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Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

05.15

2010

Art, dresses, beer in Asheville

AshevilleOTR1-2I’ve got a new travel feature in this month’s Charleston Magazine, May 2010. For the magazine’s annual arts issue, photographer Peter Frank Edwards and I went to Asheville, NC  and met some of artists, crafters and designers there. Below are the opening paragraphs, with the complete story in print and online here:

Arts Collective: Exploring the hands-on creative vibe of Asheville

I can’t say that everyone in Asheville can do this, but on a recent spring weekend there, several people I met could easily name at least a handful of their favorite artists in town. Interestingly, most also had ready answers for which beer they order when they sit among the welded metal sculptures on the patio at Wedge Brewing Co. (The citrus-hinted Iron Rail IPA was mentioned most.)

That’s the kind of city Asheville is, a place where the simplest pleasure of life – beer included – are surrounded by handcraft and art. Everyone seems to be making something.

After the 4 1/2-hour drive from Charleston, we’d start our weekend in Asheville in the River Arts District in view of the Wedge, which also houses wood-fired pottery studios. Hungry from the drive, we stopped first in Clingman Café. It’s a lively place with local art on the walls, a busy kitchen, and a refrigerator case of fresh food. I ordered a tuna salad plate and soup, and happened to be served by the owner, Tripp Howell, who moved to Asheville from Los Angeles. (And before that, in the 1980s, he said he worked at Henry’s in Charleston.) Howell keeps maps of the Arts District on the counter, and picked one up while he talked, and started circling must-see studios. He talked about the beautiful and impressive art now being made in the River Arts District, giving new vitality to the district’s blocks of defunct factory mills and warehouses on the French Broad River. “Art is all about contrasts,” he said. “That’s what we have here… and without pretense.”

– Sandy Lang, May 2010 (images by PFE)

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Art, Craft, Travel

04.16

2010

Road trip to paddle

CongareeStMat

Put the canoe on the wagon and go. We did, and drove on up to the Congaree National Park near Columbia, South Carolina, the state’s only national park. On Cedar Creek you can lay back in the canoe and just float, the blackwater current is so easy and slow. It’s a beautiful spot, and all along the drive and paddle, the new leaves were brightest green, with yellow Carolina jasmine tumbling over. I’ll have an article about the trip in a summer issue of Charleston Magazine.

Congaree

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Travel, Wild animals and places

02.14

2010

Oyster note in T+L

T+LFeb2010

Oysters make a nice valentine, I think. I had the chance to write up a few South Carolina oyster-eating places in Travel + Leisure’s cover-story round-up of romantic destinations. Here’s my blurb, on page 9o, titled “A Low-Country Drive.” You can also see it online in their list of “50 Best Romantic Getaways  2010.”

LowcountryDrive

– Sandy Lang, February 2010

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In print/published, Lowcountry S.C./Charleston, Oysters, Travel

01.16

2010

Catching up with snow

bannerelk

Last week in the North Carolina mountains, the fluff of snow piled high on pine branches. Tiny flakes blew and sparkled in the sunlight. Everyone talked of the snowfall and temperatures in the teens that had set into the High Country for longer than any time in recent memory. (Several said that the last time it was so cold and snowy for so long, it was was back in the late 1970s.) Up for several days in the white-blanketed mountains, I skied at Appalachian, Sugar and Beech. All had terrific snow, the dry kind you just brush off your shoulders and cheeks. And the cold was fierce, stinging your fingers and bringing you back inside for hot cocoa or tea after every two or three or runs. That’s not a bad plan, though. If you like cozy, this was a dreamy trip. I kept being amazed by the white beauty everywhere, the quiet that snow brings.

beech2

Besides skiing, one night I sat at the long bar at the Six Pence Pub in Blowing Rock and ordered a beer and a reuben sandwich. A man walked in holding his head and stomping snow from his boots. He sat down, ordered a whisky, and told how he’d just slipped on the icy sidewalk and landed in a snowdrift. By the next morning, four or five inches more snow had fallen, temperatures were in the low teens, and my two-wheel-drive wagon couldn’t get up a hill, so I left it in a parking spot for a few days and continued the trip with friends with a heavy duty SUV. We tried the new zipline at Hawknest, launching from platforms to glide along wires stretched between tall trees, past an iced-over pond, and above the people lined up for the tubing runs. Another night we all went to the Banner Elk Winery and sampled wines; and one morning, I swam in the heated pool at the Chetola Resort. I had the whole pool to myself, and while I did the backstroke and steam rose from the water, wind whipped snow against tall glass windows.

HawksnestTube2

Through it all, I kept thinking of the irony that while Vancouver waits and hopes for snow for the Winter Olympics in the far northwest, down here in the South it’s a winter wonderland.

