Greetings from Carrboro, Yes. It’s true. My family drank Cold Duck. OK, not the kids – we got Meier’s sparkling grape juice that was on the wrong side of delicious. But the holiday table was all about bubbly beverages and festive stemware. One day it would just appear in the refrigerator right next to the […]
Weekend At Acme 11/11 – 11/13 & Thanksgiving Menu
Greetings from Carrboro, The only day that my sister ate sweet potatoes was Thanksgiving. It was a family tradition – Senator Russell’s Sweet Potatoes. With an emphatic, brace-yourself emphasis on the sweet part. It was more a concoction of butter and brown sugar and pecans and, well, more brown sugar whipped into something akin to […]
Halloween @ Acme
Greetings from Carrboro, Not only was I not allowed to dress up as anything scary, but my mom gave out apples. Shiny, grocery store apples. Red Delicious, if I were to guess. It was a wee-bit better than handing out little toothbrushes, but still everyone ritually skipped our house like the plague. Even the littlest kids […]
Thanksgiving @ Acme
Greetings from Carrboro, I start to sweat at the first whiff of potpourri. That certain pre-industrial age ethos that can infiltrate Thanksgiving – sort of a Norman Rockwell meets Virginia Dare meets Survivor cocktail – gives me the heebie-jeebies. For the uninitiated, you have to be careful. Once consumed, I don’t believe that there is […]
Elk Cove Wine Dinner: October 26th
October 14, 2016 Greetings from Carrboro, Peter was more than a little bit crazy. Affable, but crazy. Quitting his pharmaceutical day job in RTP, he struck out on his own to find his rightful fortune in the world of wine distribution. Easy, right? Cue all of us cringing. Somehow we know that stories like this never […]
Acme Pie Day 10/7
September 30, 2016 Greetings from Carrboro, She had two kids by then. Infants, really. The small kitchen jutted out behind the small, clapboard house. By 4 a.m. most mornings she’d be working. There were buckets of leaf lard, flour, and sugar. Eggs that she left out overnight covered with a cloth. Maybe butter. And before the sun turned that […]
Oysters are back!
Greetings from Carrboro, Boxes of oysters were wheeled into the kitchen on a red hand truck. Real beauties. Tom Gallivan’s Shooting Point Salts from the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Opening the top box, I could smell the ocean. On the stove, the last of the year’s peaches were cooked for chutney. Figs were sliced for […]
Failla Wine Dinner 9/28/16
Greetings from Carrboro, It’s so easy to hate Californians. Driving through wine country in a rented Ford, I found my self sandwiched between an impatient Lamborghini and a tricked out Tesla. I couldn’t even appreciate the bucolic view, fearful that one little driving mistake would encumber my progeny’s progeny with a lifetime of unrelenting debt. […]
Weekend at Acme 8/26 – 8/28
Greetings from Carrboro, I cheffed my way around North America this summer. Snowshoe, WV. Stratton, VT. Aspen, CO. Lake Tahoe, CA. Whistler, BC. Mont Tremblant, QC. I know – lucky me. This continent is spectacularly beautiful. I cooked farm to table dinners on the top of 9000 ft mountains with glacier views and supermodels. But the […]
The Acme Calabash Night – August 24th
Greetings from Carrboro, I was at the beach when Nixon resigned. It was the first summer that we ever rented a house on Ocean Isle – the Time & Tide – that even had a TV. My mom made us all sit down, cross-legged, and watch in our bathing suits. My brother had to stand […]
