by Ray Linville Please contact the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina directly f you are needing food: 919-875-0707 North Carolina produces about half of all the sweet potatoes grown in the United States, and it has consistently ranked as the top producing state for more than 30 years. More than half of… Read More →
Christmas Cookies at Nana’s
by Laura Fieselman This is a ritual of the finest sort. It begins with dutiful contemplation and moves slowly through a prescribed set of dance moves. It requires specific equipment and traditional music. It crescendos with a pile of dishes in the sink and closes with the same narration each year. This is Christmas cookies… Read More →
Lumbee Fish Market: As Fresh as Being on the Coast
by Ray Linville Drive to the beach along U.S. Highway 74 and tune in a local radio station. If you do, you might hear an ad for Lumbee Fish Market in Pembroke that is so intriguing that you want to visit. It’s a market with fish that you might not expect in a location about… Read More →
The ultimate melting pot: Ethiopian Thanksgivikah
by Alison Aucoin As I made my shopping list for our Thanksgiving dinner, NPR inundated me with side dish suggestions for the hybrid holiday, Thanksgivikah. And just to keep the momentum of cultural stereotypes going, they added the traditional Jewish guilt: Thanksgiving won’t happen during Hannukah again for 80,000 years. Gah, 80,000 years is a… Read More →
Coke Is It: A Love Story
by Sarah Bryan It’s a moment that a lot of Southerners have had: when folks from somewhere else single out a characteristic of our speech or behavior that is evidently outlandish to the rest of the world, but that, until that moment, we hadn’t realized was at all weird. “You carried your grandmother to the… Read More →
Time for Persimmon Pudding
by Ray Linville Cool temperatures mean fall fruits and vegetables. When the summer temperatures drop, one tree becomes more noticeable as its round fruit ripens and takes on an orange-brown hue. Is it time to pick persimmons and make pudding? Many of us remember days from childhood when we asked if the persimmons could be… Read More →
A Konichiwa Thanksgiving at Grandma’s House
by Marc Wyatt This Thanksgiving we invited our new international friends from UNC Wilmington to join us in Hillsborough as we gathered for the Traditional Family Meal at Kim’s mom’s house. Home from field service abroad, it promised to be a special time for us as our college-aged children, Rebecca (senior Meredith College) and Jon… Read More →
What’s for Lunch?
by Laura Fieselman Trowels and leather work-gloves litter the scene. A few folks wearing overalls tack lathing to the exterior walls, their confident stances and the nail guns that hang from their belts proclaiming that they have done this a time or two. I help another group shove clumps of piedmont clay through a square… Read More →
Food, Service, and Prices from Yesterday at the Chicken Coop
by Ray Linville A few places serving food in our state are caught in a time warp and remain unchanged since the days that they opened. Price’s Chicken Coop, established in 1962, in the South End of Charlotte is definitely one. Seeing the name of Chicken Coop, you know exactly what to order. The classic… Read More →
New Farmers in North Carolina: Karen Refugees
by Ray Linville More than 14,000 refugees have been resettled in North Carolina in the past decade, according to the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. As these refugee communities grow, they are beginning to transform food traditions of our state and expand the agricultural offerings at farmers’ markets and farm-to-home deliveries provided through community-supported agriculture…. Read More →