– Sandy Lang, January 2010

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Travel

12.14

2009

Mississippi morning

cotton field Oxford, Miss. 2009 Sandy Lang

Last week in Mississippi, there was frost in Oxford two mornings in row. On a drive south and east of town, most of the fields were well-picked, with bits of cotton edging the roads where truckloads of the tufts must have rumbled past. Then there was this field, still bursting with white.

– Sandy Lang, December 2009

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Travel

12.09

2009

Greenville, SC by the glass (and plate)

Greenville1-2 Charleston Magazine Dec. 2009

Just out in the December issue of Charleston Magazine, I’ve got a travel story about leafy Greenville, South Carolina. A few paragraphs…

After an almost four-hour drive and nearly 1,000-foot rise in elevation, I had my nose in a long-stemmed glass of Bordeaux. Actually I’d get to seven glasses. It was a tasting, so there was an arc of wines around me and the 35 or so other sippers and swirlers, each glass with a tasting pour of French red. The setting was a room lined with racks and crates of wine in the 118-year-old, brick “Trolley Barn” in Greenville, now home to Northampton Wine, with its tasting room, bar, and café. There on a recent Friday, it was a heady start to a couple days in the Upstate city for an informal eat-around in the leafy downtown and nearby.

You could say the trip was a bit of a drink-around, too. Several hours earlier and about 20 miles south of downtown, we’d stopped at the Happy Cow Creamery and tossed back shots of fresh milk in tiny plastic cups. The big excitement at the farm that week was the debut of their strawberry milk, a new addition to their offerings of whole milk, chocolate, and buttermilk. I bought a bottle for the road. The cashier thanked me, adding, “Don’t forget to shake it before you drink it—get that cream mixed in real good.”

Yes ma’am, I did. That rich milk was gone before we’d see downtown Greenville’s mix of modern and historic buildings through the windshield – the Blue Ridge Mountains just beyond. I was ready to get to back to this city at the top of the Palmetto state. There’s been a growing buzz in recent years about the food scene, about Atlantans driving the 150 miles for a day-trip or dinner, and Charlestonians extending business trips, or getting to town early just to catch a meal before concerts at the Bi-Lo Center or the Peace Center for the Performing Arts. National media have been checking out Greenville, too. In last month’s issue of Esquire magazine, the chef at The Lazy Goat, Victoria Ann Moore, was named one of their “Four Breakout Chefs to Watch.”  The city’s food and wine festival, now called Euphoria and held in September, draws thousands of food followers and celeb-chefs like Tyler Florence and Frank Stitt. Personally, on previous trips I’ve had top-notch sushi at Murasaki on Main Street, tasted the melty-comforting, “48-hour Short Ribs” at Devereaux’s, and drunk tall glasses of hard-to-find Dutch beers in the cozy, Euro-feel Addy’s Dutch Café. I was ready to taste more…

The full piece is in the December 2009 issue.

– Sandy Lang, December 2009 (images by Peter Frank Edwards)

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Food, In print/published, Travel, Wine

12.09

2009

Clusters, singles make Food issue

SingleOyster_SL

In the annual “Food & Wine” issue of Charleston Magazine that’s out this month, I’ve got a piece on the single oysters that some of the oystermen are cultivating around here. Here’s a bit more than could fit in print:

Fresh salties by the bushel

As sure as it’s December, on low tides up on the oyster beds of Bulls Bay, in the creeks around Wadmalaw, and over on the Folly River, oystermen are pulling wild oysters from tide-washed banks.

The harvest is mostly of our Lowcountry clusters, but there should also be some new singles on the scene. Bill Anderson of the SC Department of Natural Resources says that thanks to the labor-intensive experimenting by longtime oystermen like Bill Livingston at Livingston’s Bulls Bay Seafood up in McClellanville, the local catch also now includes cultured single oysters – also known as single selects, Charleston Cups or Carolina Cups. It’s the same oyster, but is manually kept from clustering, and often grows horizontally and sometimes sub-tidally.

The results are single oysters that can have more of a cupped bottom, instead of the longer and narrower “knife blade” shape of cluster oysters that grow vertically. DNR gave a handful of grants back in 2006 to help South Carolina oystermen get single cultivation started, since the singles fetch a higher price than clusters. Livingston’s work with singles was part of that cooperative research grant program. South of Charleston, Tony Geisman got involved too. He built a platform on a creek off of the North Edisto River near Wadmalaw Island, and had some good success last year.

