View from the Mountain

Everything is Better Fried - NC Fish Camps

Seafood has long been a part of life in North Carolina at least according to my telling of the story. I am pretty sure I started eating seafood at the beach as soon as I could chew solid food. By the time I moved to Mount Airy in 1963, wherever I was home we would go to the small seafood restaurant run by a German fellow whose name escapes me. It was on the outskirts of town and was only open Thursdays through Saturday. While it was not a real fish camp, it operated similarly. Aside from a hamburger, the only thing on the menu was fish, shrimp, oysters, or the strange little stuffed crab shells.
I loved the fried flounder and the fried oysters but they would also sell you a Captain’s plate with three choices of food so it
was easy to get some Calabash shrimp if you really want to have a feast. You could get baked or fried potatoes with slaw and hush puppies. The tables in the restaurant were all long, designed to accommodate families with some friends. We were often joined by friends or other relatives.
Restaurants like this one would arrange to have fresh seafood brought up from the coast on Wednesdays. Some of the owners went to get the seafood themselves. They knew the fish houses that could be counted on to provide the freshest fish. All the restaurants had similar menus. They were not many places in Piedmont North Carolina without one of these restaurants an hour or so away.
The original fish camps were close to water and run by fisherman looking for a better way to sell their catch. The fried seafood was so popular that seafood restaurants with the same menu became very popular. My first real memory of a fried seafood emporium was in the summer of 1969. My uncle and I had gone down to Morehead City to do some surf fishing. The only bridge to Bogue Banks was there. Once we crossed, the roads ran out quickly and we drove my Bronco eighteen miles down the beach to the Point at Emerald Isle. It was midsummer so it was not real surprise that we caught almost nothing.
After reversing our trip on the beach and crossing the bridge from Atlantic Beach to Morehead City, we stopped at Captain Bill’s on the Morehead waterfront. We had a feast that I still remember well even the traditional lemon pie that follower. Later that summer I was camping on Ocracoke Island. Instead of going home by catching the short ferry and driving north to Nag Head, I took the long Cedar Island Ferry and eventually ended up in Morehead City where I filled my coolers with flounder and shrimp.
That was the summer that I learned how to cook flounder. My mother also shared the family hush puppy recipe. I learned that the biggest challenge of making small batch hush puppies is cooking them fast enough to stay ahead of the ones being eaten.
In our years down on the coast we tended to favor flounder that I caught and cooked or flounder that I bought from our local fish house, Clyde Phillips Seafood.
When friends visited we would sometimes visit one of the local fried fish houses. The most iconic would be T&Ws Oyster House which opened in 1971. The flounder is unlikely to be local and it might be a little heavier on the breading that what I would cook, but you can be sure that you will gotten a taste of the what fish houses are all about in North Carolina.
Just to get you in the mood for some fried flounder, here is our family's hush puppy recipe.
Most of the Hush Puppies that we get in restaurants are heavy and not anywhere close to the light fluffy ones that mom taught me to make.
The recipe is pretty simple.
One cup of self rising cornmeal,
One half cup of self rising flour,
One teaspoon of sugar,
One finely chopped small onion,
One cup of milk
Mix all the ingredients together.
Heat in a small heavy sauce pan three inches of Wesson oil until it is hot

Fill a coffee mug with cold water

Take a soup spoon, wet it in your coffee mug of cold water, dip it in your mixture so you have about enough mixture to cover about one third of the spoon lengthwise.
Carefully let it slide into hot oil.  If your oil is the correct temperature, there will be lots of bubbles around the hush puppy. If you take a long handled metal slotted spoon and touch the just dropped hush puppy which will sink to  bottom of the pan, it should rise to the surface easily.

If the oil isn't hot enough, just keep trying.  When the oil is the proper temperature, the dropped mixture will bob to the top of oil with very little encouragement.  Turn the hush puppies until they are golden brown and place them on a platter with paper towels.
It takes a little practice, but it isn't that difficult.  They are best done in small batches.  You're working with very hot oil so be very careful and keep kids away from the cooking.  Don't be surprised if for the first few minutes, the hush puppies keep disappearing.  The recipe makes enough for a huge crowd, probably four dozen or more hush puppies.  It does make something of a mess, but the good hush puppies are worth it.

 

All Through The House

Not a creature was stirring not even one or the tabby cats. They were all snuggled in their beds dreaming of Santa Cat and his sled full of cat treats. What a feast there would be if the sled just turned over. Even Goose might get his fill for once.

Merry Christmas from Goose, Merlin, Jester, and Maverick and the less furry members of the family.  Read our latest Christmas story here at Post.news.

Nineteen Years of Posts

I started blogging on Typepad on November 23, 2004. It was just over nineteen years ago was about the new Windows computer I had just bought after working nearly twenty years at Apple.. I had been using Radio software for blogging but I found it limiting compared to Typepad so I switched and somewhere along the Radio died and stayed with Typepad even while expanding to other platfoarms and sites that I manage myself.

For a number of years I did a post on View from the Mountain every morning. Some were short, others far too long for the average reader. I found early on that writing helped me figure out complex problems and often remove some of the emotion from the situation.  While my Applepeels blog here on Typepad had a huge following back when people were more interested in arguing about computers than politics, the size of the audience never mattered.

