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Fitting good food into a very busy life.
Seasonal Chilmark resident Ann Berwick took her first environmental job in 1991, after working mostly as a legal services lawyer for 20 years, with a seven-year break in the middle to have four children.
“You might ask,” Ann says, “how I got a job as chief of the Environmental Protection Division of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s office without having any previous environmental experience. I really wasn’t qualified for that job.” She was, however, a highly-placed litigation partner in a big Boston law firm. “And that gives you a kind of cred,” she notes. “Scott Harshbarger, then Attorney General, hired me because of that cred.”
She’d taken the law firm job after her seven-year home stay. “I wanted to work part-time,” she says, “and they were quite progressive and had a number of women on staff working part-time. I loved the people there, and they let me do a lot of pro bono work, but I found that I didn’t really care about the other cases I was working on. So I asked myself: what do I care about? I’ve always been a hiker, a skier, a biker; so I figured I’d work on environmental issues.”
The Environmental Protection Division is responsible for the civil side of environmental protection for the state, meaning that they levy fines and use injunctions to enforce compliance with environmental regulations. At the Division, Ann learned on the job, aided by her experienced deputy, James Milkey. “He should have gotten the job,” she says, “and he did, when I left six years later. He’d been there a number of years and knew all there was to know. He was incredibly generous to me, and just taught me stuff.” During his tenure as chief of the division, Milkey initiated the case Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, ultimately arguing the case before the Supreme Court and winning a 2006 decision that the EPA must regulate greenhouse gases.
After a one-year stint living in Alaska (a long-held dream), Ann and her family moved back to her wintertime home in Newton, Massachusetts. She decided that she didn’t want to practice law and instead got a job at a small consulting firm in nearby Concord that mainly worked on air pollution issues. “So I got to know a fair amount about air pollution,” she says. Then, when Deval Patrick was running for governor, she volunteered for the campaign and ended up running his task force on climate, energy, and environmental issues. When Patrick became governor, he appointed her as undersecretary of energy. She spent three years at that post, advising Patrick on energy and environmental matters, and then left to become chair of the state’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU).
“And that,” she states, “was the best energy and climate environment job in the world.” Formally, the DPU is the regulator for the electric and gas utilities; it’s a rate-setting agency, which Ann acknowledges “doesn’t sound that interesting.” But increasingly, Ann says, under Massachusetts law, “the department has responsibility for a lot of other climate and energy policy issues, so it wound up being a super interesting job with a lot of authority and power. We were free to make a lot of official judgments and orders.”
Unlike Trump’s executive orders, which, Ann notes, aren’t binding on anybody other than the agencies that work for him, “we issued orders that were binding on everybody we addressed, including the utilities. This made it sort of a scary job, kind of overwhelming — but also great.” One of Ann’s favorite orders, most of which she personally wrote, required the state to adopt time-varying electric rates, which would make power less expensive at times of day when demand was generally lower. This would give users more control over their electric bills — allowing them to save money by, for example, running the dishwasher and doing their laundry late at night rather than during the daytime peak. The order came out in the final days of the Patrick administration and was shelved by Governor Charlie Baker. “But it makes a ton of sense,” Ann says. “Governor [Maura] Healey has appointed a really good DPU with a terrific chair, so I’m hopeful that they’ll adopt some version of it.”
So, if she loved the job so much, why did she leave?
“I got fired in 2015, on Governor Baker’s first day in office,” she says. Ah, politics.
After a brief, unsuccessful attempt at retiring (“Turns out I don’t do well with retirement,” Ann says), she landed her current job as co-director of Climate and Sustainability for the City of Newton (see our 2022 Climate Conversation with Ann here). And she’s taken on an additional job in a New York University program that hires former public utility commissioners to mentor newer, less experienced commissioners. “I’m mentoring a terrific person in Michigan,” Ann says. “We quickly found a project we wanted to work on together, and I think it’s been really fun for both of us.” The project aims to implement low-income utility rates throughout Michigan. Currently, different utilities across the state have different policies regarding low-income rates. Ann and her mentee are working to see which ones work best, and then they’ll try to get them adopted statewide.
