We had a good visit  with our sister-in-law Paige, our nephew Tyler, and Paige’s mom Donna in Seymour, Tennessee on Thursday, but Paige and Tyler both have hacking coughs (or, in Paige’s words, “the crud”), so we got a little room in Knoxville for the night. (It was enough of a dump that we won’t be reviewing it, but we sure got a great price on the room!)

Paige has been trying to take us to take us to The Old Mill restaurant in Pigeon Forge ever since we visited last fall: we tried twice last year, and every time the wait for a table was well over an hour, sometimes as long as two.  Thursday was our third try, and maybe because we had Donna along for good luck, we finally got to eat there. You order your own entree and the sides are served family-style, in big bowls for the table to share.  Dinner was very reasonably priced and included a bowl of their house corn chowder, green salad, corn fritters, and a choice of three deserts.  While this might not be an optimal dining location for vegetarians or people with restricted diets, we managed just fine. (My heart goes out to vegetarians in the South, it truly does.) Take a look at The Old Mill recipe page if you want to try some Tennessee country cooking at home.

(Pigeon Forge sports possibly the highest billboard density of anywhere I’ve ever traveled; after driving along tree-upholstered interstates for several days in a row, the contrast is a little over-stimulating.)

We managed to put in 8 hours of driving yesterday, traversing almost the full width of Tennessee.   After a full day of map reading, the Tennessee’s trapezoidal shape really reminds of the Pink Pearl erasors we had when I was in elementary school. 

We started the day with breakfast in a Knoxville Cracker Barrel. Not familiar with Cracker Barrel? Just like Piggly Wiggly, you really have to see it first hand to believe it.  We’ll write more on Cracker Barrel in a future post. (More on our dietary restrictions in a future post, too.) Suffice to say that trying to eat a gluten-free, corn-free, meat-free breakfast at a restaurant that prides itself on its generous portions of biscuits, cornbread and pork products is a great way to avoid over-eating.

We stopped in Nashville for an Indian vegetarian buffet lunch at Woodlands. I realize that vegetarian Indian food is a far cry from typical local cuisine, but we are rapidly approaching our lifetime quota of Cracker Barrel meals, we were craving vegetables, and accommodating our dietary restrictions on the road can be very challenging.  The food was great, and their dosas (rice crepes) were amazing, even if Neil wound up with a very limited number of dishes he could eat. 

(Why are there so many Indian buffet restaurants named Woodlands?  I’ve eaten at oodles but I’ve never figured out why the name is so common.  Does anyone know?)

We drove straight through Memphis, over the Mississippi River, into Arkansas, and on to Little Rock.  (We’ve visited Memphis before, years ago, and since we’re trying to make good driving time right now we didn’t feel compelled to stop this time around.)

We enjoyed a light, if late, Turkish dinner in Little Rock at Istanbul Mediterranean–and throughout the meal thought of our friend Sean-Paul Kelly who is in Turkey at the moment. SP, if our menu last night was in any way representative of Turkish food, I am newly and even more deeply jealous of your trip!

There was so much severe rain and thunderstorms predicted for Tenessee yesterday that we thought we might have to put pontoons on the Mini to clear the state.  We were delighted to discover that, even in some fairly heavy rains, the humidity felt lower than in Charleston or Richmond.  The weather also feels subjectively much cooler without the humidity: yesterday we were stretching  our legs in an Arkansas rest stop and felt comfortably cool, even though it was 91 degrees.

Yesterday’s drive represents the early stages of a 5,000 mile odyssey we have planned for the next five weeks.  (More on that soon, too.)  We are pleased and excited to see how well we are falling back into our heavy-travel routines, and remembering and relearning “how to do travel”. 
 

Map of yesterday’s drive(s)

• Seymour, Tennessee to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee
• Seymour, Tennessee to Knoxville, Tennessee
• Knoxville, Tennessee to Little Rock, Arkansas

Businesses

• Cracker Barrel Restaurant and Old Country Store, Knoxville, TN
• Extended Stay America, Little Rock, AR
• Istanbul Mediterranean, Little Rock, AR
• The Old Mill Restaurant, Pigeon Forge, TN
• Woodlands Vegetarian, Nashville, TN

Geographic Locations (links from WikiTravel where available):

• Seymour, TN
• Pigeon Forge, TN
• Knoxville, TN
• Nashville, TN
• Little Rock, AR

And it feels GREAT.

