Eating Locally in the Mountains of North Carolina

David and I are loving being in our quiet little cabin by the lake. We've been lucky enough to find lots of sources for local food: at an independent snazzy (expensive) grocery called Poppies, at a very inexpensive farmer's market in the town of Brevard with lots of vendors who remind me of home (which was a small town on the other side of the state), at a dirt-cheap little farmstand, and for absolutely free on a berry-covered mountainside trail off the Blue Ridge Parkway.

For a late brunch, we made shrimp and grits with NC shrimp bought at the grocery, grits from Son's camp (and ground by previous campers), and tomatoes bought at a little tent in front of one of the houses down the road from our cabin. The shrimp and tomatoes mixture had a little local butter and the grits were seasoned with local goat cheese.



For dinner, we cooked out on the grill on the back deck. We cooked local ground bison burgers and served them on buns from a local bakery, topping them with tomatoes. Local green beans and roasted corn rounded out the meal--and as a special addition we added a few of our lemon cucumbers that we brought for car snacks.



There is nothing better than roasted corn! Just throw it on the grill for ten or fifteen minutes without any shucking or anything. After it is cooked, the silks peel off incredibly easily.



We washed our meal down with local and organic Pisgah porter:



Dessert? Wild blackberries we picked on a slow easy hike through the mountains. (Note the scale: these are intense little berries in a tiny bowl the size of a saucer, resting on a stool--not big ones in a regular bowl sitting on a table.)