(Ed. note – despite this smart-ass picture, a pork “butt” is actually the shoulder of a pig. Go figure.)

Like “freedom,” “love” or “lite,” “Barbeque” is one of those words that has been robbed of meaning from over usage by the American public. When someone tells you that they are “having a barbecue,” what they most likely mean is that they are grilling some hamburgers or hot dogs over high heat. They are dead wrong.

“Grilling” and “Barbequing” are about as similar baseball and jai-alai. Real barbeque means low heat and a long cooking time – usually with big, tough pieces of meat that can’t be serviced any other way. In a cow, the classic cut is a brisket, but the real barbeque standby is a pork shoulder.

The perfect pork shoulder is smoked with applewood or hickory for around 16 hours – for that reason it can be sort of prohibitive to a home chef. But smoke only flavors the pork so much. The real flavor of barbecued pork comes from the fat rendering through the meat, and that’s easy to get from a conventional oven.

To make barbeque at home, get a whole pork shoulder or just a Boston Butt from the grocery store . They run cheap at about 1.50 a pound. Throw it in the oven at 220 degrees at it should be falling apart after 12 hours. For a slightly more authentic experience you can finish it for a few hours over a smoky fire – a standard grill will serve if you just don’t add too many coals and throw a few apple wood chips on top – but the butt will taste good regardless.

Do this on a Sunday and you’ve got sandwiches all week.

Rarely does one stumble upon the chance to satiate these twin hungers in the same commercial establishment. While I was driving down 1-95 through Dunn, North Carolina, I started to see bright yellow billboards on the side of the road: “TOPLESS! TOPLESS! TOPLESS!” they said.

“Topless you say?” I thought. “Ho hum. Don’t you have club sandwiches?”

Then I noticed the name of the place they were advertising: “Café Risque.” They also advertised a 24-hour breakfast. As the billboard density started increasing and the distances at the bottom dropped below the mile mark, I noticed a tiny restaurant a stone’s throw from the highway. It was lunchtime. I pulled off.

The interior was confusing – just a little corridor. Someone was saying “Can I help you?” behind me. Probably talking to someone else. There was a little door that I could see tables through, so I pushed it open.

“Can I help you?’

“Oh…hi.” I said to a man with a baseball hat and glasses in a little booth.

He took a deep breath.

“This is Café Risque, we are a full sit-down restaurant, we do have topless ladies dancing and there is a fifteen dollar cover charge.”

“Okay.” I opened up a tab with my card.

It would be inappropriate to describe the interior as anything but a cross between a diner and a strip club. Dim, semi-neon lights, a few tables, a topless woman dancing on a stage in front of an old trucker with a moustache sipping a coffee. There’s a rack of porn and a few toys on the opposite side of the bathroom. I took a seat on a stool in front of the stage and a waitress in a sheer teddy brought me a menu. Coffee is 2.50 with a $7 club sandwich. You pay for the atmosphere in these places.

There were five dancers waiting around, chatting with the guy in the booth and occasionally going up to the stage for a show. The waitress brought me my food and poured me a coffee. The sandwich wasn’t especially bad, just some semi-soggy bread, a meager amount of turkey, mealy tomatoes and chewy bacon. The same sandwich you could get in 1000 identical greasy spoons across the country. The coffee seemed to be caffeinated.

“Are you from out of town?” I heard.

I looked up to see a girl with blonde hair  and a neon yellow g-string mechanically gyrating to a reggaetone song above me. I nodded.

“I figured, with the coffee.”

“Right,” I smiled.

She put her foot on the stage and I tucked a single in her garter belt.

“Thanks!” she smiled. I nodded again.

She offered a lap dance in Club Paradiso and I politely declined. Another girl got on the stage, took off her dress and started purring in my ear. I was out of singles at this point, but I thought it would have been rude to say that.

There weren’t many other guys in the topless diner at lunchtime, just two guys at separate tables in the back and the one trucker with the moustache, both of his big forearms resting on the stage. He held tension through his back, but an occasional flirt or a motorboat elicited a little smile and other than that he sipped his coffee. The guys in the back ate their sandwiches, eyes on the girls. Every once in a while one of them would come over and flirt.

It was quiet inside Café Rique. Under the steady beat of the generic hip-hop people talked low enough so that they could only be heard by the person they were talking to. They didn’t even serve alcohol. There was a sign on the door that read: “If you have been drinking or doing drugs, we don’t want your business. ”Café Risque also offers free showers to truckers coming through – travelers could clean off, fuel up and snuggle up to the bare breasts of a nineteen year old for a fifteen-dollar cover. It was bizarrely wholesome – they were serving comfort food with a bit of comfort as well.

I never really made it through my sandwich: the entertainment didn’t turn out to be particularly appetizing. I got the check and left. The guy at the bar that was there when I came in was still there when I left. The guy at the table and the dancer with the blonde hair and the plaid shirt both said bye to me as I was going, the dancer hoped that I had a good rest of my trip. It was bright and hot outside and I had to put my sunglasses back on. Rare after a visit to a highway rest stop, I felt rested.

(This post appears courtesy of The Yale Sustainable Food Project, and it also appears on their blog.)

The basil is sagging. It’s making small purple flowers on top in a desperate attempt to reproduce before the end. It is going to die, and I am going to kill it.

For most of the summer, I harvested side shoots off the basil, and it dutifully grew taller and replaced the ones I cut with bigger and stronger leaves. The side shoots have all but stopped now, and in my rapacious greed I am going to cut my friend at the base to take the last few leaves it has to offer. I am going to make a pesto.

To make this pesto I will require a food processor and several ingredients. They are as follows:

Basil (not thai)

Garlic

Walnuts (pine nuts are more traditional)

Parmesan Cheese

Olive Oil

Salt

Pepper

I will not use an exact recipe when making this pesto, because the tears in my eyes will prevent me from reading. Also, my particular pesto whims are many and fickle. Instead, I will just start blending them all together, following a few basic guidelines:

Start with the basil.

Add garlic with caution, in small quantities.

Add a little more oil than required to keep the food processor running smoothly.

Err on the side of less with the nuts and cheese – you can always add more.

Salt and pepper at the end.

Most Importantly: Taste constantly. If it tastes like it is missing an ingredient, add it in. If it does not taste like it is missing an ingredient, it is done.

Though I told myself all summer I’d freeze pesto and take it out in midwinter, I have not done so, and now it is too late. This will be the last fresh pesto I will taste until the middle of next summer, unless I cave and order sinful pesto made from sinful basil from some sinful land where the sun always shines, most likely California. I have gone and convinced myself that it is morally irresponsible to do that, and because of that I will feel bad when eating this pesto of shame.

The Alice Watersises of the world will tell me that it will only bring joy to my life to eat locally and sustainably, and yet that seems hard to believe when looking at the poor stumps of my pretty red basil and waiting for the inevitable frost to snatch away all but a few purple-green cauliflowers. There is pain here. As much as I can console myself with stored potatoes, artisanal cheeses, grass-fed beef, canned tomatoes and the rest of the preservables that constitute “seasonal” in the New England winter, I will miss my pesto.

Of course, it is morally irresponsible to eat food trucked across the nation on scarce gas bought with the blood of the international underclass, and for me, that is a more compelling reason to eat locally than the joy of fresh ingredients. I will do it despite the pain. I will remember this pesto, and I will look forward to it next year. I’m fairly certain Steve Earle was singing about a woman when he wrote this, but it works the same for pesto, I think:

Your memory cannot keep me warm, but it never leaves me cold.

I’ll tell you if it actually works for pesto when the temperatures drop below zero.