Knife And Fork, Spruce Pine, N.C.

My sister-in-law motioned to the waiter after we had been studying the menu for a few minutes and while the rest of us continued to giggle helplessly she pointed out to young Josh that among the five of us we spoke five languages and between the lot of us we had traveled to six continents but putting all our heads together there was much in the menu we could not decipher.  Such an opening bodes not the promise of  a very good meal, but Josh handled it like the pro that he is and patiently explained all we needed to know. And there was a lot.

That the restaurant Knife and Fork is an unassuming store front in the unassuming North Carolina hill town called Spruce Pine made our confusion all the more hilarious to us, the table of urbane world travelers. At Knife and Fork the food took all that noise away and replaced it with the muted sounds of people enjoying their food. . My rabbit, seen above was excellent, with black raspberries in the quinoa and feta  sprinkled over the whole thing and  best of all none of the ingredients were unknown to me...

My brother-in-law describes himself tongue in cheek as a wine snob and therefore we brought a couple of bottles of his own excellent wines to be corked as it were for en bucks apiece by our hard working waiter, the Josh aforementioned, seen here pulling the stopper from a bottle of North Carolina Raffaldini Sangiovese. Thus it was we never even got to see the restaurant's wine list.

 

My indefatigable hostess, sister-in-law Geeta had organized a Fourth of July festivity for us to attend at the nearby Penland Craft School but rain stopped play. Stopped it dead as there were flash flood warnings and rivers were rising all across the mountains of western North Carolina. The pouring rain outside just made it all the more snug inside where we pouring brother-in-law Bob's wines with gay abandon. There he is next to his wife eyeing my wine glass. Good man.

 

Once I had figured out what "lardo" was I ordered kettle corn with melted lard on it. Sounded intriguing and here it was, an appetizer like none  other I had eaten in my world travels. Popcorn for dinner...no less! In the foreground we see my wife's choice of fava beans and chicken neck.

 Knife and Fork has taken on the relatively new and very fashionable mantra of the locavore and they do a very nice job of letting the flavors in the foods speak for themselves. I think those beans were the most flavorful favas I have eaten in decades. Ellie, a former resident of Ecuador was delighted with her simple  yet elegant salad. And her glass of water...vegetarianism at its most ascetic.

Every dish was a delight to look at and even better to eat. I had never heard of "allen table" cucumbers as seen on the left but they were delicious.

 

One of my wife's goals on this trip was to taste as much trout as she  could and she got a fair slab on her plate at Knife and Fork.

 

The prices at the restaurant are quite interesting too as they are not deigned to exclude anyone from a chance to taste first class cuisine and Spruce Pine is a small mountain town developing a reputation as an artist's haven in a working class town. The appetizers are less than ten bucks but the main dishes aren't much more, peaking at  $22 for a steak main course. Desserts were imaginative and excellent and they topped out at 6 bucks. All in all this is an excellent value. 

I wanted to try a cross section of desserts and overrode my dinner companions by ordering three dishes. One was a bread pudding with vanilla ice cream which I would rate as okay and no more. I like my bread pudding to be thick and moist and crumbly but this was two flat slabs of pudding with no texture. The huckleberry dish was the stand out, shown in the middle below, comprising a biscuit (!) slightly salty and crumbly with tart berries and delicious sweet cream. It won the prize as the best of the three. Of course we included a dark chocolate mousse for those heathen who argue that dessert must include at least some chocolate... We passed them round and each dug in with a spoon before passing the dish along to their neighbor. 

 

Owing to our aborted Fourth of July plans we had reserved an early seating and were unable to move it back and that ended up being okay too as we got home before dark, lit the fire and drank brandy till sleep overcame us one by one. It was an excellent Fourth despite the washed out weather.

 

I was doing fine by the end of dinner.

Nate the owner came out to chat with the locals at our table, Bob and Geeta. He is a Los Angeles transplant who married a North Carolina native who started pining for her homeland. One can  hardly blame her when one sees these mountains under sunshine, as one should. Anyway he came to live in his small town and decided to open a fabulous restaurant which he did. No one much noticed until he entered a regional cooking contest and beat everyone hands down, including the big name from the Biltmore Estate and suddenly he put himself on the map. Now everyone in the area is trekking to Spruce Pine for a meal. Plus Nate is expanding with prospects for a bar with food and a patio dining area. I've eaten there twice and I know I will go back when we make the family visit trek back to Celo.

That locavore thing is on display in the dining room with photos and notes from the area farmers who supply real local food to the restaurant. These are the people who provide the ingredients for Nate to work his magic. Happy families growing happy food,.

