View from the Mountain

The New Art of Eating Well At Home

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.

The Elusive Great Saturday Morning Breakfast

The older the you get the more that you find excuses to go out to eat. The pandemic has complicated that by putting all sorts of pressures on restaurants, not the least of which is staffing. My mother and almost every lady that I have met including my wife has held that breakfast is their favorite meal to enjoy outside the home.

Turns out that getting a good breakfast delivered to your table in a timely fashion is much harder than one might expect. I am of the opinion that I can cook a better breakfast for up to half a dozen people than you can find just about anywhere. That's the case as long as you don't want pancakes or waffles, then I give in and agree to a meal at iHOP.  We roll the dice with service and hope for the best.

We lived on the side of a mountain in the county outside of Roanoke, Virginia, for over twenty wonderful years. It was a wonderful place to raise a family. We moved to the Carolina coast for the next sixteen years so I could bring a few dreams to life. We had a favorite breakfast place at the coast which we could enjoy during the nine months that the tourists were gone, but it closed as favorite restaurants sometimes do.  We moved to a small town just west of Winston-Salem in the winter of 2021.  It is near where I grew up in the fifties and sixties. For the last two years we have looked for a breakfast spot to call our own. We have come close, but there are no winners yet.

We thought we found one in Winston-Salem.  It had been open since 1963 which just happened to the year that I got shipped off to military school in Tennessee.  The first couple of times we went it was great.  The third time, the service was the worst I endured in a while.  We were some of the last few customers in the restaurant as we watched as a couple of waitresses stand around chatting while our food cooled on the window by them. When our food did come, no surprise, it wasn't hot. My grandson had to wait another fifteen minutes for his waffle. We were finished eating by the time he had his food. He had eaten food off our plates while waiting for his waffle.  The place was closing as he finished eating.  We haven't been back.

There's a new restaurant opening near us. We have hopes it will be better.  Actually, if I could tell them what to do, it would be to emulate the waitresses that used to serve us at the Famous Anthony's Restaurant in SW Plaza in Roanoke, Virginia.

Walking into what we consider our home-away-from-home Famous Anthony's this morning, we found it packed with customers who were all being taken care of by the very energetic crew of waitresses. What always amazes me is how each waitress connects with her customers in a personal way and makes certain that they get what they want from the kitchen. The other impressive thing is how they work as a team. Sometimes there is a hostess, but sometimes there isn't. It doesn't matter, you always get seated quickly. Then someone will get your drinks, and it might be your waitress or another waitress who has figured out that you need something to drink. Your coffee cup might get filled by your waitress or another one who happens by and sees that you need coffee.

If you can sit back and watch it for a moment, the waitresses have time for personal interactions with each other while still delivering exceptional service to their customers. They might be occasionally irreverent towards management and even joke at some of us regulars, but it creates a wonderful atmosphere. As much as we like the quick, reasonably priced food, we really go there because we feel at home. We know many of the waitresses by first name, Wendy, Ginger, Janelle, Tasha, Jean, and Robin, last but certainly not the meekest. There are other whose faces we know, but we just haven't caught their names yet. We even know some of them well enough to tell when they have run into some challenges at work or home. Yet in spite of the many times we have gone there, it is the rare time we don't get absolutely great service.

There are restaurants that might have fancier menus or even some food that I might like better, but there is just no place where I think you will find a better team of waitresses. You might find some individual people who excel in other places, but this is a whole group of individuals who through their cooperation and dedication to doing more than a good job create an exceptional experience just as the Fishmongers do.  (Full article on Teams That Work)

That particular Famous Anthony's also had very good food.  I still have not found an omelet that I like better than their Chicken Philly omelet (that excludes the ones that I cook myself like the one pictured).  I have not been back to that Famous A's in Roanoke in over a decade and I am sure those waitresses have moved on to something better. Still I have the memories of being a valued customer there.

Teamwork really is important in all sorts of businesses. That is a lesson I learned in my early days after college when I moved to Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, business owners rarely have the skills to create an atmosphere that fosters teamwork.  I was part of some great sales teams at Apple.  Then the company's philosophy changed to have teams compete against each other for the same business.  Imagine the customers who sit down and have two different waitresses vying for their order. Confusing?  It is absolutely confusing, and the worst way to run a business. There was sales magic at Apple during the early years, but like all magic, it was easily destroyed.

