After the sun dropped below the horizon, the air was still sticky with humidity, which kept the smoke emanating from the 11 rib vendor booths close to the ground.

Take a drive along High Point Road and look for the Mekong Oriental Market, tucked into the back corner of a strip mall. It’s four aisles of exotic delicacies: pickled duck eggs, yellow lump candy, fresh produce in unmarked bags, frozen fish with the heads still on; jars of chili paste, pickled garlic and kim chee; canned langon, lychee, jackfruit and rambuton; pickled squid and shrimp candy; bean curd and dried sausages.

Buying local isn't a fad. More and more these days, consumers are willing to go the extra mile to buy unprocessed, earth-friendly, healthy foods that help support the local economy. For nearly 250 years, the Old Mill of Guilford has been a fixture along Beaver Creek on the western edge of the county.

Between skipping breakfast, shoveling down sandwiches at my desk, slurping noodles over the kitchen sink and mindlessly noshing in front of the TV I mean just shoveling in snacks like a tender loading coal into one of those old-timey locomotives sometimes I forget what a meal is supposed to be.

I wasn't even hungry when I pulled into the parking lot of Bib's Downtown, on the western side of the district. I wasn't hungry, but since when do you need to be hungry to eat a plate of barbecue?

Fat Tire has excellent malt flavors, with a sweet caramel taste on the front end and a bitter, hoppy finish. Bartenders all over town tell me that people love this beer, probably the most approachable of the New Belgium line, and it is as fine an amber ale as you can get.

The fields out here, which have been in the Rudd family for four generations, were once used to raise tobacco and wheat, with the first strawberry plants going into the ground in 2000. Today the pick-your-own crowd works one plot while another is reaped by migrant workers for bulk sale to restaurants and produce markets.

As far as fast-food fried chicken goes, I'm a Popeyes man. I like my chicken spicy, and I make no apologies for that. I can do Bojangle's in a pinch, or the spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy's (no mayo, please). But I've never been a devotee of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

They gathered on Saturday in downtown Asheboro to eat chili and drink beer in the street or, at least, drink beer in a small parking lot off the corner of Sunset and Fayetteville streets. They came to defy the notion, put forth by Forbes magazine, that theirs was the fourth-fastest dying town in the United States in a communal party that celebrated those who are proud to call Asheboro home.

I remembered the leisurely cafe life of Morocco. There weren’t opium dens and dancing girls, in my experience, just simple cafes, some fried meat, tobacco and coffee, where men could sit and talk for hours or just stare out into the street. On the other side of the world, Mooney’s feels almost the same.

Chef Don McMillan had already browned spareribs, chopped cabbage and was in the process of making stuffing for dumplings. Around noon, when the last student arrived, he began to talk. Now we add garlic using a garlic presser, Chef Don said, crushing several cloves in a blue plastic nutcracker.

I first met Diego Gomez, fittingly, in a restaurant. It was in the summer of 2002. I had been in Greensboro about two years and was supplementing my freelance income which at that point was about five grand a year by tending bar and waiting tables at whatever restaurants would have me.

Here's how it goes down: With one kid and a grandparent at the Greensboro Coliseum to watch basketball, a need arises to entertain the other two children with a vague promise, something special. It is decided that this special thing will be a meal at a restaurant.

Scotch on the rocks, I say. What do you got in the well I got Dewars, says John Gardner, but we use Cutty Sark in the well. Cutty Sark: a dependable old blend that came to prominence during a scotch-drinking boom.

The back of my neck is sunburned, pink like Spam. I've got red clay under my fingernails and smeared against my cuticles. New blisters have formed underneath old callouses and tiny rocks have formed divots on my knees. It was the peach tree that finally made me do it.

High Point is quiet in February. Showrooms of living room and dining room sets wait through the season, lit only by light from the window. Signs hang from every lamppost advertising the furniture market: Welcome Taiwan; Welcome Kuwait; Welcome Russia; Welcome Switzerland.

My father lives for small adventures, like a scenic road, a used bookstore or a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. That's why I brought him along to one such place, Shabazz, a tiny restaurant on the east side of downtown Winston. Several features mark Shabazz as an unusual place.

Plus, you know, I really miss this kind of food. Surely by now everybody knows the magnificent touch of Jody Morphis on jambalaya and etouffe — he did work with Chef Duke LoCicero at Giovanni’s off Canal Street (incidentally, he worked alongside my old friend Coach Bill, with whom I once had the pleasure of spending an afternoon in Central Lockup).

Downtown Greensboro's tony Southside neighborhood put a classy sheen on this end of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive where once prostitutes, crack merchants and other street life flourished, now folks rush from parked cars to the shops and offices at street level or sit behind upstairs windows, glowing with comforting amber light.

The Mellow Mushroom began in the early ’70s in Georgia as a place for college kids to sate their munchies — a post-joint joint, if you will. But in the ensuing decades, the brand began to embrace a healthy corporate philosophy akin to the House of Blues or Ben & Jerry’s