Coastal North Carolina

"What is the BBQ Plate?" I asked cheerfully.  "Bar-B-Que, coleslaw, and your choice of two sides."  Then she rattled off the list of sides.  We were baffled.  So we asked for a minute to decide.  When she came back she brought a basket of hushpuppies.  "What exactly is the Bar-B-Que--," I started.  "Chopped Bar-B-Que, coleslaw, and your choice of two sides."  Well, okay then.  "I'll take the BBQ Plate with green beans and sweet potatoes."  When the pile of what looked like pulled pork sans BBQ sauce arrived, I asked for the sauce.  When it came, it was thin and translucent with a reddish tinge.  So I tasted the meat first.  Well, it was pork, and definitely seasoned with the "BBQ sauce" she had brought out.  But this was no BBQ sauce I'd ever had.  Vinegar was the prominent taste, with a bit of sweetness and a touch of heat.  I was in the coastal region of North Carolina and this is Bar-B-Que, plain and simple! 

So it seems that Carolinians are pretty serious about their Bar-B-Que.  When ordering BBQ it is understood that you are ordering pork and it is usually the meat from the entire pig rather than white or dark meat only.  In North Carolina there are the coastal and piedmont regions, both with vinegar based sauces, however the piedmont region adds ketchup to theirs.  And South Carolina has their mustard based sauces.  Being from the midwest, I'm used to the thick, sweet, tomato based sauces made famous in Kansas City.  I didn't have a chance to try the piedmont or South Carolina varieties, but I must say the coastal North Carolina Bar-B-Que was excellent, once I got past my BBQ sauce prejudice.  That is how my foodie trip in North Carolina began. 

We drove past fields of corn and tobacco.  I saw my first fields of peanuts and sweet potatoes.  One little tangent here:  Sweet Potatoes vs. Yams.  You will probably never see a true yam in the grocery store.  True yams are from Africa and are in no way related to the sweet potatoes of the Americas which are actually related to the morning glory.  "Yams" that you will see in the grocery store are actually a soft variety of orange sweet potato, named so by African slaves due to its resemblance to their native root.  The "sweet potatoes" that you see in the store are paler and firmer when cooked.  Either way, you are eating a sweet potato.  So back to the trip...  These four:  corn, tobacco, peanuts, and sweet potatoes, are in the top ten cash crops in North Carolina along with marijuana.  Hmmmm.   Really?  Driving along the narrow two lane highways occasionally reminded me of Iowa especially when they were hemmed in by cornfields.  But mostly there were too many trees and houses for the feeling to last long.

Once we made it to New Bern, I scoped out the local restaurants.  From upscale, gourmet to down home diner style, we tried a bit of everything.  Of course there was a lot of great seafood, traditional southern dishes, and American classics.  Some of our more outstanding meals:  buttermilk fried chicken and black pepper fries; shrimp tacos with wasabi sauce; a stack of fried green tomatoes with pesto, goat cheese, and a wine reduction; char grilled Norwegian salmon over horseradish-chive gnocchi and braised artichokes with Creole mustard topped with crispy fried onions; southern eggrolls filled with pork and collards then wrapped in bacon; shrimp and grits; and thick slices of French toast with house-made butter syrup, bacon, eggs made to order, and Dutch potatoes (a hashbrown casserole with cheese and sour cream!).  What a collection of inspired foods to motivate me in my experiments!

So check back y'all and see what I create over the next few months!