The omelet at the top of post is a recent breakfast.  I do omelets much differently than most people.  I call my omelets cold-pan omelets to distinguish them from the hot pans that the French often use for their omelets.

1. Put a pat of butter, and a tablespoon of grape seed oil in your non-stick pan on your stove burner, turn the burner on medium for about ninety seconds and then turn off.
2. Spread an ounce or so coarsely grated cheese over the bottom of the pan after you have evenly distributed the oil-butter mixture.
3. If I am using precooked sausage like what is in the one pictured, I just cut it in pieces. If I am adding mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, or onions, I precook in another pan.  Mushrooms work well in the microwave as long as you drain them.
4. Next I beat two or three eggs (local eggs so it depends on the size) and a splash of water in a bowl until I can't beat them anymore. I love egg whites but they make omelets fall apart unless you are very careful.
5. Now I pour my eggs carefully into the pan where the cheese has melted on the bottom. Here I usually grind some black pepper into the pan and often add some red pepper flakes.
6. Next I distribute my sausage, ham, bacon or whatever across the pan with the eggs- the omelet pictured had turkey and chicken sausage
7. I usually  find a piece of cheese (whatever needs using- blue cheese, cheddar and feta are favorites) that I crumble into the pan
8. I am also fond of spreading a thin last layer of spinach across the bottom of the pan- sometimes I added chopped green onions. When the lid goes on, they steam nicely.
9. Finally on top of the spinach and/or green onions, I sprinkle a little more shredded cheese.
10. Then I put a cover on the skillet and turn the heat on and set it at medium.
11. I put bread in the toaster oven, and I put my plate on top of the toaster oven.
12. I pour myself another cup of coffee and set the table.
13. Around three or four minutes later (depends on your stove, burner and how fast you are cooking) I check the omelet. If it is almost done. I turn the burner off, remove the pan from the burner and put it on a hot pad- leaving the lid off.
14. My toast is now ready, I take it out, spray with olive oil and put it back in for another minute in the toaster.
15. I take a non-stick spatula and work it under the omelet from the edges until it is ready to slide out of the pan.
16. I bring over my plate, slide half the omelet out of the pan onto the plate and fold the rest over.

If your omelet gets brown, try using less heat.  I like salsa with my omelets.  Omelets are for experimenting so go for it.

 

Tomatoes and Me

I would not venture to guess when it was that I ate my first tomato.  Tomatoes likely appear on every page of my life story.  Shortly after we moved to the small town of Lewisville just west of Winston-Salem in 1952, my mother had tomato plants growing in front of our house.  When she moved from her Mount Airy house to our Roanoke house, there were still tomatoes growing near her back steps.   When she got to our house, there were tomatoes growing by the side of the house.

I remember loving tomato sandwiches, even to the point of ordering BLTs for breakfast when traveling.  Some time during my teenage years when on an overnight fishing trip with a friend, I learned about bologna, cheese, and tomato sandwiches. It was love at first bite.  This was well before all cured and processed meat was pronounced as bad for us.   However, we can cling to the knowledge than nothing is better than a plain tomato sandwich on the great bread of your choice with the perfect mayonnaise which in my case is Duke’s.

To eat really good tomatoes, you must face the challenge of growing tomatoes unless you live in an area with lots of farmers’ markets.  I planted my first tomatoes in Nova Scotia in 1972, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy.  We started the plants from seed and hardened them off in cold frame made from salvaged windows.  We barely managed to get tomatoes before the first frost. Since they were all we had and North Carolina was a long way off, they seemed delicious. However, there just wasn’t enough heat out on the shore for tomatoes to be a reliable crop.

For lots of reasons including better hay making weather for our cattle, we moved inland to the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. It was much easier to grow tomatoes (and make hay) there.  By the time we got to the mountainside in Roanoke, in 1989, I had a lot of experience growing tomatoes in harsh conditions.  Even so, getting a ripe tomato by July 1 on our Virginia mountain was a challenge.

Then in 2006, we decided to make a move to North Carolina’s coast.  We ended up on a marsh on an inlet of the White Oak River near the beaches of Emerald Isle.  It was definitely a tomato friendly climate. The spring of 2007, we planted our first coastal tomatoes. Even though we got them in the ground late, we had ripe tomatoes before the end of June.  The next year we had ripe tomatoes before the end of May.

