Just sharing a cute picture to help you start your day. This is the brand-new label for North Hero farm Savage Gardens' dilly beans, courtesy of farmer Amanda Gervais, who is also a talented designer.

Why the quirky drawing? "Dilly beans are pretty silly," says Gervais.

Too lazy to cook? Since Monday, Logan's of Vermont has been doing its best to cover you.

That's when chef-owner Nick Logan opened the market and take-out restaurant at 30 Main Street in Burlington, the former location of Miguel's on Main.

The spot is open from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., for items ranging from elegant, Euro-style breakfast pastries to marinated meats to take home and grill and gourmet treasures such as oils and vinegars.

Logan says that the focus of his menu is take-home dinner items, from Black Angus sirloin to pan-seared chicken with fennel cream, available either ready to heat and eat or raw and requiring the touch of a home cook.

Lunch includes a range of panini, including ham, apple and Brie with mango chutney, and a classic Cuban with sliced pork loin, ham, pickles, butter and Dijon. Carrot-rosemary and asparagus-Brie were some of the opening soups. Sides are available, too, including enticing-looking squares of macaroni and cheese.

Click the photo above to see some of the desserts. For further food-pornographic edification, here's today's menu:

When I separate eggs, I sometimes end up with bits of yolk in the white, and messy fingers, too. So I'm grateful to this Chinese woman for showing me this clever way to do the deed — and reuse a soda bottle at the same time. (And I'm also grateful to writer Meg Maker for posting this to Facebook!)

The Seven Days food writers live to eat, not the other way around. That means that at any given moment, we're probably tasting something we want to recommend — or warn you about. And it's our job to know about new restaurants, dishes, chefs. Through Bite Club, you can get that info as soon as we track it down. In other words, you can get it while it's hot. 

Alice and I are excited to collect all of our food content here on the brand-new Bite Club blog. Our staff blog, Blurt, came to be a rather serious place for pithy posts about food news we've stumbled across, a photo of something amazing we've eaten, a lament for some axed menu item, or a trailer for a new food film. 

On the Bite Club blog, we can roam free. Check in each weekday not only for Alice Eats and Grazing but for Vermont restaurant, foodie entrepreneur and ag news, recipes, and links to the sometimes-strange, sometimes-vital food and drink content we find both locally and on the interwebs. Come and get it!

1580 Dorset Street, South Burlington, 862-4602

It's apple season. While those with an interest in being outdoors go apple picking, I found a more passive way to enjoy the season's quarry. Right in South Burlington, the Mill Market & Deli has plenty of dishes that showcase the same local fruit the cider mill uses in its Chittenden's Sweet Apple Cider.

In early September, the Mill straddles the seasons. On my recent visit, locals were still hitting the creemee window, though the chocolate and (fresh berry) black raspberry machine was broken, leaving just vanilla and maple.

But I was there to pick up a meal. The counter girl told me they were out of sandwich menus, and the options aren't written on a chalkboard, so I had to go from my memory of the website. This lapse was representative of a general disorganization I encountered at the market. I was asked to repeat my order three times and even then, they still didn't make it exactly to my specifications. The employee helping me wasn't sure of the items' prices or even where the store might have napkins.

That said, it's a great little market, full of quirky specialty foods, from Island Ice Cream to local meats and snacks. I grabbed a bottle of green-apple Jones soda and a bag of sweet and lightly salted Danielle pumpkin chips to make a fall cornucopia of snack food flavors.

It was a pretty ideal match for the Cider Mill sandwich. Composed of Boar's Head maple-glazed honey ham, green apples, baby spinach and red onion on grilled wheat bread, the sandwich was a roundup of crisp, sweet early fall flavors.

But what really defined it was its condiments: apple butter and honey mustard. The two combined for a symphony of sugary, spicy and fruity tastes. A layer of cheddar calmed the aggressive flavors with a blanket of creaminess.

It was a well-thought-out sandwich. But the Thanksgiving Feast pizza was truly inspired. Like a teenager with a mohawk, uncommon pizza toppings all too often exist just for the sake of doing something different.

Not the case with this pie, which seemed as if it had always been waiting in some culinary heaven, and had only now sent its avatar down to us.

The homemade crust was thin and crisp, and the Thanksgiving Feast was host to two homemade sauces, a garlicky white sauce and a tangy cranberry one.

Mixed on the crust, they combined into a slightly creamy, slightly sweet concoction that played a surprisingly similar role to tomato sauce. Set in a layer of chewy mozzarella, thinly sliced turkey, spinach and onions showered with Parmesan added even more Thanksgiving flavor. I might have liked some chunks of butternut squash to add another dimension; my boyfriend proposed sage stuffing. But even unchanged, this is a $15.50, 16-inch pie we will certainly order again.

We finished lunch with a pair of homemade cider doughnuts so light that they'd gotten away from us several times in the strong winds at the Mill's picnic tables.

But once I bit in, I found the desserts to be more cakey than I had expected from their aerial acrobatics.

Though not as airy as I might have hoped, the flavor was excellent. A hint of apple imbued the cake. A crust of sugar and spicy cinnamon covered it with just the autumnal tastes I was hoping for.

It seems I discovered the Mill just in time to bring in the cool weather. Surely as the leaves turn and fall, I'll be enjoying another Thanksgiving Feast.

Alice Eats is a weekly blog feature devoted to reviewing restaurants where diners can get a meal for two for less than $35. Got a restaurant you'd love to see featured? Send it to [email protected].

If you're the kind of person who loses all sense of time and self control whenever you visit King Arthur Flour, you might want to carefully plan your next visit. As in, set both a monetary and caloric budget and tell a friend where you're going, lest you get lost.

A few weeks ago, the baking giant unveiled the fruits of its yearlong, $10-million expansion. Though the building sprawls along the same hillside it's occupied for years, it feels like an entirely different place. And the complex looks like a wood-and-steel mothership. Which it is, of course, for thousands of bakers all over the world.

69 Elliot Street, Brattleboro, 254-6143

Growing up outside New York City, my favorite flavors came from India. My earliest memory is of tandoori chicken.

When I moved to Vermont in 1998, I was nonplussed as to why something that seemed so effortless as preparing delicious, flavorful Indian food seemed so difficult within the borders of the Green Mountains.

My only hope was India Palace, a family-run restaurant in Brattleboro where I habitually stopped on my trips from Burlington to Connecticut. The food was flavorful, the meat was of good quality and the prices were astonishingly low.

I excitedly returned on Sunday for my first meal there in more than a decade. I found that India Palace wasn't bad, but it was no longer great, either. The food to price ratio, however, was still unbelievable.

I ordered the $21.95 tandoori dinner for one, which proved to be more of a tandoori dinner for three or four.

Immediately after ordering, I was presented with a cup of mulligatawny soup (above right). It smelled delicious, its cumin aroma sensuously filling the air. The lentil soup also had a spirited punch of acid, and as I swallowed it, black pepper lightly burned my throat.