We checked out of the Mt Pleasant Extended Stay America, ate a fantastic brunch at the Glass Onion in West Ashley, snuck in one more visit with Neil’s mom in Summerville, grabbed a bottle of water from the Piggly Wiggly, and headed North on I-95.

• The Extended Stay America was a great place to stay.  Until I tried to cook a duck breast for Neil–what possessed me? No one knows–and the smoke set off the hotel fire alarm.  We now refer to the hotel as the House of Burning Duck.  We suspect “duck flambé” may not catch on in the aromatherapy world. But we do recommend the hotel.

• The Glass Onion is one of our favourite places to eat in the Charleston area.  They serve healthy, balanced meals of Low Country and Louisiana cuisine prepared with produce from local farms, fresh caught fish, and hormone-free meats.  The portions are generous without being obscene and provide great value for the price.  They have wonderful, friendly staff (Brian! We’re talking about you!) and they even give you crayons so you can draw on the brown paper table cloths.  The menu changes daily and somehow they find the time to update it every day on their website.  Every meal we’ve ever eaten was fabulous.  They have been completely accommodating in making substitutions for our bizarrely restricted diets: good place for non-dairy, gluten-free, and vegetarian; limited but possible for vegan.  The Glass Onion is about everything we could hope for in a restaurant.

• Canadians’ first and only contact with the Piggly Wiggly in most cases seems to stem from the movie Driving Miss Daisy. I had no idea the store was real, and Neil was amazed at how ecstatic I was to see one the first time I can down to visit his family.  When we brought my parents to visit Charleston, we made a special trip to “the Pig” (as its known locally) so they could take pictures of it and get plastic and paper bags to take home.  Doesn’t everyone make pilgrimages to grocery stores when they travel?  We’ve also taken a grocery bag from a Food Lion as a gift for friends in Montreal…so maybe the grocery store obsession is a Canadian thing.  The Pig also offers a range of Piggly Wiggly merchandise.  I wonder if my brother registered there for his wedding?

So far today we’ve driven half way from Charleston, South Carolina to Richmond, Virginia. We’re getting reaquainted with our gear, our travel gadgets, and our driving protocols (e.g., parking a car full of heat-sensitive vitamins in the shade).

We pulled over in Lumberton, North Carolina for dinner, and put our navigation and on-the-fly restaurant research skills to the test.  We discovered that…we’re a little rusty in that department. We won’t be reviewing the restaurant we ate at (because our mothers taught only to say nice things), but after a few false starts we did manage to discover one of the healthier eating options in the area and a meal that, while perhaps not Michelin-worthy, did fit our diet restrictions.

Right now we’re tucked into the independently-owned Four Oaks Lodging & RV Resort at Exit 90 of Interstate 95 near Smithfield, North Carolina: at $28/night, our super clean, no-smoking, free Wi-fi room is the best deal we’ve ever found on I-95.

We pulled in to Four Oaks just as the rain started coming down.  We weren’t suprised: for the past 15 minutes I had been taking pictures of the amazing purple sunset through the Mini’s sunroof.  We’ll try to post some of those next time we have a little energy–meaning not tonight!

To sum up, we’ve already hit adventures, bad food, cheap lodgings, bad weather, and at-speed sunroof photography, and we’ve only been on the road for a few hours!

It definitely feels like we’re traveling again.

Today we launch a whole new chapter of the trip: we exit Virginia (for the third time this trip) to head west for Tennessee.

As much as we love Virginia, it’s time to make like a tree and leave.

Maple leaves on the lawn of the Rockridge Virginia Court House, October 5, 2008

We were expecting a dish something like southern classics corn pone (an eggless corn bread), corn pudding (somwhere between a quiche and a souffle), or spoon bread (a pudding-like bread).

We couldn’t have been more wrong!

It turns out that Indian Pudding, which originated in New England, is a spicy baked pudding made chiefly of cornmeal, milk, and molasses. The name Indian pudding comes from the addition of cornmeal—early colonists called most everything made with corn “Indian.” Originally the pudding was cooked in a pot over the open hearth and was very dense.

And it is NOTHING like the southern dishes we had in mind.

Indian pudding is traditionally serviced with ice cream, whipped cream, or hard sauce for a reason.  We declined all of the above, and quickly regretted our choice.