 

The bill came to $225 including $20  corkage and considering the fact that we held back not one jot it was an astonishing good value.  

 I have to confess that after coming to terms with preposterous Key West prices it was enormous great fun to have an exceptional meal, served by a cheerful capable waiter and to be able to call the whole experience a good value.

The food items that had confused us are all recorded on the restaurant's online menu. The cheeses, once we discovered they were cheeses got confusing invierno, sottocenere,taleggio. Not to mention the assorted and wild greens that accompanied the dishes. We were feverishly  consulting my wife's iPhone on the subject of mizuna, lamb's quarters, frisee and after we sorted that lot out we had the mysterious gribiche to unravel. If that lot is child's play to you, you're welcome. In any event if you want a first class meal and can find Spruce Pine on the highway between Asheville and Boone this is the place to stop. 

Spruce Pine has  had quite  a history since its founding in the early 20th century and the backbone, the railroad is still there in town, alongside lower main street known as Locust Avenue. There is also an upper main street parallel up the hill but it was too wet to take Cheyenne for a walk. For her the trip was in vain, a ride in the car and a snooze in the car while we stuffed our faces. her reward was a chew at home in front of the fire.  I don't think she cares much about the local food movement or braised frisee or anything quite that fancy. She is a plain dog and none the worse for that. I on the other hand want to go back to Knife and Fork and indulge myself.

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The Circle Of Life At Celo

This is the Hobbit house at the top of the hill where I stay when I come to visit Bob and Geeta (ghee-tah with a hard 'G'). That's because this is their home in the woods. As an alternative to the Florida Keys I can hardly think of a better place to spend time away from salt air, 911 calls and crowded sightseeing traffic on the Overseas Highway.

Geeta is my wife's sister, raised in Illinois and California but an Appalachian by inclination who walks the ridges of these mountains and still says, half to herself, she can't believe she gets to live here. She travels a lot, especially now the she is retired from general medical practice, but she continues in the vein she has lived where before she ran a rural medical clinic in these forgotten mountains (they were off the map in 1970) now she visits the cold frozen parts of India to bring medical care to forgotten mountain women in the Himalaya.

Bob from Alabama adopted the hippy creed decades ago and brought his wife to the mountains where he built a house and raised the family and still chops wood and grows vegetables and milks goats and trades food and ponders the mystery of how the planet can support billions more humans than it was designed for. I am pleased to say I have contributed nothing knowingly to the overcrowding but being human he enjoys his grandsons in Asheville who may or may not be the seven billionth and seven billion and first people on Earth. And yes we enjoy wine and local brews of one sort or another when we visit.

To build a house is beyond my comprehension, and then to live in it for the rest of your life, me who has spent a lifetime wandering, well that's beyond my ability to begin to fathom. Here they are on the door of the fridge, from 35 years ago:

So for me a week in these surroundings can be a strain, as mountain people tend to be sociable folk, but it is a reminder that there are more ways to live than sitting under a palm sweating year round.

Cheyenne doesn't mind it at all, though the inside stairs to the guest bedroom are steep and winding so I make sure she comes down outside by way of a deck that has shallow steps and fewer of them as the houses built into the hill. She takes the time to sit on the deck and watch the full sized deer come out of the woods and graze the lawn. Celo community owns the land and when Bob and Geeta die the house would first be offered to their boys who will not want to live year round on an Appalachian mountain, most especially not the park ranger in Yosemite, but even the local son likes his solar home in urban Asheville too much to move. So then it will be offered to anyone on the waiting list for the community. and so the wheel of life goes round. Like many residents of the community bob and Geeta have had to make money away from Celo and thei boys have graduated college with no student debt and with jobs and wives and values inculcated by this strange peace loving world free of television, newspapers, cell phone signals and all too frequently for my taste, Internet. Aside from the fact that it snows in winter while summer, if you're lucky, lasts three months in the shadow of Mount Mitchell I would not want to live in a community where my neighbors get to vote on my admission to the club and then my house design and where collective decision making governs the community as a whole. It's not a gated community and the is nothing suburban about Celo but I am too iconoclastic to subsume myself into the collective as Bob and Geeta have done over the decades.

Time though is passing and I feel it when I go to Celo now. Geeta talked about what she and Bob will do when either or both of them can no longer drive, and what the survivor will do when the other dies (a retreat to Asheville to live with their local son seems the preferred solution) and she says there is talk of creating assisted living in the community. I'd not suggest taking any cues from Key West which cannot decide from one minute to the next how to deal with that issue. The community has become a success in response to the cracks we see in our civilized facade. Local food,locally grown, solar panels, rain water collection, shared transport, community help are all issues that seem less crackpot now than they did half a century ago.