The holidays are a peak season for oysters, with clusters and singles at seafood purveyors like Stella Maris Seafood, a longtime wholesaler that also sells to the public. Chaz Green, who works with Stella Maris, describes the local “cups” as being more flavorful and rare than the ubiquitous oysters from the Gulf.  They’re also big, but not too big. “They’re like that one good-sized one you’ll get on a cluster,” he says. “A perfect bite.”

– Sandy Lang, December 2009

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Food, In print/published, Oysters, Travel

12.02

2009

Sauerkraut and Belon

Morse Sauerkraut, Nov. 2009 Peter Frank Edwards

On a November drive on the Maine coast north of Portland, we stopped in at Morse’s Sauerkraut for a quart of their brined cabbage. I love the sour crunch, hot or cold. We met one of the owners and learned that the sauerkraut-making and farm had its beginnings back in 1910, and its farm store now includes a well-stocked German-Euro deli with a tiny restaurant in the back –  the  “Little German Cafe,” with specials like goulash and sauerbraten. In the deli, they had some just-sliced local pastrami from Bisson’s right down the road in Topsham… so cool, where else do you see local pastrami? We had to have some of that. Later at the cabin we’d make hot sandwiches, but in the car, we pulled out strips of the pastrami to try – simply dried beef with good saltiness, and not too peppery. It was delicious.

On that Thursday afternoon we had no particular schedule, which was pretty amazing in itself. But it was also a clear, cold Maine fall day. In the bright sunshine we drove the curving, rising two-lane road to the honor stand at the Glidden Point Oyster Sea Farm. Past farm fields and spruce woods, stood the small and tidy building – maybe 15-feet across – beside a house where several wetsuits were hanging over the porch rail near the back door. (They dive for the oysters in the Damariscotta River below.) You pick out the oysters you want and leave your cash in a wooden box. One by one, we counted out a dozen each of the icy Damariscotta singles that are known to be clean and sweet tasting (they definitely were); and of the flatter, rounder and more iodine-tasting Belon oysters. (I’ve been learning about these, the French-Euro oyster that Julia Child wrote of eating in Provence, and that was introduced in Maine waters in the 1950s.) An elder Mainer pulled in just after us. Wearing a flannel shirt and walking slowly with a cane, he made his way over to the coolers to choose three of the “jumbo” singles (big as my hand) that go for $1.50 each. He didn’t look up for talking, but as he counted his change into the cash box, I said hello and asked how he’d eat the big oysters. “I eat ’em with a spoon,” he said, “like any other oyster.”

Belon & Damariscotta oysters Nov. 2009 Peter Frank Edwards

At the cabin the next day, we got into the sauerkraut and pastrami for an early lunch – made a Reuben version – and a few hours later, we iced down and pried open the Belons to eat on the half shell with lemon, followed by sips of Madeira. By then, the temperatures were in the mid-thirties and I had a fire going in the woodstove.

– Sandy Lang, December 2009  (images by PFE)

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Food, Maine days, Oysters, Travel

10.22

2009

Pumpkin farm stop

mr.lineberry

Before he switched over to planting patches of pumpkins, squash and peas, Mr. Billy Lineberry grew long rows of tobacco. “He was a tobacco farmer, until all that ended,” his wife said, then leaned down to pick up their shivering chihuahua-feist, Spanky. It was a chilly morning, and Mr. Lineberry was several yards behind her, propping up the scarecrow on the hay bale.

The couple had come out of their tall farmhouse about 50 miles south of Chapel Hill, NC to mind the sideyard display of pumpkins and squash they were selling – gooseneck and Hercules’ Club gourds, orange pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns, and old-fashioned pie pumpkins with lighter, almost pinkish skin. Mr. Lineberry explained that they only ever meant to grow Halloween pumpkins one year, but as soon as they did, people said, “we’ll see you for our pumpkins next year.”

Lineberryfarm2

It was great to meet this fine couple (and Spanky), and when Mr. Lineberry saw that we admired his climbing okra plant, he sent us home with two of the long okras, so we could dry them for seeds to plant. I’ll have to report back on how they grow.

– Sandy Lang, October 2009 (images by PFE)


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Home & garden, People, Travel

10.08

2009

Green days, Campari nights

greenville_PFE

Typically I’m not much of a lush, but last weekend I got pretty well intoxicated by Greenville, South Carolina. The premise was an assignment about the city’s food scene, and we spent the better part of two days along the leafy Main Street lined with café patios.

I’ll write more soon, but for now, here are a few images by PFE… at a bar known for its Limoncello and Campari cocktails (even George Clooney has stopped in, they say), an afternoon by the Reedy River, and the line-up of Bordeaux wines at a Friday testing. (I loved that Château de Fieuzal, Pessac-Léognan 2005.)

greenville2_pfe

– Sandy Lang, October 2009

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Food, Travel, Wine

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