What we received was essentially big bowl of warm molasses, slightly diluted with cornmeal and ginger. It was astoundingly strong in flavour.

Neil, a molasses fan, thought the Indian Pudding was amazing.  I found it too sweet to eat.

I also got so loopy from the iron and sugar in just a spoonful that I spent the afternoon running and whooping up and down the dirt roads of historic Old Sturbridge Village (OSV). (Picture an overstimulated child the day after Halloween: that was me. Parents and school teachers will know exactly what I’m talking about.)

To put that phenomenal sugar rush into perspective, the OSV tinker told us that the early settlers at Sturbridge ate an average diet of 5,000 calories a day, and yet had life expectancies into the 70′s and 80′s: they burned off the calories with hard physical labour.

Indian Pudding had to go a long way to making up those 5,000 calories.

This is a good dish to serve on the crisp autumn weekend you fill your cellar with wood for the winter. Or the day you shovel driveways—for your entire zip code.

It should also be a big winner with any anemics or vegan vampires you have over for Thanksgiving dinner.

You can find recipes for Indian Pudding in both Fanny Farmer and the Joy of Cooking, or you can try this recipe from Jasper White’s Cooking from New England via Steven Frederick’s blog.

Indian Pudding

• 2 ½ tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 cups milk
• 5 Tablespoons yellow cornmeal or johnnycake meal
• 1/3 cup molasses
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 egg beaten
• 1 cup cold milk
• Heavy or light cream for serving

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.
   
2. Grease a 1 ½ quart soufflé mold or baking dish with 1 tablespoon of the butter; set aside.
   
3. Heat 3 cups of milk in a saucepan until it is close to a boil.
   
4. Add the cornmeal and reduce heat to low. Stir until the mixture thickens (about 5 minutes).
   
5. Remove from the heat and add the remaining butter, the molasses, maple syrup, salt, cinnamon, ginger and egg.
   
6. Pour into buttered mold or dish.
7. Place in the preheated oven and bake for 30 minutes.
   
8. Pour the cold milk over the pudding and return to the oven.
   
9. Cook for 1 hour and 30 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes more or until the top is brown and crisp.
   
10. Serve hot with cream.

Serves 6 to 8 people.

And if Indian Pudding isn’t hearty enough for your tastes, you might want to try flumadiddle: a baked main course pudding from New England made with stale bread, molasses, spices and pork fat.

Enjoy your taste of Massachusetts!

Photo Credit: Elise at Simply Recipes

Savoury pork mush. Yum!

• Bulkies: seems to be a large roll or bun in Massachusetts.  Can any natives comment?
• Scrod: a fish we’ve seen on menus around New England but Neil hasn’t tried yet; scrod seems to be either very young cod or “catch of the day,” depending on who you ask.
• Scrapple: a savory mush of pork scraps and trimmings combined with cornmeal and flour, sometimes buckwheat flour. You know anytime you get “savoury” and “mush” juxtaposed you are in for a gourmet treat.

We haven’t just chickened out on new foods!

We have also tried some regional specialties that were special in a good way, and we’re tracking down recipes for those to share with you, like Cheddar Ale Soup from Vermont.

In the meantime, we have a couple of questions for you:

1. What is the wierdest food you’ve ever eaten while traveling?  Share your horror stories!
2. Over at BearShapedSphere, one of my favourite travel blogs, Eileen writes about the new (to her) potato chip flavours in Chile, and asks her readers about the wierdest chip (or crips) flavours in their countries.  The wildest I’ve seen were hedgehog (in the UK) and all the seafood-flavoured chips in Japan.  If you have come across some strange flavours where you live, head on over and tell Eileen about your potato chips.
3. What kind of unique US regional specialties can you recommend that we try?  We’ve been known to make detours just to taste really wierd stuff.

If we can find your weird food recommendations (and if they fit my restricted diet), we’ll do our best to try them out as we travel and report back.

And if can’t eat them, I guess that means the duty falls to Neil!

Photo Credit: Creative Commons licensed scrapple photo by Flickr member mandydale.

It has been a pleasure to see how vigorously Brattleboro businesses promote and support local Vermont products.  Menus boast of dishes made with Vermont Cheddar, Vermont cream, Vermont microbrew ales, and of course, Vermont maple syrup.