Eventually, in 2016, we managed to grow tomatoes for twelve months using wagons to move them in and out of the garage.  The ripe ones we got in January and February weren’t the best but by the time the heat came in March they were pretty tasty. 

Now we are back in North Carolina’s Piedmont where my mother grew her first and best tomatoes.  On March  8, I planted my tomato seeds for this year’s crop. I will get them into the ground in late April.  Hopefully, we can still manage to beat that July 1 date that I used to chase on the mountain.

Last Mowing Revisited

Eighteen years ago, I wrote a post, the Last Mowing.  We had been living in Roanoke, up on the mountain for fifteen years.  It was hard to get used to mowing the yard in December after years in New Brunswick where the snow could come in November and cover the ground until mid-May. 

Except for the green grass in December, there  were parts of living on the mountain that reminded us of our years in Canada.  The sometimes snowy weather was one thing and the friendly people were the other.

When you come over our hill after dark, it is almost like an approach to the airport. The city is spread out before you, street lights blinking, and buildings glowing. There are not many views in the world that can compete with it.

Being on top of the world at the end of the road seems to make us closer. Perhaps we have been drawn closer by the few times that the county has forgotten to plow the snow off the road in the winter.

Flatlanders, that is anyone who does not live on the hill, often ask how we get up the hill in the winter. Actually getting up the hill has rarely been the problem. All of us at the top have at least one four wheel drive. It takes less than one winter to realize that going down the hill is far more exciting than going up. I have been fortunate to have a job that allows me to work at home when necessary. That means that snowy morning’s entertainment usually is watching the folks who have to go to work try to get down the hill safely.

Our  first year on the mountain, we got an early coat of ice.  Everyone on the hill banded together and we cut a single tire track all the way to the bottom of the hill.  It was the first of many weather adventures on the hill.  We saw snow storms that were worthy of Canada.

It was a good place to live  and while we lived there, those of us at the top of the hill were a tight-knit group.  and I remember more parties than disagreements.  After we moved from the hill,  most friends drifted away but we remain close to one family that grew up with our children.

A lot of water has passed under me in skiff and kayak in the fifteen years after we moved from Roanoke and lived on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast.  My crocs also covered many miles of sandy beach. Yet I still fondly remember the years when we partied on our decks whenever given the slightest chance. There was no close neighborhood group in our coastal subdivision. I will blame it on the lack of any steep hills.

After fifteen years in the marsh, we moved from the coast during the pandemic.  Selling, buying, and moving during a pandemic are not the easiest things to do, but with lots of help, we managed to find a nice neighborhood less than half an hour from where I grew up in North Carolina’s Piedmont. We even found a home with a real backyard instead of a marsh or a ravine.

While my family has deep roots here, many who have been close to us are much older even than us.  The younger generation has their own busy lives and there is little to connect us with the neighborhood. Last year none of our immediate neighbors even attended the annual neighborhood HOA picnic with free (well it is covered by your dues) barbecue.

When we lived at the coast, we had a wonderful church family but we lost that when we moved.  Because of the pandemic, we remain video-church goers.  If the pandemic recedes further, perhaps we will find another church family.

Age, changes due to the way people live, some driven by the pandemic and even political divisions make it harder to connect.

Much like it was in early December eighteen years ago in Roanoke, we just had our last mowing of the yard here in North Carolina’s Piedmont hill country. Our fescue yard is still green like our bluegrass one in Roanoke so there is a chance it will be mowed again.

Our yards might be much the same green in December but somehow it feels like our world has changed.   In is unlikely we will have as close a group of friends as we did in Roanoke both on the hill and in the flatlands. Having children in school makes it easy to have common ground.  The Roanoke friends will have to share a spot in our fond memories of the friends we made during our years on the farm and in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

I have always believed that  there are good people everywhere, you just have to work harder in some places to find them than others.  I have seen nothing to change my mind in our latest move. We are finding our new ones, one at a time.

Three Channels Were Plenty

I was six or seven years old when televisions made it to our neighborhood in Lewisville, NC.  It was too late for the television to own my soul.  I had already given it to the fields and especially the deep dark woods that stretched all the way to Conrad’s Pond perched above the bottomland by the Yadkin River.

