw launches into the air, heading for second and the third base coach yells “Down!” A cloud of sand and dust erupts, closely followed by the dull ‘thwack’ of the ball striking leather. “Safe!”

It’s moments like these that make the summer what it is. As we approach the end of the season, the past weeks’ memories begin to take on the glow of a time not soon forgotten. I know that in three weeks’ time, today’s softball game will be added to the long line of summer games staged over the last 22 years of my life. Memories of my father helping beat the Staff, while I hugged the fence with my Mom, unable to sit down or look away. Of five years later, when I was old enough to understand the game and had begun to play in Little League back home. I manned the score board and brazenly called plays -- always in favor of the Guests. Of another five years, down the line, when I could finally join in, and despite a defeat at the hands of the Staff, I could walk away from the pitch knowing that I’d made no errors and brought in 2 RBIs. And then the memories of the last two years, when I joined the ranks of the TP Staff and was able to play, not just one hallowed game a summer, but every week for 13 straight weeks.

Win or lose, softball has remained one of the highlights of my summer. How could it not? Staff and Guests uniting over a friendly competition, enjoying a national pastime, reveling in the camaraderie and the rivalry, and later swapping stories over an evening of music and drink at the Inn. I would be hard pressed to envision a more perfect climax to any week. Though this summer’s season will soon join many others in the recesses of my memory, I know that I can look forward to seeing you all back on that diamond in a few short months.

The Family Show

By Becky & Jes (JD) Dean

There may be 16 Tylers and Hills working at Tyler Place this summer but there are some other families represented amongst the staff. This post is from JD and Becky, our favourite look-alike sisters.

Did you see JD leading the Highgate Loop bike ride? Or, Becky answering phones from behind the desk? Well, don’t worry. You’re not the only one who confuses us. On a daily basis, guests either use the wrong name, think we’re twins or become convinced there is one very busy person doing it all. It probably doesn’t help matters that we switched jobs this summer. Good thing we don’t mind being confused for each other. The most common question: which of us is the older sister?

We hail from Ontario, Canada where we grew up going to a family resort similar to Tyler Place. We are the middle children, with an older brother, Eric, and a younger sister Alex (TP ’11?). Our fondest childhood memories are jumping off the dock in the lake, playing in the woods and going waterskiing (Hmm… starting to sound familiar?). During our “resort days”, our friends (the owner’s children) would sneak us behind the scenes, where all the magic happened.

After JD’s second year of university, she couldn’t resist applying to work at another family resort, Tyler Place! She is currently on her fifth summer (and counting) and has worked as a counselor, directed the Clubhouse, put in a year with the grownups, and now works as a co-director of the Inn and on the front desk. In between it all, she regularly runs down to help out at the Red Clover Inn, our sister property in Killington.

After three summers of hearing about all the fun JD was having at the TP, Becky joined the team and is currently on her third summer. She began as a lifeguard/cocktail server, worked one summer as a counselor and fitness instructor, and this summer is a part of the Adult Sports & Activities team.

While we may look alike and have identical mannerisms, we have very different interests career-wise. JD has a degree in business management, and one in recreation and leisure studies. Meanwhile, Becky is in the last year of a kinesiology degree and on her second year of a mechanical engineering degree. (Our mother is currently starting her fourth degree so we are just trying to keep up with Mom.)

We plan on going into business together someday. Until that day, we are enjoying every magical moment in beautiful Vermont, meeting new people at the Tyler Place and creating confusion for staff and guests alike. We encourage all of our new friends, staff and guests, to keep in touch! (And, if you hadn’t guessed, JD is older.)

Yummy Desserts

By Misha Lebell (TP Pastry Chef)

I like white nectarines, dark chocolate, dill, meatballs, hot sauce, quail, cinnamon toast, browned butter, and ice cream.

Baking at the Tyler Place is a demanding yet rewarding experience. All the hard work is worth it when I hear that a piece of my cake made someone’s day, when I finally get a finicky recipe just right, and when everything that could go wrong does and I’m able to keep a sense of humor about it. Desserts make people happy and it makes me happy to be the one dreaming up and baking sweets that will bring people joy.

The Tyler Place is a unique baking job for several reasons. I get to make a variety of baked goods from muffins to cakes to bread, which is relatively rare in the pastry world and keeps me from getting bored. I also have a great deal of creative freedom; I can pretty much bake what I want as long as ya’ll seem to enjoy it. We try to use local ingredients when possible including butter, flour, milk, rhubarb, and strawberries to name a few. Like the rest of the Tyler Place staff, the kitchen staff is largely international, which adds to the kitchen environment in interesting and fun ways.