I sometimes think I just wanted to write down things so I could more clearly "remember" them. For whatever reason, I am still writing and some folks are still reading so with luck perhaps I can make it to the twentieth anniversary of the blog.

If you look at the unfinished but extensive index, you see quickly that this has never been a single topic blog. It has always been whatever pops into my mind. That's not likely to change at this point. 

Several years ago I tried to come up with a list of favorite posts. It was a feeble effort but the best that I could do at the time. I now tend to post some of my longer articles at my Oracokewaves.me blog. I feel like I have more control there. 

If you are reading this, I want to offer my sincere thanks. If you have been reading for several years, I trust you have enjoyed what I happen to write.

My Theory of Soil

As I wrote in November 2021, there has been dirt on my hands for many years. I started serious gardening in the summer of 1972 on our farm in St. Croix, Nova Scotia.  It was grass pasture that we turned into a garden. It was plowed with my John Deere tractor and its three furrow plow. It was then harrowed, covered with old chicken manure. The next spring we tried beating it into submission with a tiller with front-mounted tines. It was a bone jarring experience.

We were young and strong so it still became a great garden. We grew so much broccoli that I am still traumatized if I eat broccoli more than once a week. We moved to New Brunswick where we raised cattle for ten years. Not only did we garden, I also planted twenty acres in oats most years. We did not harvest the oats as grain but green chopped them in the fall to extend the pasture season. The oats were a cover crop for reseeding an old field in grass and clover.

The garden spot that we inherited on the old farm in Brunswick had been used for quite a while so it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from our garden spot in Nova Scotia. It was also rocky, well-drained soil while the Nova Scotia soil was heavy clay once you got down over a foot.

If you a trying to grow new grass where mostly weeds and brush grew, you work the land hard. If you are trying to build up a worn out soil, you hardly work it.  What did do was apply as much rotted manure to the old garden as we could. We never plowed. We would use a disc harrow to work the composted manure into the soil.  Then I would till it in the spring before planting with my tiller that now had rear-mounted tines.  Towards the end of our time on the farm in 1984, the garden really did not need tilling.  The soil structure had been restored.  You could easily stir it with a three-tined digger. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do about the rocks. As the old-timers were fond of saying, the most reliable crop in the area was rocks.

Since the farm we have lived and gardened on a mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. Next we did the same along the marshes at the North Carolina coast and finally here on ridge in the North Carolina Piedmont.

The recipe for good soil has always been the same, plenty of compost, mix it with the soil so the air, soil, compost, and moisture can do their thing.  This year our soil needed stirring, I used a broadfork to lift and break the soil a little. It was not turned over like with a plow. I figure three or four years of this and I will be able to stir it with my three-pronged digger. As for no till gardening, it can work if your soil is in good shape. As for no-till farming, I am all for the no-till not so much for all the chemicals.

Grounded in Life

Our Roanoke, Virginia, Home

Heading out on your own involves a little mystery until you find you place in the world. People used to join a company and the company had a lot to with their life and where they lived it.  That doesn’t happen so much anymore.

Our life wasn’t a structured one.  I got out of college, felt lucky to not be fighting a war in a jungle and equally lucky to have missed the law boards.  I went back to the land in Nova Scotia.  Life was remodeling a two-hundred year old post and beam house, gardening, and taking care of a few cows until I figured out what to do with my life.

Our First Nova Scotia Home

That house and others that followed provided safe haven from not just the weather but from a lot of life’s challenges.  We built our lives around our houses.  The people we met were nearby and because of the nature of the jobs that I held, I always had an office in the house.

In seventies and early eighties when we lived on the farm, local neighbors, also tied to the land, would drop by to build relationships and strengthen that web of friendship that keeps farming communities running.

After we moved off the farm to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Columbia, Maryland and eventually to Roanoke, Virginia, visitors were often those with children of the same age.  Only for a few short months did we live where we could attend a company holiday party.

Life revolved a round our homes, church, and schools.Our Roanoke home at the top of post was high on the side of the foothills of a mountain. It was safe have from the winds that often buffeted  the mountainside and reminded us of our Nova Scotia years. It was big enough to get lost in and to collect far too many family treasures as our parents passed away,  The office I had there was larger than the one I commuted to as Apple director.  As the kids moved away the house became too big for the two of us.

Our Coastal NC Home

We moved to a smaller house on the North Carolina coast. It anchored us once again. We found friends and a church with more friends. Once again I had an office in the home. Our coastal home kept us safe from a number of hurricanes and plenty of high water.

After fifteen years there, we decided to move on again.  Each move after Roanoke took us to a

Our NC Piedmont Home

smaller home but every time the home anchored us in life. This last move to the Piedmont which by my counting is our sixth and might truly be our last. This has turned out to be a good home, one where we are comfortable in our surroundings and well-anchored in life.

At a time of rising seas, it is good to perched on a ridge at 785 feet instead of just six feet above sea level in marsh.  Even though I loved every moment of living in the marsh, I have found plenty to love here in the Piedmont.