FOOD FRIDAY!

PORK TENDERLOIN WITH GARLIC-HERB MARINADE

We had a couple of adventures last night. First, we bit the bullet and got our hair cut. This was something of a signal event, because our friends Frank and Rick in Arlington had been coming to our house every six weeks to cut our hair and hang out for more than 20 years. We hadn't set foot in a hair emporium of any kind--hadn't even thought about it--in all that time. So many questions came to mind. Do guys down here go anyplace but barber shops? If I went to a barber shop would they snicker if I gave them a few directions about what I wanted done? (Thin the sides so I don't look like a Kremlin dome, among other things...) Finally I discovered Edenton Hair Solutions "for Gals and Guys" right downtown and made appointments. A matronly lady named Anita, who, she told us, has been cutting hair since 1964, welcomed us to her one-chair operation.

There was a slightly shaky start when she asked us what we did for a living. When I told her I was retired from the Peace Corps, she said, "So. The military." It's been so long since I explained what the Peace Corps is to another American (have I ever?) I wasn't quite sure where to start. I told her it was a government program that sends people to live and work in poor overseas countries to help them. No glimmer of recognition from Anita--not even a perfunctory "that's nice." I had no idea what reaction the word "Kennedy" might elicit and wasn't particularly anxious to find out, so we left the Peace Corps and moved on.

Anita was clearly grateful for our business and chatted about how things in Edenton are changing. She bemoaned the fact that most of her customers are newcomers anymore, replacing the old timers who have either moved away or passed on. More and more businesses are catering to tourists instead of locals, and that can be hard...and I agree it's ridiculous that people in this relatively prosperous little pocket have to travel more than 30 miles to get to the Elizabeth City Super Wal-Mart to get cheap groceries, or to Lowe's...and the nearest Home Depot, if that's your preference, is all the way up in Virginia. We asked her about the county fair, coming up at the end of October. She told us she's with the American Legion and is there every day cooking. We used to love the Arlington County Fair and visit it to sample the various ethnic foods available. Now, down here we aren't expecting satay with peanut sauce, not even kielbasa with peppers. But chili dogs? Not a word about barbecue in this literal hog heaven. But, strained conversation aside, Anita did a good job on our hair for less than half what we used to pay Frank and Rick, so we'll stick with her until we move up to Hertford. Then we'll probably find someplace else for our haircuts in (relatively) urbane Elizabeth City. (We hope once we're in our house we can entice Frank and Rick down for an occasional weekend visit. Maybe every six weeks???)

Speaking of barbecue, our other adventure was a barbecue dinner at Captain Bob's, a big roadhouse on US 17 we pass every day on our commute to the property. There's always a lunch and dinner crowd there, so we figured it must be the place where the locals know they'll find the best BBQ around.

The official name of the joint is "Captain Bob's Barbecue and Seafood" (emphasis mine), and its sign has a picture of an old salt with a parrot on his shoulder, so we should have been clued in to the preponderance of seafood on the menu. Yes, they do have barbecue: minced or sliced pork, which is done with vinegar-pepper sauce, the way I like it, and sliced beef barbecue, which is also not too bad, at least not cloyingly sweet. I ordered a plate of the minced pork with coleslaw, potato salad, and corn bread. How's that for a great sounding Southern spread? My mouth was watering.

Well. Ever had potato salad so soupy you needed a spoon to eat it? I drank it out of the bowl. (Yes, there were a few lumps of potato, but clearly the stuff had been sitting around so long the vegetables had given off all their juices and watered down the mayonnaise to the consistency of soup.) Same with the cole slaw, whose main ingredient besides cabbage was sugar. (I poured it over the pork to moisten the meat a bit and it wasn't too bad.) The meal was served with a golden-brown hockey-puck thing sitting on top of it. That turned out to be Captain Bob's version of Elvis Presley's death-wish corn bread. What they do is take a slice of perfectly presentable corn bread, and then they dip it in batter and deep fry it. Is this some regional specialty the rest of the country has never heard of? If so, I understand completely the South's desire to keep it a secret.

We figure we'll give the place one more chance for the seafood. At least we know what to stay away from next time: the potato salad, the coleslaw, and the "corn bread." Steve had an order of onion rings and they were good, light and beer-battered. And the pork wasn't bad. But mine's better.