I hope you find the baked goods delicious and memorable this summer. Feel free to contact me with feedback/suggestions/questions by visiting my personal blog at http://mishapiece.blogspot.com/.

Misha's Key Lime Pie

Servings: Serves 8

Ingredients:

Graham Cracker Crust:

2 cups ground graham crackers
2 Tbsp. honey
1/3 cup butter
1/4 tsp. sea salt

Filling:

4 egg yolks
1 can (14 ounces) condensed milk
2/3 cup fresh Key lime juice
1 lime , grated zest

Topping:

1 cup heavy or whipping cream , chilled
2 Tbsp. confectioners’ sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:

To make graham cracker crust: Preheat the oven to 325°.
Break up the graham crackers, place in a food processor and process to crumbs. Add the melted butter, honey and salt and pulse until combined (or mix by hand). Press the mixture into the bottom of a 9-inch pie pan, forming an even layer on the bottom, sides and edge. Bake the crust for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow the crust to cool.

To make filling: While the crust is resting, in an electric mixer with the wire whisk attachment, whip the egg yolks and lime zest at high speed until fluffy, or 5 to 6 minutes. Gradually add the condensed milk and continue to whip until thick, 3 to 4 minutes longer. Lower the mixer speed and slowly add the lime juice until incorporated.

Pour the mixture into the crust and bake for 15 minutes, or until the filling has just set. Cool on a wire rack, and then refrigerate for 20 minutes.

To make topping: Whip the cream, confectioners’ sugar and vanilla until nearly stiff. Evenly spread the whipped cream on top of the pie, and place in the freezer for 20 minutes prior to serving.

Edible Flowers (updated 6/24/2010)

By Claudia (The TP Gardener)

As you stroll around the Tyler Place you will pass many areas of flowerbeds and cross many grassy patches. Did you know that some of the plants are edible? Here is a list of the edible flowers you could find right here at The Tyler Place (or even in your own backyard).

1. Nasturtium: Leaves and petals have a distinct peppery taste and are a great asset to any salad. Leaves are best picked and eaten when still quite small and young.

2.Daisies: the petals are edible and look lovely scattered over a salad. These flowers are perfect for a wonderful flower soup.

3. Roses: the petals are edible, though the white base of the petal tends to be bitter, so is best removed. Rose petals are really lovely when iced and used as decoration on top of birthday cakes or summer flans. Red rose petals are the tastier ones.

5. Sunflower: we all knew that the seeds were edible and delicious, but the buds are also edible, as are the petals which have an interesting taste somewhere between bitter and sweet.

6. Dandelion: Leaves, roots, flowers and buds are all edible. The leaves can be used in salads or brewed into a tea, the flowers and petals used for garnish and in salads. Pick as fresh and young as possible, as they taste more bitter with age.

7. Violas and Pansies: the flowers and petals are pretty when sprinkled on top of salads - or even as decoration on top of fairy cakes.

8. Clover: The whole flower is actually edible and a high source of protein - though better digested when boiled lightly for 5 - 10 minutes. Rabbits and guinea pigs love to eat clover it too.

9. Lavender: really an herb so it is not surprising that the flowers are edible as well as the leaves. The flowers can be used in a similar way to the leaves (needles) and are especially recommended for adding to lamb before cooking. Flowers look beautiful and taste good too in a glass of champagne. But another great thing about lavender is that insects and slugs don't like the scent, so spreading a stem or a few flowers around the deck or picnic area can help to keep annoying gnats away!

11. Peony: In China the fallen petals are parboiled and sweetened as a tea-time delicacy. Peony water was used for drinking in the middle ages. Add peony petals to your summer salad or try floating in punches and lemonades.

12. Impatiens: The flowers have a sweet flavor. They can be used as a garnish in salads or floated in drinks.

13. Geraniums (not the lemon-scented variety), carnations, and the blossoms from apple, cherry and pear trees are also edible

Warning: Before eating any flowers be sure that you can identify what the flower is and that it is indeed safe to eat. People with allergies such as asthma or hay fever are better off avoiding eating edible flowers as it can set off a reaction.

Pre-Season

By Sam Tyler
(one of the third generation)

(Sam is from Boulder, Colorado and will be a Senior at St. Lawrence University majoring in Philosophy and Outdoor Studies. He’s Cam and Karen’s Tyler oldest son, and this will be his second year as one of the Adult Entertainment & Sports staff, another is Becky, JD's sister.)

The lawns are glowing green up here at the Tyler Place, and the pre-season 2010 staff are arriving to take our place next to the 30 year-round staff and family members who’ve been renovating, roofing, decorating, purchasing, program and menu planning, planting, pruning (you get the idea) since last fall.

