Chefs of the Mountains: Course 3

It is not unusual for Nicole Palazzo, weighing in at barely 120 pounds, to go into a restaurant and order every appetizer on the menu, plus two entrées. She may not clean every plate, but she savors every bite. Of more importance, she will probably be able to identify all the ingredients from taste.

“I probably inherited a sensitive palate,” she says,  “but my sense of taste has been trained all my life.” Nicole loves to eat, loves restaurants, plans vacations around restaurants she wants to visit, and loves being a chef in her family’s restaurant.

Born in Hollywood, Fla., sister and brother Nicole and Anthony Palazzo moved to Banner Elk as children. Their grandfather was driving through town on his way to New Jersey and fell in love with the scenery. Eventually, their grandparents and aunts and uncles moved to the area as they retired.

Nicole and Anthony grew up cooking with their grandmother. Nicole remembers sitting in her grandmother’s lap and rolling meatballs when she was no more than four years old.

Anthony’s cooking memories center on “Grandma’s homemade gnocchi, ravioli, and pastas. Everybody would be involved – kids, uncles, aunts, everybody. It was very labor intensive.” By the time Nicole was seven, she was throwing pizza crusts in Villa Sorrento, the restaurant the family opened in one of downtown Banner Elk’s oldest buildings. “People would come in just to watch these little kids cooking their dinner,” she recalls.

After Valle Crucis Elementary and Watauga High School, Nicole went to Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington to take art classes. She was creative.

While in college, she got ideas from television cooking shows, then cooked huge five- or six-course meals for her friends.

“They had never experienced anything like that, so they started wanting more,” she says. Friends would call and ask if they could come over for her to cook for them. She eventually left Wilmington, returned to Banner Elk, and went back into the restaurant as bartender and waitress. But she moved into the kitchen quickly.

Anthony says he cannot imagine life without a restaurant. He became “one of the cool kids in high school because when I got off the school bus, it was at the restaurant. Everybody else got off at home. All the other kids wanted to get off at my stop and come in and eat. I could invite friends into the restaurant and cook for them. So I never even thought about doing anything else for a career.”

At home, Nicole especially likes to cook breakfast. “Potatoes and eggs is a big family tradition. I made a breakfast pizza of potatoes and eggs for my aunt. She had never had that before. I will also make soup out of anything that is in the house.”

The Restaurant

Villa Sorrento, named after a town in Italy, was the first restaurant the family owned in the area. It fit all the stereotypes: checkered tablecloths, candles in wine-basket bottles, a menu of mostly pizza and spaghetti. The restaurant burned in 1998. When planning to rebuild, the family decided it “wanted to go a little more upscale,” Nicole says.

Since the pizza station was in a separate building, the pizza ovens were salvaged. The family moved to a new shopping area closer to the center of town and created Sorrento’s Bistro, which offers a menu ranging from pizza to traditional Italian veal, chicken, seafood, and eggplant fine-dining entrées.

Nicole and Anthony try to let the ingredients speak for themselves. The menu still has “family Italian” dishes that people expect to see. But the ingredients in the more ambitious dishes are quite sophisticated. The restaurant uses Provimi veal, prosciutto di Parma, Roma pepperoni, and San Marzano tomatoes. The Italian rope sausage is imported and fresh-roasted every morning.

“You cannot slack on product,” Nicole says.

The restaurant purchases most of its vegetables at the farmers’ market in Banner Elk. A mushroom supplier who has lived in the area all his life brings in tubs of shiitake, oyster, and cauliflower mushrooms on a regular basis. Boone’s Let-Us Produce is another major supplier that buys from local farmers. The kitchen uses no frozen ingredients.

The team from Sorrento’s, lead by Nicole and Anthony, vied for the championship of the 2011 Fire on the Rock Chef’s Challenge. It defeated all competitors in the preliminary rounds and ultimately placed second by a small margin. The Sorrento’s team had placed third in 2010 in its first competition.

Sorrento’s Bistro

140 Azalea Circle

Banner Elk, N.C.

828-898-5215

sorrentosbistrohome.com

Chef’s note: “I typically use reconstituted sun-dried tomatoes in this recipe, but I have used dry as well. If using reconstituted, soak for 5 to 7 minutes in water that has just been removed from boiling. This will produce a deeper tomato flavor, whereas dry will give a crunchy texture. Either option is fine.”

4 to 8 jumbo shrimp

4 to 8 thin slices prosciutto di Parma

olive oil

pinch of red pepper flakes

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 sun-dried tomatoes, chopped rough

2 cups heavy cream

salt and pepper to taste

10 fresh basil leaves (6 torn, 4 whole)

handful of Romano cheese

4 slices ciabatta bread, cut into triangles

Wrap shrimp in prosciutto. Sauté in olive oil until crisp. In another pan, sauté red pepper flakes and garlic in olive oil until garlic is very light brown, then add sun-dried tomatoes. Add heavy cream, plus salt and pepper. Reduce over medium heat. Add torn basil leaves and continue to simmer. Drop in Romano and allow to thicken. Meanwhile, grill ciabatta until crisp, with nice grill marks.

To present, drop whole basil leaves in a deep fryer for about 20 seconds until crisp. Remove and add a little salt. Place ciabatta slices on a plate. Position prosciutto-wrapped shrimp on each slice. Cover with sauce. Place basil chips on top.

