In California ‘foodies’ are snooty sorts who browse their tiny plates of wild-sourced, shade grown servings of French herbs with Peruvian potatoes on the side and a delicate sauce applied with an eyedropper. They sip Calabria juice and drive vehicles made anywhere but the USA.
In North Carolina “foodies” are people who like to eat food, and boy do they. They drive Ford F-150s.
North Carolinians enjoy barbecue and deep-fried chicken, and that’s for breakfast, midnight snacks and all consumption opportunities in between. Regional fare is debated, sometimes by shouting. BBQ sauce schisms divide North and South Carolina more clearly than state boundaries.
But a food that unites everyone everywhere is Macaroni and Cheese, abbreviated by them, and you, as good ol’ Mac-n-Cheese. It appears on more North Carolina menus than salad.
Mac-n-Cheese is the state meal. The North Carolina state flag features three steaming bowls of Mac-n-Cheese on a field of blue, and a crossed Knife & Fork above the Latin phrase ’Sede. Comedite.’ A tiny winged pink pig hovers above the emblem.
Down here, family mac-n-cheese recipes are passed along from generation to generation. These recipes, some written 200-plus years ago on tree bark, are more fiercely guarded than spouses or trucks.
I don’t know where all the pasta fields and Velveeta farms are located, but I’d like to plant a few hundred rows of macaroni bushes in my back yard. You never know when artisanal pasta products might catch on down here, and the guy who corners the inside track on fresh organic elbow macaroni will have a lucrative market not seen since cotton was king.
The problem: I have yet to find even one restaurant serving a mac-n-cheese dish you would feed your dog. Maybe your kids, but not your dog.
Macaroni and cheese in North Carolina is uniformly bland and tasteless. It sits on the plate an unhappy congealed mess of gluey pale yellow sauce so thick you could dilute it with a hundred gallons of water and it still wouldn’t pass through an eyedropper.
North Carolina cheese sauce squeezes, barely, through four-inch pipes at some well-hidden central cheese goo processing facility. The sauce is sometimes used to hang wallpaper.
Kraft Macaroni and Cheese has a better version of the stuff Trophy and I had yesterday at an upscale sandwich shop. It, along with cole slaw, fried green tomatoes and boiled yams were the side dishes offered; as always I gambled on the mac-n-cheese. And as always I left two-thirds of it in a fat lump on the small plate it arrived on.
In a state populated by tens of millions of eager mac-n-cheese eaters, why is it the state’s most popular menu item is uniformly and predictably uninspiring and dismal? Why can’t one chef in one kitchen mix in some bacon, onion, good quality cheese(s) and when it emerges from the kettle, sprinkle another fistful of good quality cheese along with some bread crumbs and grated parmesan, then run it under the broiler for 30 seconds?
Why not? Why not make a mac-n-cheese that would revolutionize the sickly dish and turn it into something North Carolinians could justifiably brag about? And wouldn’t the chef who performed this gourmet miracle appear in food and recipe magazines all over the country?
Our cuisine conquering hero might then return to North Carolina and run for Governor, unopposed.
Willits Goes Upscale
Whatever it is they’re doing in Willits to survive the dearth of (illicit) marijuana money ought to be copied, purchased or stolen by Ukiah’s leaders.
New good-quality eateries have sprung open, along with a knockout of a new brewery (The North Spur) on the north side of town. The Noyo Theater, under new ownership, is running the kinds of movies I’d like to see, and has split itself into four-screens in four theaters, with at least one featuring recliner seats and cocktails.
Somebody wake me up.
My friend Kip, who’s lived in Willits since Highway 101 was a dirt road and the town was called Willitsville, says it’s hard to keep up with the businesses opening and the economy swelling.
All that has to happen in Willits now is build the Highway 101 bypass and get rid of the 18-wheelers rolling through the middle of town.
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