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Thursday, October 10th, 2019 Greetings from Carrboro, I got a TV. The thing is wildly embarrassing. It’s like 4 times the size of any screen that I’ve ever owned. And weighs about as much as a large pizza. Is it me or does all of this newfangled modern stuff feel so much more rife with […]

Thursday, October 3rd, 2019 Greetings from Carrboro, Most of them are handwritten. Simple index cards, often front and back, the name of the dish underlined at the top left. Each one is attributed deliberately in parenthesis “(Clara, Mrs. R. D. Bunn)” at the top right. There are hundreds of them. My grandmother organized the recipes […]

Greetings from Carrboro, Potlucks are scary. Because, face it, a lot of people can’t cook. Ok, shouldn’t cook. Yet they somehow still feel guiltily tied to the mast of that sinking culinary ship and oh-so-kindly drag us along for the ride. Thank god there’s no equivalent assembly demanding everyone sport clothes that they made themselves. Lord knows, […]

Thursday, September 19, 2019 Greetings from Carrboro, The fancy plates had a gold rim. But no monogram; that wasn’t my mother’s style. Dad jovially called it “the good stuff” to mask the unspoken threat of what would happen to me if I broke anything. It was always unduly stressful setting the table on those days […]

CLICK HERE TO BUY SALT & SMOKE TICKETS Greetings from Carrboro, It’s hard for me to let things go. I have boxes in the attic full of the myriad dreams of who I wanted to be. My Wilson A2000 baseball glove that I haven’t used in 30+ years. The first 50 pages of that great […]

Greetings from Carrboro, Naming a business is hard. Naming a winery is next to impossible. It’s too fraught. There was a good stretch in the 80’s and 90’s where the rule was pick a romantic animal, provide a suitable adjective and, voila, your winery was named. You know the ones. Wild Horse. Screaming Eagle. Flying Fox. It […]

Greetings from Carrboro, Drag Brunch is having a moment. To be clear to all my fellow southerners, Drag Brunch does not involve race tracks or funny cars or the NHRA. That would definitely be more of a Busch Light and Twinkies and nacho cheese kind of brunch. And, no, it’s also not a show on ESPN2. Personally, I […]

Wednesday, August 21, 2019 Greetings from Carrboro, When you take away the chef coats and fancy clogs, the sous vide wands and chamber sealers, restaurants are still pretty primitive. We use sharp metal to cut things and hot metal to cook things. Water boils and oil sizzles and line cooks swear. Hogs smoke overnight and […]

Greetings from Carrboro, Sometimes English doesn’t cut it. Call it culinary intuition, but I have the strong sense that Eggs Benedict would not have the same yum-appeal if Hollandaise instead was hung with the moniker “lukewarm citrus butter gravy.” You with me? Needless to say, the french version sounds much more delicious. It may just be […]

Thursday, August 8, 2019 Greetings from Carrboro, My first shift was brunch. It was August and hot as hell. I washed dishes. Pots and pans, really – and anything else my manager told me to clean. No one told me that my shift was over until that same boss yelled at me close to 6:30 […]