My gosh: when it's been almost 40 years since laying eyes on a dear college friend, the evening of the reunion simply cannot arrive quickly enough. That's what made me so very happy Thursday a week ago to hear the car drive up in the lot and behind its wheel to find the one and only Kelly Clark. The long gap in our UNC-birthed friendship is on my shoulders, thanks to a 14-year delay in responding to an email! Of course, because he moved to New York after graduating from UNC, and then lived overseas some of the intervening years, and now has nestled his family into quaint New England, it's not as though we're going to run into one another at the Harris Teeter.
I'd promised to make dinner and something that captured and spanned the state was the clever idea that drove the menu design. We'll head west for the main meal, borrowing from Asheville's Tupelo Honey Cafe, the source of the recipe for lamb and mushroom meatloaf and smashed sweet potatoes, pictured above. Roasted herbed asparagus joined the plates as well.
Dessert took us to the other end of the state, where might often be found the popular Atlantic Beach pie, our home state riff on key lime pie with lemon as the featured flavor. Tying the menu up into a neat bow is that this wonderful dessert gained national attention thanks to an NPR feature on Chef Bill Smith of Chapel Hill's Crook's Corner bringing it to the fore. It could not have been a finer evening, here in Carolina, and I'm glad we'll have more to look forward to on Kelly's frequent trips to nearby Greensboro.
"Lamb and Multi-Mushroom Meatloaf" (p. 150) and "Smashed Sweet Potatoes" (p. 128), in Tupelo Honey Cafe: Spirited Recipes from Asheville's New South Kitchen, by Elizabeth Sims with Chef Brian Sonoskus. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing (2011).
"One Phenomenal Pie: Atlantic Beach Pie," from Chef Bill Smith. Published in Our State Magazine, May 2014. Also featured in "Found Recipes" on All Things Considered from National Public Radio, broadcast April 13, 2013. First made in the RoHo: July 2014.
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