Ann is also an active member of the board of two Martha’s Vineyard nonprofits: Vineyard Power, and the Vineyard Power Development Fund. “They’re basically supporting offshore wind and moving the Vineyard toward electric power instead of fossil fuel use,” she says. They also provide supplemental funding for energy costs to people who are eligible for low-income utility rates. And, Ann adds, “I’m proud to say that Vineyard Power has copied Newton in having energy coaches — Newton was the first community in the Commonwealth to have such a program.” When a homeowner is, for example, considering adding solar to their roof, or installing a heat pump, they can call Vineyard Power (here’s the info) and get a free expert consultation.
Last summer, she and Don made a corn chowder with corn at the peak of its season, and this summer, she says, ‘I’m determined to make gallons of it, because it’s delicious, and it freezes really well.'
Given all of this activity, plus the fact that Ann is an inveterate long-distance biker and a regular swimmer who, when on the Vineyard, likes to swim across Ice House Pond and back, one can’t help but wonder how a person like her, who appreciates good food, can possibly fit food and cooking into her days, especially when she also has such a large family. (“There are 18 of us as the core group,” she says, “so people are coming over to dinner a lot.”) But Ann is nothing if not efficient. Lately, she’s mainly making recipes she finds in the New York Times, and she’s become adept at selecting recipes that will turn out delicious results without taking too much time to make. (“I only save recipes that have five stars,” she says, “and I try to stick with recipes that have an alleged prep time of 20 minutes or less, because I know it really means ‘20 minutes prep time if you have a staff of sous chefs.’”)
That being said, Ann confesses that on occasion, she and Don have ice cream for dinner. Just ice cream. And they kind of love it.
But over the years, Ann has developed a roster of crowd-pleasers that she makes regularly, including the shrimp scampi recipe below, and a lasagna “that one of our granddaughters will kill for.” Last summer, she and Don made a corn chowder with corn at the peak of its season, and this summer, she says, “I’m determined to make gallons of it, because it’s delicious, and it freezes really well.”
After Ann created a wildly popular turkey pot pie one year with leftover turkey, homemade stuffing and gravy, and “tons of vegetables,” she started making it at other times of the year with rotisserie chicken. She admits that the stuffing alone calls for a sous chef. “I buy umpteen loaves of bread and cut them up and toast them,” she says, “and it’s an ordeal, because if you burn them even a little bit, they’ll have a bitter flavor.” To the croutons, she adds chopped onions, celery, and garlic, a good amount of turkey or chicken broth (homemade at Thanksgiving with the turkey’s giblets, etc.), and slivered almonds. “It’s nothing super fancy,” she says, “but it’s traditional.” The pot pie also contains a secret ingredient that she swore never to reveal to the family, though she’s fairly certain her kids have figured it out: curry powder. For the first Thanksgiving during Covid, when the family couldn’t gather since no one was vaccinated yet, Ann and Don made a slew of turkey pot pies and delivered them to the doorsteps of all of their children, and even to the kids’ in-laws, along with all the ingredients needed to make chocolate sundaes. “It was really nice, because we got to be together for a bit on people’s porches and see how happy everyone was to receive all this food. Otherwise, it would have been a terrible day.”
Most of Ann’s and Don’s children have grown up to become very good cooks, which, Ann says, “has upped our game, which is nice.” Of one son, Ann says, “He and his wife are both wonderful cooks. Basically, if they don’t have to hang the meat in the basement for two months to cure it, they’re not interested. They make things with at least 25 ingredients. That’s definitely not my thing.”
Like any sensible home cook, Ann welcomes guests’ offers to make and bring some part of the meal. Because my husband is gluten-free, she most often asks us to bring something simple like gluten-free crackers to go with whatever appetizers she’s prepared. But when we went to enjoy the shrimp dish featured below, my husband had just picked a nice batch of chanterelles in our backyard, so he contributed a scrumptious mushroom ragu to the meal, the recipe for which is also included here.
