by Leanne E. Smith At the Grocery Basket & Grill in Ferguson, North Carolina, Labor Day Monday is Livermush Monday. On the day after the Happy Valley Fiddler’s Convention, Livermush Monday is a somewhat new music gathering celebrating an older foodways tradition and the longtime local eatery. Traveling from the festival towards Wilkesboro, the first… Read More →
Feasting at the 10th Annual Oyster Roast and Shrimp Steam at the Ocracoke Seafood Company
by Leanne E. Smith Seventy-degree weather on December 30? With some slight southerly breezes blowing off of Silver Lake, and a well-timed break in the day’s rain, it was a great day to gather around sheets of plywood propped on sawhorses in anticipation of oysters, shrimp, stews, and hushpuppies outside the Ocracoke Seafood… Read More →
Pat Franklin’s Mama’s Banana Pudding
by Leanne E. Smith When Pat Franklin buys fifty pounds of bananas at one time the second week in June, the cashiers at Ingles grocery store in Marshall, North Carolina, give her funny looks. What could someone possibly do with the contents of a cart loaded with bunches of bananas, boxes of Nilla wafers and vanilla… Read More →
A Blueberry Ramble in Burgaw
by Leanne E. Smith At the 12th annual N.C. Blueberry Festival in Burgaw, NC on June 20, 2015, the temperature at 9 a.m. was above 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with a heat index of nearly ninety—but it’s worth a few hours of southeastern North Carolina humidity on the third Saturday in June for a morning stroll… Read More →
“A Martin County Thing”—Chicken Mull
by Leanne E. Smith Sixty-five gallons of chicken mull disappeared in less than a couple of hours on Saturday, October 25, 2014, when the town of Bear Grass in Martin County, NC, held its First Annual Chicken Mull Festival. Bear Grass is in the middle of Martin County in Eastern North Carolina, about 20 miles… Read More →