So far I'm amazed at the lack of imagination--or local pride, really--we've seen in restaurant food here. We're not looking for gourmet and certainly don't expect it from roadhouse food. But freshness doesn't seem too much to ask for. We'll keep looking. (And I have to admit that the three sit-down restaurants in downtown Edenton are not bad at all.)

Today's recipe is a very simple but delicious treat, made with the same marinade I use for shrimp kebabs, but with a little brown sugar added. I like pork tenderloin, but I don't often grill it because it cooks so fast. After firing up the Weber and waiting for the coals to heat, the 20-minute cooking time seems anticlimactic. But it's good to eat, and perfectly suited to the faster gas grill.

Herb-Garlic Marinade:

6 large garlic cloves
1/3 cup packed fresh thyme sprigs
1/4 cup packed tender fresh rosemary sprigs
1 cup fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 cups olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup brown sugar, light or dark, whatever you have on hand
Pepper to taste

1 package pork tenderloins, 2 1/2-3 lbs.

Mince garlic, herbs and salt together in a food processor. Woody stems on the herbs are OK--they will not be eaten. Add lemon juice and olive oil to herbs in processor bowl and process until emulsified.

Remove tenderloins from shrink-wrap, run under faucet to remove moisture, and pat dry with paper towels. Place meat in large ziplock bag and add marinade to cover. Refrigerate at least 2 hours or overnight, turning meat occasionally.

Remove meat from marinade and pat dry. Discard marinade. Allow meat to air-dry at room temperature while you prepare grill for the indirect roasting method.

When grill is ready, place meat directly over coals (or burners) and sear for 5 minutes to develop surface carmelization. Turn and repeat to brown other side. (The sugar will brown quickly, so mind well the size of the flame on a gas grill.)

Move meat to opposite side of the grill, cover, and continue roasting with indirect heat another 10 minutes. Remove meat to a cutting board, allow to rest about 10 minutes. Slice into inch-thick pieces and serve.

Epilogue

An update and some closing thoughts await your eyes today in the Rainbow Room.

Learning along the way

I've had the picture and my song ready to go since early Saturday morning, but this is the first chance I've had to sit down and write something. Between playing tourist and taking care of business both on the construction project and everyday living, there has been little time for this. Today is different because Steve went to the property by himself to work on the garden shed, which I'm not much help at. We'll start clearing again tomorrow or Thursday, and the morning labor routine will begin again. We're almost finished with that job; now we have to get a tractor mower to stay ahead of Mother Nature, who appears to abhor an underbrush vacuum. When the shed is up, we'll have a place to store the mower. You know how it is, one thing leads to another....

The picture above is a closeup of the Roanoke River at Williamston, NC, about 40 miles south of here. As you drive south on US 17, you cross the river at that point on an enormous bridge, and you see what appears to be a complex of walkways. In the same proximity along the road are signs bringing your attention to the Roanoke River Wildlife Sanctuary. A stranger to these parts can be forgiven for putting two and two together and concluding that the walkways are part of a walking tour of the Sanctuary. At least, that was our conclusion, and we set out Saturday morning to take a trek and see some wildlife. Wrong. Turns out the walkways you see from the bridge are all there is; they don't "go" anywhere. They're just part of a small park. Interesting enough, for about 5 minutes. We drove into the town of Williamston itself to check out the tourism center. On this sunny summer Saturday, when tourists may be expected out and about, it was closed. Weekdays only, 9 to 5. What, one may reasonably ask, is the point?

We continued on to the town of Plymouth, whose name we had seen on road signs since we've lived here, and was intriguing. It's a harbor town, it has the same name of the more famous town in Massachusetts, and there might be something there to explore.

We discovered another barren little viilage, hanging on by a thread. We stopped for lunch in the only place that was open, the Plymouth Bakery and Café. The owner/hostess/waitress, an older woman, turned out to be a transplant from New Jersey who engaged us enthusiastically once she found out we were new to the area and from "the North." She asked us what we were interested in, and we said activities like antique stores, walking tours... she became a fount of information about out-of-the-way restored plantations and emporia. Plymouth is trying hard to rejuvenate itself, but like so many places we've seen in this depressed pocket of the state, it has been hit hard by the economic crash. People like us are bringing a little cash in, but it's a mere trickle at this point.

It wasn't my intention to write something depressing today, but this is what came out as I followed the words. We still like it here very much, but as is to be expected, we are discovering things we hadn't anticipated, such as these dormant local economies. In Edenton we find ourselves in a capsule of relative prosperity, and when we move, our little neighborhood will be the same. Our "big city" then will be Elizabeth City, and collectively we will be contributing to that economy by spending our retirement pensions there on restaurants and good grocery stores. Little by little.....