The picture is one of my mother by our first television in our Lewisville house at the corner of Styers Street and Shallowford Road.  In those days Lewisville was a simple place. The school when I first went in 1955 still housed grades one through twelve and was within easy walking distance of our home.  My first grade teacher, Ms. Conrad, was a cousin to my mother so I followed the rules and colored within the lines.

In fact we were surrounded with cousins and other relatives.  My great grandmother, Millie Styers lived in a little house next door to us. Abe, her husband ran Styers Ferry across the Yadkin River.  Millie's house was just behind the big house of one-armed uncle Joe Styers who had lost one arm in an accident at the Styers-Shore water-powered mill in Yadkin County.  Just across Styers St. on the other corner of Shallowford road was uncle Joe’s daughter Jet  Fix and her two sons, Tommy and Stevie.  

There always seemed to be lots of kids to play with after school.  We played tackle football in the Fix’s yard and baseball in our yard before the cedar, cherry, and plum trees got too big.

Lewisville was a safe place.  We rode our bikes everywhere and sometimes even to school. It was a different time, parents believed teachers explicitly, Fund raising involved making potholders with loops and other crafts. There were no air conditioners in houses or schools. You ate what they put on your place at the cafeteria. The only pizza I had before college was Chef Boyardee pizza kit. There wasn’t much homework and the only audio visual aids we had were tiny film strip ls that seem to be so securely locked away that watching them made you think you were involved in a jail break.  They copied things using mimeograph machines.  The purple copies smelled of alcohol and felt a little funny.  You could also have it out with a bully at the bike rack and not get suspended.

Into that world came black and white television.  The first show that I remember watching was the Howdy Doody show.  When invited, I would go over to the Fix’s house and watch it with Tommy and Stevie.  The show that I enjoyed the most was Davy Crockett.  It launched in the mid-fifties. Then in 1959 came Bonanza with the Cartwrights. There were other shows, the Ed Sullivan Show and  Walt Disney Presents.  The one thing on television that seemed to matter was Major League Baseball on Saturday afternoon.  I can even remember the  teachers bringing televisions into the classroom during important World Series games.  There were other TV classics like the Lone Ranger, Sky King,  Gunsmoke, Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Cannonball, and Route 66. We got NBC from Winston-Salem, CBS from Greensboro, and ABC from Charlotte if the antenna was just right.

To me one of the most important shows became the  Nightly News with David Brinkley and Chet Huntley.  My mother often took a few minutes off work from her beauty shop to watch it with me. That along with reading both the Winston-Salem Journal and the evening Sentinel kept me well informed for a kid.

I read all the comic books and Tom Swift Books that I could get my hands on with our limited budget.

There was no Internet, and no one was enamored with talking on the rotary phones so we played a lot, went to school and church, and when we were old enough, we joined the Boy Scouts.  There was a fair amount of fishing involved when the weather was warm and even sometimes when it was pretty chilly.

Once we got old enough for Boy Scouts, we were also old enough to go hunting which wasn’t a big deal in those days.  Boy Scouts eventually took over my life before high school which was probably a good thing.  There was plenty of camping, summer camps and even a last hurrah of a 20 mile hike on the Wilderness Road before I went off to military school at McCallie. Only after I came back from my first semester in 1963 at McCallie did we get a color television which I mostly remember as a portal into the political conventions of the day.  The only television that I remember at McCallie was in the canteen.  We could watch it for a few minutes after evening study hall. It was hard to get hooked with only fifteen minutes of TV.

It was a much simpler life in the fifties and early sixties. Doctors even made house calls but radical change came pretty quickly. As freshmen in college the fall of 1967, we wore sports coats and ties. That was pretty much over by second semester. Inadvertently, we learned by 1969, that our government did not always tell the truth.  We also figured out that at least in Harvard, there was a lot of police hostility to college students privileged enough to go to Harvard.

We can remember fondly those times when only the newspaper delivered the news (we had no TVs in our college rooms) but there is no way to unconnect our society just a little so it is best to take control of our new over-connected lives. Start by figuring out the right technology to connect yourself to the world. While it is not as easy as walking to Beck's General Store for a loaf of bread or a can of biscuits in the fifties, it is not impossible even for those of us with several decades on us.

When you get your technology connection to the world right, there will be no more cable company sagas or worries about being embarrassed by the lack of technology in your house. The last thing you want to do is embarrass those grown children with rotary phone equivalent of an Internet conncection.