I feel immensely privileged to get to spend time once a year perhaps more in the mountains. I like to come up on the Triumph and spend a few days riding mountain roads, an activity that recharges my batteries, renews my pleasure in motorcycling for the fun of it and allows me a moment or two to miss my dog (my wife uses a telephone with some dexterity). To bring Cheyenne is to slow done and smell the roses, or the cow manure, depending on the circumstances.

There are things here that remind me of my childhood, the farming, the society rooted in pre-industrial values that when I was a child were a drag and that now at I am an adult are a source of nostalgia. Happily I have lived my life as fully as I could and I have few regrets. I admire Bob and Geeta's sense of rootedness in their community, values both their boys have inherited or learned but the idea of a whole life spent circling a rural village was offered to me when I was a child in Italy and I firmly rejected it.

Mason, Bob and Geeta's dog inherited from their too busy daughter-in-law died last March. He got cancer and two months later he was dead but not before he paid his respects to his friends and neighbors. Bob tells the storylfhow how Mason was getting to weak to go down the steep stairs by himself so Bob lifted the forty pound dog in his arms and took Mason out to sit in the grass on warm Spring days. Mason would then roll himself down the hill to the road and stagger off across the fields. When Bob noticed his dog had gone he'd think to himself Mason had gone off to die. Not a bit of it; Bob would get calls from various neighbors announcing Mason had showed up and was tiring and needed to be collected and taken home. On a trip into town they loaded Mason onto the back seat and by the time they arrived in Asheville he was dead.

Good bye Mason, I miss walking with you. As does Cheyenne who liked competing for your supper.

Geeta's hip replacement is bothering her from time to time as the nerves severed in the operation grow back but she doesn't let them slow her down. She and Bob play the grandparents now, not because they have to but because they want to. Like all of us past the age of fifty they have friends who have died, have cancer, take medications all day, or who grumble that growing old isn't for sissies. As I write this my wife is in California for her oldest friend's memorial service. Who needs cancer "awareness" in this generation? I look at twelve year old Cheyenne chewing a bone contentedly and wonder how long she has, or if I will beat her to it with a tumor or a wreck? In the end all we have is the time we have and spending it wisely is the most important thing to do, and the hardest.

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Cheyenne's Mountain Vacation

I woke to the sound of heavy snoring. Cheyenne was on the trundle bed which she had appropriated for herself and I could hear a sound like thunder as she sucked in air through her snout, rolled it round her rib cage and held it for a second. Then she let the air out like a balloon through her thick flappy lips with a sound like a truck rolling through a puddle. Then she started again, a deep gasp, a rumble and a wet rubbery sound of her lips wobbling. She was tired. I was merciless and rousted my dg for her morning walk. The good news was that we were a few thousand feet up in the mountains of Western North Carolina and as a result the morning temperature wasn't going to shoot up to 90 degrees as soon as the sun appeared. Around here we'd be lucky to see 65 degrees on this overcast morning threatening rain. A dog walk was in order.

Cheyenne puts up with being in the car. I have noticed she likes to be able to look out and see the world, so lying on the back sat of the car doesn't do for her where her view is blocked by the door. Nevertheless she puts up with it, in sure and certain hope of better things to come. In this case two days of lounging on her bed on the back seat with the air conditioning turned low enough to silence her panting, brought princess to the wilds of my sister in law's home outside Asheville.

Cheyenne was ready for her walk and Celo, a private community of back to the land urban farmers and renegade hippies from the 60s, is perfect country for dog walking. Celo is the ideal many of us would like to live in, were it not for the communal land ownership and governance by consensus and community chores and so forth. A small price to pay you might argue to learn true appreciation for the bounty of the land, a quiet rural life with no fear of your neighbors who are in point if fact are your friends and your support. The apocalyptic types who predict a sudden end to civilization as we know it could learn a lesson or two from this unarmed intentional community as they call it. Children run free here and so do, it turns out, well behaved dogs. Strangers are greeted with a wave, not shot.

Because it is a community, Celo (named for the Italian word cielo which means 'heaven' and around here is pronounced see-low) has an abundance of signs which as usual tend to tickle my funny bone. Above we have a standard road sign marking the limits of the private property of the community, here rendered in a slightly altered state, as though on acid. Below an important warning sign on rain resistant cardboard held up in scholarly fashion by paper clips, a touch of academia in the woods...

It did not as I recall take a great deal of discussion but the community voted unanimously, as it must in a consensus run organization, to outlaw deer hunting on the communal land. That was quite the move in rural North Carolina, a place where money is short and hunting is long and where people value their animal prey as food. The genteel paper signs are everywhere peeling and fading in polite support of this long held principle. No need of orange reflective vests here when out walking, thank you.