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Recipe: Shrimp Scampi With Summer Corn and Tomatoes
- Yield: Serves 4
Description
This is a recipe that we make over and over again, because it’s both delicious and easy. Especially when accompanied by pasta, rice, or bread, it’s a meal-in-one. It’s best made at the end of the summer, when really good fresh corn is available and local tomatoes are bursting with flavor.
Ingredients
- 1 pound large shrimp, peeled and deveined
- Salt and black pepper
- 2 Tbsps olive oil
- 1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
- 2 cups fresh corn kernels, from about 4 ears (frozen kernels can be substituted in a pinch)
- 7 garlic cloves, minced
- 3/4 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1/4 cup dry white wine
- 2 Tbsps freshly squeezed lemon juice, plus lemon wedges for serving (optional)
- 5 Tbsps unsalted butter, cut in 5 pieces
- 3 Tbsps chopped parsley
Instructions
- Pat the shrimp dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the shrimp and cook until it’s pink and lightly browned in spots, 1‒2 minutes per side. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the shrimp to a plate.
- Add the tomatoes to the skillet with a pinch of salt and black pepper to taste, and cook 3‒4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they start to blister in spots. Add the corn and cook for another 3‒4 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes burst and the corn is golden in spots. Taste, and add more salt and pepper as needed.
- Add the garlic and the red pepper flakes and cook, stirring, until the garlic is fragrant, about 1 minute.
- Reduce the heat to medium, and add the wine and lemon juice, scraping any brown bits from the sides and bottom of the pan. Cook until almost all of the liquid has evaporated, then add the butter and stir until it’s melted. Add the shrimp and its juices, and stir until the shrimp is warmed through.
- Remove the pan from the heat and add the parsley. Taste, and season with more salt and pepper if needed. If desired, serve with lemon wedges for squeezing over.
Recipe: Mushroom Ragu
- Yield: Serves 4–6 as a side dish 1x
Description
Foragers can find many varieties of delicious edible wild mushrooms on Martha’s Vineyard. The day we went to Ann’s for dinner, I harvested a crop of chanterelles (both cinnabar chanterelles and yellow chanterelles) that had popped up in my lawn. As there weren’t enough to feed four people, I supplemented them with dried morelles and some hen of the woods we’d found in the woods and dried last fall. Fresh wild mushrooms are often so flavorful that preparing them to their greatest advantage requires nothing more than a frying pan, some butter and olive oil, and a little salt and pepper. Here, no salt was necessary, because there’s salt in the porcini bouillon cube used for rehydrating the added dried mushrooms. A touch of cream mixed in toward the end creates a sauce that pulls together all the varieties of mushroom in this dish.
Ingredients
- 1 porcini mushroom boullion cube (see note)
- 1 1/2 - 2 cups boiling water
- 1 cup mixed dried mushrooms, such as morelles, porcinis, shitakes, and hen of the woods
- 2 cups fresh mushrooms
- 1 large shallot, minced
- 2 Tbsps butter
- 2 Tbsps olive oil
- 2 or more (to taste) Tbsps of chopped parsley
- 1 tsp ground black pepper
- 1/2 cup heavy cream
Instructions
- Dissolve the porcini bullion cube in the boiling water.
- Place the dried mushrooms in the bullion when the water is warm (not hot), and let sit for 20–30 minutes until the mushrooms are tender. Remove the rehydrated mushrooms with a slotted spoon, and reserve the broth.
- If the fresh mushrooms are large, roughly chop them. Leave smaller mushrooms whole.
- Melt the butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Add the olive oil, then the shallots, and sauté until the shallots are translucent and slightly browned, about 5 minutes.
- Add the mushrooms, ground pepper, and half of the Parsley, and stir to mix. Cook until the mushrooms are tender, about 5 minutes.
- Add the cream and about a cup of the leftover bouillon. Bring to a low simmer, and cook for several minutes, until the liquid has reduced to a sauce of your desired thickness.
- Garnish with the remaining parsley, and serve.
Notes
Both Star and Knorr make porcini bouillon cubes, and both are available online.
