It has been years since I spent significant time in the big cities so I cannot vouch for the state of restaurants outside my rural world of North Carolina’s Piedmont. We have some good restaurants here, but with few exceptions (and we just ate in one for our fiftieth annivesary) most can be faulted on something, service, price, or even the quality of the food.
Like many since the pandemic we have cut back our in-restaurant eating drastically. We have been disappointed so many times that we often choose to not go back.
Our home-cooked meals have for the last few decades been exceptional. We have been fortunate enough to eat wonderful fish like red drum and flounder fresh from the waters of the White Oak River where we lived from 2006-2021. The fish I caught was often supplemented with vegetables from our own garden.
We know what good food is. We understand what it looks like and how it tastes. For a decade we had a cattle farm and raised most of our own food. Our kids grew up on unpasteurized Guernsey milk that I got from our cow every morning. Our freezer was full of beef. We had our own chickens which provided us with eggs even when they had only snow for their water.
We had wild red raspberries that grew along the rock piles by our fields. There were still a few wild strawberries around in those days. We harvested Chantelle mushrooms from our woods and fiddlehead greens from our marshes.
Times have changed. We are a lot older but we still love good food. We still garden but it is only supplemental to what we buy from farmers, farmers’ markets and grocery stores. We also have relatives that garden. This year I have grown enough tomatoes to sell a few pounds and still have plenty to enjoy and share with friends.
We have all the tools we need to cook well from a sous vide stick to a gas grill and a wood pellet smoker. The challenge is that the older you get, the less time you want to spend cooking and cleaning up.
We use our cooking energy sparingly, often working to cook something that will last a few days. If I smoke a trip-tip roast, we might eat off it for four or five days or until it ends up in the soup pot. A pot of beans or crowder peas will last at least as long. When I bake bread, it is usually three or four pounds of bread. We always freeze most of what I bake.
Even so there comes a time when the spirit to cook needs a rest. We have learned very little take out food travels well. Pizza needs to come from a place as close as possible, certainly not more than ten minutes away and it is still just pizza.
Burgers, Chinese and Mexican food just don’t travel well. Even rotisserie chicken is a gamble and often too salty. The one food we have found that travels well is barbecue or smoked meat. We are lucky to live in the South where it is plentiful.
The meal pictured above has crowder peas that were given to us by relatives and cooked by my wife. The brisket and smoked-pulled chicken, and collards came from Honky Tonk Smokehouse in Winston-Salem, NC. Honky Tonk is one of the hidden gems in the Triad area. The baguette was from Camino Bakery in Winston-Salem. It was a delicious takeout meal supplemented by some of our cooking and bread from a good local bakery. It is the way we have learned to give ourselves a cooking break post pandemic - find something that travels well and build a meal around it.
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