What fascinates me about American cuisine is the lack of boundaries,” says Chef Peter Fassbender of Season’s at Highland Lake Inn. “I find that very appealing. This is the world capital of fusion cuisine, and Americans have been doing this for centuries.”

Fassbender, born in Punta Arenas, Chile in 1969, has lived in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and California. After high school, he went to Texas A&M to study industrial engineering but returned to Chile after a year to pursue the culinary arts. He received a business management and international chef’s degree from Instituto de los Andes in Lima, Peru. He then continued his culinary studies by cooking under master chefs in Chile, Italy, and France before relocating to the United States, where he has lived and worked since 2001. He moved to the North Carolina mountains around 2005 after spending some vacation time in the area.

“This area reminded me a lot of southern Chile,” he says. “It was love at first sight. I knew then that this is the place I wanted to call home.”

He started cooking when he was 12 years old. “I used to make breakfast for my parents during the weekend,” he recalls. “I moved around a lot with family, and we used to go out to eat on weekends in the different countries we had the fortune of living in. So the relationship between different cultures and their cuisine has always fascinated me. When I was attending engineering school, I used to invite friends over to eat, and more than once they told me I was a good cook for an engineer. A few years later, I realized I enjoyed cooking more than I enjoyed engineering. When I went to Lima, Peru, I found one of the world’s richest gastronomic cultures.”

At home, Chef Fassbender enjoys seafood for its versatility. He is also fond of simple, wholesome foods such as spare ribs, barbecued pork, fried chicken, ceviche and pasta dishes.

The Restaurant

The name of the restaurant, Season’s, reflects its core concept of working with seasonal, sustainable, fresh local ingredients. The restaurant maintains its own organic garden, utilizing a drip irrigation system from the property’s 40-acre lake.

“All product deteriorates in the transportation process, and being able to utilize produce from only a few feet away has a tremendous impact on the quality of the dish,” Fassbender says. “That, together with a well-defined, polished technique, creates a wonderful outcome. We also believe that using a sustainable product is important for the environment and allows for future generations to enjoy what we have.”

The restaurant is an avid participant in the Appalachian Sustainable Agricultural Project, which helps staff members purchase ingredients from local farmers. “Most of our menu items feature staples of the area,” Fassbender says. “Season’s is truly a garden-to-your-plate restaurant. Season’s also participates in the sustainable seafood program to ensure that the seafood we purchase is not [the product of] environmentally destructive seafood harvesting.”

Highland Lake Inn offers cooking classes throughout the year to educate guests about how to grow, harvest, and cook vegetables, fresh herbs and flowers.

Season’s of Highland Lake Inn has received awards from Wine Spectator for the past 10 years and has been featured many times in Southern Living, Our State, Organic Style and Country Gardens magazines. UNC-TV profiled the inn and restaurant on “North Carolina Weekend.” The property has the facilities to accommodate weddings, retreats and other special events.

Season’s at Highland Lake Inn

86 Lily Pad Lane

Flat Rock, N.C. 28731

828-696-9094 (restaurant) or 800-635-5101 (inn)

hlinn.com 

Chef’s note: “The Bison Meat Loaf is actually a creation of our sous chef, Matthew Lineback. It is his take on an old-time childhood favorite. Due to the abundant production of bison in this area, it only made sense to give it a twist and do this meat loaf in particular with bison and bison sausage. This is one of our most popular dishes. The combination with garden herb pesto and grainy mustard jus makes this once-simple dish a much more refined version with a subtle, yet complex, plethora of flavors.”

Meat Loaf

½ pound pancetta, diced medium

1 cup minced celery

1½ carrots, diced medium

1 large yellow onion, diced medium

1 yellow bell pepper, diced medium

1 red bell pepper, diced medium

1 green bell pepper, diced medium

½ tablespoon minced garlic

3 tablespoons minced fresh herbs of choice

1 tablespoon dried oregano

5 eggs

1 pint heavy cream

5 cups panko breadcrumbs

5 pounds ground bison

1 pound bison sausage

salt and pepper to taste

bacon, 8 strips or more for wrapping as needed

Mustard jus:

2 cups beef demi-glace

½ cup barbecue sauce

1½ tablespoons whole-grain mustard

Yukon mash:

15 large potatoes

1 stick butter

1 cup heavy cream

salt and pepper to taste

asparagus, carrots, or other vegetables of choice for garnish

Meat loaf:

Preheat oven to 380 degrees. Render pancetta in a large pan until crispy. Add vegetables, garlic, and herbs and sauté until tender, then cool on a sheet pan. Mix together eggs, cream, and breadcrumbs in a bowl. Refrigerate. Mix together ground bison, sausage, vegetables, and breadcrumb mixture. Season with salt and pepper. Wrap mixture with bacon and put in a mold. Bake for 1 hour. Let rest 15 minutes before serving.

Mustard jus:

Bring all ingredients to a slow simmer in a saucepan until reduced to a paste and nearly dry.

Yukon mash:

Cook potatoes in water until done. Strain. Mix in remaining ingredients.

To serve: Slice meatloaf into 1-inch-thick serving size. Place in center of plate. Flank with vegetables.