After our out-of-car foray at Craggy Gardens, we continued north on the Blue Ridge Parkway in search of Mount Mitchell. We decided to drive to the parking lot just below the summit rather than make the long, arduous hike up from the bottom. The drive up from the parkway was surprisingly long. Once again climbing, we quickly found ourselves in spruce-fir forest with lots of moss and lichen. The microclimates on the top of these high peaks are pretty interesting.
Annie Looking Over the Observatory Railing at Mount Mitchell
Pretty Fancy Survey Marker
The Obligatory Sign Shot
Looking North and Down on Mount Craig, Second Highest Peak in the East
While I was up top, I shot a 360-degree view of North Carolina and Tennessee from the summit.
The Mosses and Lichens are Natural Poetry
A Raven Kept Us Company at Mount Mitchell
Ravens are Notoriously Tame and Playful
Our plan was, after seeing Mount Mitchell, to get some lunch in nearby Burnsville and drop in to see our friends Neil and Kay. But it proved that were really hungry, so we thought we might just grab something quick at the restaurant where we parked, but a sign on the door announced that it doesn't open until May first. Damn! It was April 28th.
We didn't really think things through enough to realize that there's no good way off the Parkway at that point to get to food. Though as the crow flies, Burnsville is about 10 miles away, the Garmin was saying that it was an hour to either Burnsville or Black Mountain and that each would still be an hour from Asheville. So we decided just to drive the 45 minutes back down the Parkway to Asheville and eat lunch there.
About halfway back, coming down from the Craggy Gardens picnic area into lower elevations where the trees were starting to leaf out, Ann asked me about a flower she was seeing in the woods but which I couldn't see on the roadside. After a couple miles we managed to find a shoulder wide enough to park on close enough to a patch of these flowers. When we walked back and up into the woods a bit, we were staring open-mouthed at an entire hillside of geraniums and trilliums in full bloom. I don't know enough about trilliums to be confident in identifying these. These might all be Trillium grandiflorum as they are all growing together, but I couldn't say.
Masses of Geraniums on the Roadsides
Pink
Wine-Colored
White
When we had nearly retraced our route in reverse, we asked the Garmin for nearby restaurants and saw HomeGrown about which we had read, whose slogan is Slow Food Right Quick, and which is a pioneer in the Asheville local food scene. Ann got pan-fried trout with saffron aïoli, sprouts, pickles, and pickled onions.
Trying to save room for dinner since it was already mid-afternoon, I ordered a watercress salad with pepper-candied bacon, red onions, pickled watermelon rind, farmers cheese, and strawberry vinaigrette, a daily special.
Watercress Salad
Rainbow Trout Sandwich with Fries
While we sat outside and waited for our food, we tried out a local cider and a local pale ale. I noticed that almost everyone at the place was drinking Shiva IPA from Asheville Brewing. It's a decent IPA. Nothing to shriek about, but it drinks easily enough.
Monday night, we were going to have rainbow trout for dinner, but we ended up going to the movies and eating cheese steaks there. Ann wondered because of the snow if I might be able to get home early enough on Tuesday to have the trout. I was able: it was a painfully early night at the restaurant.
Rainbow Trout with Roasted Haricots Verts and Lentils
I love trout, always have. As a child, I remember that my father would take the whole family to Graves Mountain Lodge down in Syria, VA in Madison County each spring for the opening of trout season. My brother and I would fish ineffectually with the wrong gear in the Rose River until dinner time, at which point, we would consume massive amounts of fried trout. Bones be damned, I love me some trout.
For restaurant service, I take the head off the trout and butterfly them, removing the spine and then I surgically remove all the tiny and hugely annoying pin bones. This three minutes of labor per fish yields the perfectly deboned butterflied trout that you see above. Now multiply this labor by the 64 fish that I prepped last week and you could understand why I might not want to see another trout again for a very long time. But so delicious is trout that I would willingly go through a lot of labor to put it on the table.
This trout I rubbed with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put under the broiler for about 3 minutes while I reheated the lentils in the microwave. Ann roasted the haricots verts before I got home. Dinner took five minutes to put on the table, which is good, because we were both voraciously hungry. This is about as simple, easy, and delicious as dinner gets.
I met Claire some years ago when we were both at the studio in Harrisonburg shooting some TV shows and have been meaning to get down to her restaurant in Warrenton ever since. November weather does not get any nicer than it was yesterday, so I had the idea to visit Claire's and then run by Jeff and Kelly's to confirm some details about a forthcoming event, but mostly to sit outside and enjoy the glorious view on a glorious day with a wonderful woman and a great glass of Glen Manor wine.
We arrived at Claire's ten minutes early for our table and Ann asked if we could sit outside, out back of the old refurbished train depot that houses the restaurant. Despite a 2/3 full restaurant, we were the first table of the day to sit outside and we had to battle the falling red maple leaves all during our brunch, but that was part of the beauty of sitting out on such a glorious day. Behind the old depot is a beautiful backyard of sorts that gives on to what appears to be a public pocket park just behind the restaurant. We saw dozens of people out there walking their dogs and enjoying the delightful day.
The back yard was framed by a raised bed garden on one end, a trickling water feature overlooked by a threadleaf maple along the park fence, and by an old caboose on the other. It was against this backdrop that we sat and ordered a bottle of Argyle sparkling wine.
It's not a bad bottle of sparkling wine. I've had a lot better and a lot worse, but I wouldn't go out of my way to order it again. It just didn't have any personality: it could have been a bubbly from anywhere.
Argyle Brut 2008
For food, Ann ordered fried oysters to start. They were plump and tasty, but the fryer wasn't up to temperature and they came out really greasy and needed salt. I kept tasting fryer oil for the rest of the afternoon and that is not a good thing.
Fried Oysters
For brunch proper, I had rainbow trout and grits and Ann had a portabella Benedict, one of the off-menu specials, both of which we enjoyed. Everything on my plate wanted a bit of salt or other seasoning. The eggs were tasty enough and apparently cooked in clarified butter—a nice touch—but were slightly overcooked to my liking. Granted, it is very hard to manage quality of scrambled eggs in a restaurant setting with such a long time between plating and delivery to the customer. My grits were really nice and coarse and probably the same ones (Anson Mills) that we serve at the restaurant, but again, they were screaming for salt. The trout was well done although I would have preferred that the kitchen remove the ventral and pelvic fins on the butterflied trout before cooking it.
Both Ann and I had envisioned her portabella being stuffed with the artichoke and spinach mix. It was instead cut up and mixed with the artichokes and spinach. A stuffed portabella would have plated a bit nicer, but Ann had no other issue with her meal other than a lack of seasoning and that her English muffins were not toasted. She liked her hollandaise which she called "light and lemony." Bottom line, we had a good time, an enjoyable meal, and an OK bottle of wine. We'll go back.