Locavore / Green Traveler Alert! The Riverview Café is a member of The Vermont Fresh Network, an organization dedicated to supporting Vermont farmers by connecting them with local chefs.  What a brilliant initiative on so many levels: strengthening agriculture, improving the quality of local restaurants, showcasing state produce to locals and tourists, reducing the environmental impact of food distribution, encouraging local eating, and improving public health through the consumption of quality local foods.

(I would LOVE to see a program like this set up in the Okanagan Valley where I grew up, and I could see something like this really take off in the Vancouver / Lower Mainland area, too.)

We’ve started the Vermont Fresh Network Dining Challenge, and we look forward to trying out more Vermont Fresh Network member restaurants.

This recipe for Cheddar Ale Soup, by Chef David Smith of The Old Tavern at Grafton, Vermont, showcases Grafton Cheddar and McNeill’s Firehouse Ale. If you don’t have either on hand, substitute a full-flavoured cheddar aged at least one year and an amber beer.

Vermont Cheddar Ale Soup

• 1 garlic bulb, roasted
• 1 sweet onion, chopped & carmelized
• 1 red pepper, diced 1/4 inch pieces
• 1 carrot, peeled and diced 1/4 inch pieces
• 2 shallots thinly chopped
• 2 qt vegetable stock
• 1 pint heavy cream
• 2 pounds Grafton Cheddar, shredded
• 22 oz McNeill’s Firehouse Ale
• 3 large Yukon gold potatoes, diced 1/2 inch pieces
• 1/4 pound unsalted butter
• Extra virgin olive oil

1. Saute shallots, peppers, and carrots until soft in 2 T olive oil and 1 T butter.
2. Add bottle of beer and simmer 5 minutes.
3. Add carmelized onions, potatoes, stock and remaining butter.
4. Simmer until potatoes are tender, then turn off flame.
5. Add cream, roasted garlic and cheddar slowly with whisk.
6. Puree in blender.
7. Add salt & pepper to taste.  Garnish with fresh chives and croutons.

Yields 1 gallon.

Enjoy your taste of Vermont!

Update
We have submitted this recipe to La Fête du Fromage, a celebration of cheese at Chez Loulou. We’ll let you know when the cheese festival goes live.

Photo Credit: Pieces of Vermont

Today was one of those days.

I slept well, and woke easily. Then Neil came upstairs with the mail….

We’ve been in Brattleboro for a week, so we had our mail forwarded from Richmond.  And in the mail bundle was a shock: an account we’ve been fighting with that made a mistake in our billing. It is a small error that has snowballed into a very long battle.  The latest billing mistake wasn’t particularly big or particularly significant, but the surprise of it knocked me flat.

In my current state of health, I have no physical capacity to withstand unpleasant shocks. My head can make perfect sense of a situation, but my body just shuts down.  (Think of all the science fiction movies where the captain shuts down the damaged space ship to basic life support: that’s me after a shock.)

So I read the mail, opened the wrong envelop, and started shutting down.

Neil whisked me out the door to eat.  We had a lovely, nourishing, delicious lunch at Vegetarian Paradise, a relatively new Jamaican restaurant near the Brattleboro Food Coop, run by vegetarian Rastafarians.  The fellow working the front of the restaurant was so sweet, so welcoming, and so overflowing with love that he just made my heart burst.  It was all I could do not to cry into my stew. (My emotions are pretty close to the surface on rough days.) In other words, it was the perfect lunch for today.

We came back to the hotel for what looked like an inevitable nap.  When we walked in the door, we were assaulted by a strong, chemical smell, probably some kind of industrial cleaner.  We didn’t think anything of it, went up to the room, and I promptly fell asleep, around 2 pm or so.

I woke up at 7 pm, after a total of maybe 3 hours of wakefulness so far in the day. When we headed out to dinner (after all, Neil was still on a “regular” day), we stepped out of the hotel and noticed the difference in air quality outside.  Whatever the common areas of the hotel were cleaned with today was probably contributing to my collapse, too.

We had a nice little drive and wound up at Shin La, Brattleboro’s Korean / Japanese restaurant.  We shared a vegetarian Dol Sot Bibimbap, mixed rice and vegetables in a fiery hot stone bowl, and Ja Jiang Bi Bim, noodles with hard-boiled egg, cucumbers and scallions, with a tangy hot sauce.  Both dishes are made spectacular by their simplicity: all of the ingredients stand on their own and contribute unique flavours to the dish. It was a delectable, digestible finale to a difficult day.