The crash of 2008 gave fresh impetus to a stagnant community and you can see evidence everywhere of the influx of fresh blood, younger families, people with energy and a desire to distance themselves as much as they can from mainstream life. They want their children to grow up playing and learning from the land, they want their homes to be appreciated as part of the landscape and they want work to be as meaningful as they can. People commute the hour to Asheville from here because they must but the ideal is always to live off the land and sI the land. It is old fashioned, idealistic and inspiring.

For one like me who grew up surrounded by farming and country living it has it's appeal as an escape pod from the flat heat of a tourist riddled summer in the Keys but it's not where I want to live. Nine months of the year it's cold or wet, summer is beautiful and fleeting and Celo is a long way from the mindless entertainment of the city. That my brother in law and his wife have made it their home base for decades is a tribute to their clear eyed vision as young college graduates. She became a general practitioner in a small rural health clinic in Appalachia while he raised their boys. Then he Went to school to teach up near Canada whe winters were bleak and the money they both earned put their boys through college. Now they are home and retired and travel as the mood takes them and where she works from time to time as a locus - a substitute doctor - for vacationing physicians.

Cheyeen's tail was wagging wildly when we got her out of he car. Dogs have better memories than humans tend to attribute to them and she knew where she was. Walking here is a matter of picking a trail and letting your body wander in sync with your mind. The roads are unpaved in the community and behind any rhodendron bush could lurk a house, in Hansel and Gretel style, or a parked car at the head of an almost invisible trail leading to said house.

The community has a school, dedicated to the memory of Arthur Morgan where children are raised more than simply educated, on Quaker principles. Arthur Morgan School :: A Progressive North Carolina Boarding School with Quaker Values and Montessori Philosophy The school was out of course and this is the time of year young people tend Camp Celo further up the road which would be in my estimation an idyllic Tom Sawyer summer were summer weather to prevail. Days under canvas in pouring relentless rain revealed clumps of damp small people huddled by the side of the road as we lucky adults drove out of the flooded country in search of the city fleshpots. More on that later.

Cheyenne was, as you might imagine, delighted to chase down the labyrinth of trails wandering apparently at random through the woods. She cast off her summer Florida hibernation and reverted to being a frisky puppy once again. Her nose was down and I have no idea if she was pursuing deer scent, possum scent, field mouse scent or neighboring dog scents. She made slow forward progress dodging back and forth across the trails I meandered as I kept an eye on her.

Water in Celo tastes excellent, both from the tap and apparently in puddles and streams. Cheyenne took advantage of it all. The small wooden bridges are in the Celo style, unobtrusive yet effective.

The woods are thick with trees and bushes and dead leaves, and easy to get lost in. I have managed the ignominious feat before now taking off for a walk and ebing up hours later in some upraised farmer's homestead well outside the boundaries of the community. My sister in law advises a taking off for a walk in the evening. They've had guests obliged to spend an uncomfortable night among the tree trunks, lost and exhausted.

The heavy rain this year has produced thick greenery everywhere, and wet middy roads. Cheyenne was entirely content and I set aside my desire for a hot dry dusty summer.

They call these little valleys and indentations in the mountains "coves" in Appalachia and looking up out of the tree cover the prospect of more rain is obvious.

It is a fabulous change from walking the streets and back country of the Florida Keys.

Wisps of louds hanging on the hilltops. Celo is located in the shadow of Mt Mitchell, the highest point on the eastern seaboard, Key West Diary: Mount Mitchell .

Imagine getting lost at nightfall out here. It doesn't bear thinking about, the boogy man would be bound to get you.

There is beauty here too, and I have no doubt by the time I got back to Florida the sun was out and mushrooms were pushing up everywhere. My sister in law can identify the edible ones and I love mushrooms fried in olive oil with garlic.

Cheyenne found a watery ditch so she was as happy as a pig in muck.

Rain or no rain it's a good vacation when your dog is happy.

 

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Tropical Storm Chantal

The experts told us to expect an active hurricane season this year, but there again they always do that because they fundamentally have no clue where the storms might possibly go months in advance. In any case the so-called experts warn everyone to be prepared and some of us try to be well prepared. However when projections are actually cast showing a track that could very easily lead right over your  house you do tend to sit up a bit more and take notice. This was the National Hurricane Center's  view of the third strom of the summer season early this morning:

The good part is that the storm should crumble over Haiti's landmass, which is cold comfort to that benighted island, but that dissipation of energy means the storm will likely bring the Keys nothing much  more than wind and rain.