Maine is an absolutely incredible place, I loved everyplace we went there. I’m not sure what place I loved most, but I think it might have been the Stonewall Kitchen Company Store. On our New England trip, my college roommate and his wife let us stay with them and showed us all the best places. We have known each other for quite a while now and my buddy said he knew I would enjoy visiting the Stonewall Kitchen, he was dead right.

I don’t even really know how to describe the Stonewall Kitchen store for you. It’s like a theme park, except instead of rides there are incredible flavor experience for your mouth. It’s like a museum to jams and jellies, sauces and salsas.

Essentially you walk into the store and it is packed to the brim with every kind of condiment you can imagine, and a lot you would never imagine in your life. You can start looking around anywhere, and soon you will discover that everywhere there are little jars open and pretzels or crackers so that you can start sampling.

And sample I did. I can’t tell you how many things I sampled, because I can’t count that high, but it was a lot. I really liked all the different salsas they had, and the fruit jams were excellent, but it is the pepper jellies that won my heart. I love pepper jellies, but really before visiting the Stonewall Kitchen I had never known there were so many. One corner of the shop was completely to devoted to pepper jellies of a wide variety of flavors and heat. It was like a little piece of heaven, just for me.

So I bet you are wondering what I bought, and the sad story is that I didn’t. There are two reasons why I left the store without buying anything, the first is that we were flying out of Boston in a couple days and I didn’t want to buy a jar of just three ounces of jelly. The second is that even if I could have got a jar home there were so many amazing choices I couldn’t make up my mind about what to get. So Meagan ended up buying a little blueberry dish (because blueberries are famous in Maine), and I left with a promise to come back some day.

So I highly recommend that the next time you are in New England you make some time to go by a Stonewall Kitchen Company Store, your mouth will thank you and your tummy will too. There are several stores in the New England area, but the one we went to was in York and I believe it is the company’s headquarters.