Jan 14, 2025
When I was a kid, a big snowstorm meant poking my three-pin cross-country ski boots into their bindings and climbing the logging roads behind my house. I tolerated the family activity — and it was plenty fun on the way back down — but I mostly looked forward to a warm lunch afterward. At Goshen's Blueberry Hill Outdoor Center, home base for the nonprofit that manages and provides access to an expansive network of trails in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area within the Green Mountain National Forest, I found my new favorite version of those childhood memories. Since its establishment in 1971, the outdoor center has served soup to skiers and snowshoers throughout the winter season. Offered from noon to 2 p.m., the soup is always hot, always vegetarian and almost always gluten-free. Last year, grill-your-own cheese sandwiches hit the succinct menu. Shari Brown preps it all across the street at Blueberry Hill Inn, which the late Tony Clark, her former husband, reopened the same year he started the outdoor center. I met Brown for lunch for the second installment in our Dining Inn series, which highlights culinary offerings at the cozy inns dotting Vermont's countryside. These lodging places for out-of-towners may not be top of mind for locals, but many B&Bs serve their fare to the public as well as guests. Blueberry Hill's simple winter meals in the Outdoor Center are just one way to dine at the appropriately blue-painted inn, which also offers three-course communal farmhouse dinners, soup and salad nights, occasional pancake breakfasts, and a bustling pond-side pizza night in summertime. Brown hopes to expand those offerings, if she can find someone to lead the kitchen. It's mostly her right now, she said. Since Clark died in 2022, she's also been the innkeeper and food shopper while overseeing the Outdoor Center's day-to-day operations. Still, she found time to make me a grilled cheese. The sandwiches warm up DIY-ers as they cook on the antique woodstove and when they eat them, she said. "People love it," Brown continued, covering our sandwiches to help melt the cheese. "I think they love the ambience of it as much as anything else. And there's nothing like a grilled cheese sandwich on a cold day." It was certainly cold the day I visited: 13 degrees. A hardy group of local middle schoolers huddled around the stove after tackling the snowy…
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