Now here we sit in the lobby of the hotel, tapping away at our laptops (we can’t get a reliable wifi signal in our rooms).  In theory I’m finding a hotel and mapping out a route to our destination tomorrow night, but in practice we are both distracted by the lobby tv loudly broadcasting speeches from the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Neil’s been getting mentions all week in messages from his colleagues in Richmond, Virginia about the big rains down there courtesy of Hurricane Fay.  The pressue system disturbances caused by Fay should be the third strike against me, on top of the mail suprise and the chemical cleaners in the hallway.

All in all, today has been a very good iteration of a lost day.

These are hard days, but not bad days: Neil takes advantage of these days to spoil the hell out of me.  He brings me tea, makes sure I’m fed, and untangles the blankets that I turn into macrame in my sleep.

I have spent time around people who figure that a bad day is a good chance to get their kicks in while you’re already down; Neil’s the exact opposite.  (Note to single friends: do not marry those people.  Stick it out until you find someone like Neil. Please.)

Now it is 11 pm, and the day has essentially happened without me.   A lost day.

One of the best parts of dealing with chronic health issues for so long has been getting over my Protestant work ethic: I no longer suffer any illusions about being “productive” on days like these.  Just “being” takes up everything I’ve got.

I think of these days as my chance to be a fallow field: catch up some rest, let ideas percolate in the back of my head, invest in my health.

So today may have been a lost day, but it wasn’t a bad day at all.

Here’s some ocular proof of our fine dining adventures, along with two of Janet’s recipe for light and simple summer dishes that should tempt even the weakest appetite on hot and muggy days: Watermelon with Orange Oil and Smoked Fish with Cucumber “Noodles“.

Watermelon with Orange Oil

Janet enjoyed this savory watermelon dish in a DC restaurant and replicated it at home sans recipe.

• Watermelon
• Fresh basil
• Orange oil (or meyer lemon oil)

1. Cut watermelon into cubes. Place in serving bowl.
2. Cut basil in strips. Sprinkle over watermelon.
3. Drizzle watermelon lightly with oil.
4. Serve.

This light and refreshing salad offers a surprising combination of flavours. I liked a little salt on mine to bring out the savoury side of the dish, but don’t add salt during the preparation or you’ll draw the liquid out of the melon. The splash of red also brightens up your dinner table!

I can see this recipe being a big hit at my mom and dad’s cabin. I’m going to make a wild guess that they can probably pick up a 3-oz or so bottle of orange oil at Kelowna’s Mediterranean Market.

Smoked Fish with Cucumber “Noodles“
From the July 2008 edition of Gourmet Magazine.

• 1/2 cup plain Greek-style yogurt
• 1 Tbsp bottled white horseradish
• 1 3/4 tsp grainy mustard
• 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
• 1 seedless cucumber, peeled and halved crosswise
• 1/4 large sweet onion
• 7 to 8 oz. hot smoked salmon, mackerel, or trout

1. Whisk together yogurt, horseradish, mustard, and lemon juice. Season with 1/4 tsp. salt.
2. Cut thin ribbons of cucumber with slicer (mandoline style), then very thinly slice onion. [Note that Janet cut the cucumber into ribbons with a vegetable peeler and this worked out perfectly.] Toss with half of yogurt sauce.
3. Discard skin from fish and break fish into large flakes. Arrange fish on cucumber-onion mixture and serve with remaining sauce.

To make a vegetarian version, substitute strips of smoked tofu or atsuage (deep-fried tofu). To make a vegan version, substitute non-dairy yogurt for the Greek-style yogurt; you may want to drain non-dairy yogurt through a coffee filter first to make it thicker.

I really loved how the cucumber ribbons turned out, and when I have a kitchen again (whenever that might be), I look forward to experimenting with substituting cucumber for noodles in different kinds of cold pasta salads.

. . .

If my mom or any of our foodie friends (and that means you, Kathy!) or other readers try out these recipes, I’d love to know how the dishes turn out and what you think.

And now when we say that we were held hostage and force-fed gourmet food, you’ll know exactly what we mean.

Update: We have sent this recipe in to No Croutons Required, the soup and salad recipe carnival.  This month’s edition, hosted by Tinned Tomatoes, is all about recipes that incorporate fruit.