FOOD FRIDAY!

SUCCOTASH WITH TOMATOES AND BASIL

I was hoping to get this done before we went out into what is now our workaday world this morning but the picture took so long to upload I didn't have time for anything else. It rained buckets last night, and I thought maybe we'd have a day off, but the sun came out in the morning, so we went ahead and continued the clearing work on the property. The eye-popping "before-and-after" views are all created now; we're down to nitty-gritty places that aren't as attractive but still need to be done. And when it rains a lot of that forest floor turns to shoe-sucking, tire-burying muck. It's so hot so early in the morning that before long all those long sleeves and long pants--necessary to keep away the bugs--are sticking to you as if you'd been wading in the water. There is no way to put a "whistle while you work" spin on this uncomfortable drudgery. Its only reward is its completion, and the fact that what you've done has made a visible difference. Next week the foundation bricks will be laid, so I'll have more pictures to share.

We are still enjoying the bounty of all the little vegetable stands nearby. When I saw baby limas at the place down the road I knew I'd have to make some succotash with them and some of the sweet corn I still had on hand. There's nothing very complicated about the succotash I've always known--corn and limas--but to make sure I got the proportions right I went to Epicurious to find a basic recipe. What I found was this instead, a great variation on the classic standby that uses two more gifts of the season: tomatoes and fresh basil. And it happens that this is a dish that truly does improve with a few hours to let the basil flavor develop fully. I liked it the first day and LOVED the leftovers the next day. If you think succotash is a plain-jane side, you may change your mind after you try this.

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
Coarse kosher salt
1 large garlic clove, minced
3 cups chopped red tomatoes (about 1 1/2 pounds)
2 1/4 cups corn kernels cut from 4 ears of corn
2 cups fresh lima beans (from about 2 pounds pods) or 10 to 11 ounces frozen lima beans or baby butter beans, thawed
3 tablespoons thinly sliced fresh basil

Heat oil in heavy large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and sprinkle with coarse salt. Sauté until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add garlic; stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes, corn, and lima beans. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover, and simmer until corn and lima beans are tender and tomatoes are soft, about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Stir in basil and serve.

"A bunch of Yankees"

First: take a look at the new masthead photo. Since we're all about transition here, I thought it was time to get rid of that tentative image from the time we were merely hoping to be able to make the property into something, to an up-to-the-minute representation of what it looks like now. We finished clearing the land all the way to the house site today and now you can actually see where the house will sit the at the end of the curving, shaded driveway. Lovely, if I say so myself!

I'd always heard there are southerners for whom the Civil War never ended. We saw one such soul today. It was at the dump. The guy was at a distance and he must have heard us say hello to the attendant in our accents, which mark us as not from these parts. "A bunch of Yankees," he said to no one in particular, was filling up the yard waste bin with pieces that weren't cut down to four feet. Huh? After at least a dozen runs to that same bin at that same dump, the people working there have never said anything to us about a size limit. But leave it to us "Yankees" to fill up the waste bin too fast and make it harder for an honest Reb tryin' t'do the rat thing.

Steve and I have probably been called much worse, of course, but never to our faces. We had an epithet--Yankee--actually thrown at us! You think of all kinds of snappy comebacks later, of course. (My immediate reaction was what I wrote above: "huh?" because we didn't know about any four-foot rule, and as far as we're concerned, until an attendant at the dump tells us about it, we still don't.)

I could have said, "I'm no Yankee, I'm from Virginia, but I outgrew the accent." But it would have been too subtle for such a sledgehammer brain. You think about a possible conversation with somebody like that and you mentally ascribe all the worst prejudices to him because he called you a Yankee. Jews, queers and n-words are what's wrong with this country. Can't you just hear it?

I think the reason I'm so taken by this incident is that it was the first negative vibe we've received in the month-plus we've lived here, and in all the visits we made before moving here. Steve and I aren't the most obvious gay men swishing down the trottoir, but we figure it has to be clear to anyone with two eyes that we're more than just good friends, the way we finish each others' sentences and appear together everywhere. And yet we are welcomed everywhere we go--indeed have at times been overwhelmed by the kindnesses we have been shown.