There is something definitively special about being here to open up the resort before everyone else arrives, a bond that is built between you and your fellow pre-season staff that lingers through the rest of the summer. This past week we groomed the bike trails. “Groom” does not quite cover the clearing of 40 major tree falls, the 11 shin-deep puddles, 2 broken bridges, innumerable mats of matted leaves and sticks, 1 broken pair of clippers, and 15 miles of hauling a chainsaw, 5 gallons of gas, a backpack blower, signs, nails, hammers, and rakes that have pretty successfully put us in our place next to Mother Nature.

But hey, nothing like some good old manual labor to bring in a little team bonding right? Every black eye from taking a branch to the face (thanks Becky…) makes our team a little tighter. Every bruise and pulled muscle hauling the docks into place, or sunburn earned assembling the climbing wall adds a certain measure of pride at our part in prepping and polishing the myriad of details that prepares The Tyler Place for our opening Memorial Day Weekend.

This weekend the rest of our pre-season staff arrives and the buzz around the resort will quickly turn into a dull roar. Staff members have begun to roll in from all over the United States—and the world. You can’t help but feel the energy building. This year we will have the largest number of returning staff the TP has ever seen so prepare yourselves for a lot of familiar faces along with some good new ones. We’ve all been in contact throughout the off-season and have some great new ideas and activities planned for you along with all the old favorites (don’t tell anyone I told you this, but karaoke’s going to be back and bigger than ever). But for now, we’ll enjoy the quiet, the hard work, and the smell of Brett’s BBQ wafting up Old Dock Road. And man, if I could get a dollar for every time Becky Dean said “I freaking love pre-season!” I’ll be a wealthy man by the time you begin to arrive in two weeks. Can’t wait to see you all then!

Spring & Summer Vegetables

MORE REFLECTIONS FROM A T.P. CHILDHOOD By Ted Tyler

Claudia’s new raised beds garden (west side of the clay tennis courts) brings back memories of the late 1930’s and early ‘40’s when the T.P. was still Missisquoi Farm. (It’s been that long since we’ve had a real vegetable garden contributing seasonal herbs and produce to the table.) In those days a large garden occupied the area between the barn with its out-buildings and Old Dock and Shipyard Bay roads, subsequently displaced by a horse/pony riding ring and now by the soccer field southeast of the Pool Complex.


No one born since World War II can fully appreciate the mouth-watering succulence of each crop of vegetables as it matured in a rural area. In those days Boston, New York and other cities received some produce as vegetables ripened in more southerly states, but these didn’t percolate to the “sticks”. Vermonters’ tomatoes, properly tended, provided the real thing into October, but for all intents and purposes the only fresh vegetables after that month until the following June were root vegetables kept in sand or otherwise in the cellar. Of course everyone “canned” in mason jars, but preserved green beans (or pretty much anything else) versus the real thing, freshly picked, offered no comparison at all.


The earliest spring “vegetable” was horseradish. As far as kids were concerned, this was not considered a plus. An earlier entry for those who knew to dig when the ground had just begun to thaw, but not too late, was parsnips, amazingly sweeter than if they had been harvested and consumed in the fall. However, the first real green vegetable was asparagus – hugely delicious and available in early May, a good month before anything but the salad vegetables (chives, lettuce, radishes and the like). And then that marvelous feast: the peas had come in! Plate after lip-smacking plate, unadorned except with salt, pepper and plenty of butter.


By late June and for the rest of the summer, life was good. Green and yellow beans (limas took the whole summer to mature) picked young and seedless. Summer squash. Beet greens with young beets attached. I smack my lips in recollection. The two best came midsummer and were the subject of substantial competition: who could bring in the first sweet corn or ripe tomato before August 1st? To this day at any price I’ve never found a tomato in the off-season that tastes like a tomato. And in those days (unlike today) corn-on-the-cob was overripe (or absent) with the exception of two months – August and September. August had meals with just one entrée – corn (plus butter and salt) - and finishing off eight to ten ears at a meal was no major feat.


I’ve excluded from this exposition the produce of the land – which was a major supplement in the decades referred to. Fiddleheads (yum!), cattails, young dandelions all were part of the spring larder, as were strawberries, cherries, red raspberries, black raspberries and blackberries in the summer, and puffballs and butternuts in the fall.


So getting back to 2010 I hate to give away Claudia’s secrets, but here are some of what you may find in her new garden: asparagus, beans, beets, cherry tomatoes, carrots, celery, cucumbers, eggplant, garlic, herbs (many varieties) flowers (for dining room), lettuce, onions, peas, peppers (a variety), potatoes, radishes, summer squash, tomatoes, zucchini. How sweet it is!