A Fruity Foodie Old Friendly Fathers Day Weekend

A friend of ours from the SFA, Sheri Castle, from beautiful Carboro, NC. has just had her first cookbook published. She’s travelling around the South for 4 months promoting it, and we’ve been trying to meet up with her since April. Unfortunately when we’ve been headed to NC, she’s been elsewhere, and when she’s been in SC or Georgia, we couldn’t make it happen. About 6 weeks ago we found out that Heidi and Joe Trull of Grits and Groceries were featuring recipes from Sheri’s book for their June Dinner Club. Grits and Groceries is kind of in Belton, SC., just down the road a piece from Mom & Dads house in Williamston. Since this was Father’s Day Weekend, we called Mama Glenda and Big Phil to see if we could take them down for a celebratory meal. Now we’ve been fans of Grits & Groceries Breakfast for years, (Glenda and Phil rave about the Stuffed French Toast) but none of us had never been to Dinner Club.

Sheri’s book is all about using the South’s wonderful fresh produce. It’s arranged by crops, which is really pretty cool. So that got me thinking about farmers markets and such, which led my brain to Callaham’s Orchard, owned by some wonderful folks I went to high school with a hundred years ago.

As it turns out their Blackberry U-pick operation was in full swing. So Saturday morning we all went picking! The berries were absolutely gorgeous, and almost, but not quiet, at peak. In about 2 hours of not hard work, 5 of us picked 11 gallons of berries! We froze 3 gallons whole, kept one to eat on, and juiced the rest. We wound up with over 3 gallons!

You’re probably thinking I’m going to make wine with the juice. Well, I’m not. All that juice is reserved for Breakfast Smoothies in the dead of winter. (Although I will admit to using a small amount of whole berries for rumtopf.) I can’t say that juicing all those berries was a lot of fun, but it sure beat picking and canning couple of hundreds quarts of James Island tomatoes in a tiny un-air-conditioned kitchen on Folly Beach, which is what we used to get into this time of year! Big Phil wound up looking like he had the measles.

The event at Grits and Groceries was wonderful, ‘ceptin’ for a little bit of rain, which really wasn’t that bad, especially since Mama Glenda quickly grabbed the last available table inside! And Lo, there right inside the door was Bobby and Suzanne Callaham! So it was so good to see old friends, especially with such fantastic food all around. Bacon Wrapped Pork Loin with Fig Sauce, Squash Casserole with Swiss Cheese, Black-eyed Pea Salsa, and Peach Upside Down Cake were just some of the deliciousness they set forth for us to enjoy. Heidi and Joe did an impressive job with Sheri’s recipes. We came back with her book and have already started using it!

We’ll definitely be back to G & G for a Dinner Club, although it’ll have to be a while. Heidi and Joe have the good sense not to do outdoor events in July and August!