Ignoramuses like that "Yankee" slinger have been around since long before I set foot on the planet and will no doubt continue to reproduce. God bless America because they can say and think what they want. As long as they remain under their rocks while I'm out cutting my 6- to 8-foot brush, I'll be fine.

Progress

Arrgh! Between Blogger taking its more than sweet time to upload these pictures and the new, slower speed I still need to get used to, my attempt at the proud papa act of pulling out photos to show you is being short-circuited. Just these two photos took 20 minutes to load. The other two I wanted to share just weren't moving at all. So I'll settle for these today and try for the other two another day.

Our days are falling into a routine. We are still clearing the front couple of acres of the property--the subject of these photos--so we get up there at around 8 o'clock so we can work while it is still relatively cool, quit around noon, come home, have lunch, and then tend to whatever town or home chores await. It is very hard work I would never do for anyone else, even for money. But it's also fantastic cardio exercise over a period of a couple of hours, so I'm not complaining--I'd be getting the workout somehow, anyway. And the pride of accomplishment and ownership is worth every drop of sweat--which is profuse, bundled up as we are in long pants and long sleeved shorts against the chiggers and ticks.

Here's what the area to the right of the driveway looked like this time last week: The camera's back is to the road and it is looking towards the area cleared for the house and the septic field, which is just barely visible through the thick grass and the tree suckers. Here's how we left it today: it's the same view taken from pretty much the same viewpoint. It's starting to look like a yard! The clearing in the distance is the septic field, and the house site is behind the last clump of trees on the left. We have a total of 2.5 acres and I'd estimate that the house will take up the .5 or perhaps .75. The rest will be cleared forest land. The initial clearing is by far the worst part. Maintaining it should be fairly easy with a riding mower,which is inching up to the trop of our list of things we need. We have a backup generator scheduled for delivery this week (that's in case a hurricane knocks out power, and also to operate our boat lift before the house is finished), and then next week our garden shed will come, just in time to keep usn busy after the clearing job to be done. The shed is coming as a kit, which we'll put together ourselves. (When it's built, there'll be room for the riding mower!)

Initial ground breaking on the foundation happened today; that was the subject of the other two pictures. We now have trenches with re-bar in them. (I hope to show you on Wednesday.) Next step: inspection, then concrete in the trenches, then some actual carpentry.

We're on our way!

FOOD FRIDAY!

ANDRÉ'S CORN, TOMATO AND BLUE CHEESE SALAD

I'm really pushing to get this done within the next 20 minutes; otherwise the day will take off and leave Food Friday in the dust. According to the weather forecast, we have only a couple of hours to do some more brush clearing on the property before the heavens are scheduled to open with heavy rain for the rest of the day. We'll work until we are rained out, then come home and get cleaned up. Then we'll be off to the big city to see about a dock permit. Yesterday we took a one-day trip up to Delaware and back to get up some things for the boat we had left in storage there. Four-and-a-half hours up and the same back, with about two hours in Delaware itself eating lunch and loading the car. We took the time to look at the old property and see what has become of it. You won't believe it. Traces of our idyll there have been completely erased. I'll post pics tomorrow. No time now.

Our friend André Miller brought this scrumptious salad as his pot luck offering for our Farewell to 12th Street party. Anything André makes is a treat; this stuff was gobbled up before many people even had a chance to sample it. It's a perfect way to showcase some of summer's bounty. Try it once and I guarantee you'll be going back to it again and again as long as corn and tomato season lasts. I used the last of the delicious corn we had bought from our neighbor.

Notes: you don't have to grill the corn. I just cooked mine conventionally on top of the stove, and it came out fine. The blue cheese is an unexpected addition and absolutely makes the dish. Substitute at flavor's peril.....


1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves

1 teaspoon sugar
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
8 ears corn, grilled in the husk, kernels removed
1 sweet onion (such as Vidalia or Walla Walla), halved
and thinly sliced
1 pint grape or cherry tomatoes, halved
8 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
Fresh basil sprigs, for garnish

Combine the vinegar, basil, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/4
teaspoon of pepper and oil in a blender and blend until
smooth. Can be made 2 hours in advance and refrigerated.
Bring to room temperature before using.

Combine the corn kernels, onion and tomatoes in a large bowl.
Add the dressing and toss to coat, season with salt and
pepper. Let sit at room temperature 30 minutes before
serving. Top with crumbled blue cheese and garnish with
basil sprigs just before serving. Salad can be made 1 day in
advance and served cold or at room temperature.