This was a fun combination! Both states have state fruits - blueberries and strawberries for North Carolina, and apples for New York. Fruit salad from those three fruits is the perfect red, white and blue combination! New York is bigger than Manhattan, believe it or not. We found a sandwich particular to Binghamton, NY called a 'spiedie'. It's basically a kebab served in a slice of Italian bread. They were traditionally lamb, but are now made with most types of meat. We made both lamb and chicken, and I thought that the lamb was particularly good.
To go with the spiedies, we made sweet potato oven fries for North Carolina, and (baked) potato chips for NY. Potato chips were invented in Saratoga Springs, NY and were originally named Saratoga Chips.
For dessert we made black and whites, which are cookies created in NY. One story says that they were invented by bakeries trying to use up their cake batter. The cookies really are a cake batter baked as cookies. For each cookie, half is frosted white, and the other half with chocolate. Truth be told, most of the store bought ones are dreadful. However, a batch freshly made at home can be really good. We made a half recipe from here
http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/09/black-and-white-cookies/
We did not actually do a full meal for these two, but parts of two meals. We made pizza strips, a Rhode Island specialty, as an appetizer for dinner. And we baked apple pie, the Vermont state pie, for dessert. Pizza strips are pizza dough, with a spicy tomato sauce and no cheese. They are served room temperature or cold. The sauce isn't cooked - it is just crushed tomatoes with some seasoning. We liked them a lot, and thought they were pretty easy to make since we bought pre-made dough. I made a second batch by making dough in my bread machine and that was extremely easy too. For the sauce, we used the first recipe in this blog http://cookingchaotic.blogspot.com/2011/04/recipe-2-ri-pizza-strips.html
The declaration of the apple pie being a state symbol for Vermont is hilarious. It includes the wording "When serving apple pie in Vermont, a "good faith" effort shall be made to meet one or more of the following conditions: (a) with a glass of cold milk, (b) with a slice of cheddar cheese weighing a minimum of 1/2 ounce, (c) with a large scoop of vanilla ice cream." We served ours with a choice of all three :-).
We felt the need to cook more for these states primarily because we hadn't used any maple syrup for Vermont! Happily, johnnycakes are very common in Rhode Island. They are basically fried cornmeal mush. Kind of a cross between a pancake and polenta. They were great served with maple syrup for breakfast.
Tennessee bourbon (Jack Daniels). Kentucky bourbon (Makers Mark, Jim Beam, Four Roses). What a pair of states! We figured we'd better do something with bourbon. Coincidentally, a friend gave me a bunch of mint from her garden during the week so we made a batch of mint juleps. Fortunately, we had a ton of company for Memorial Day weekend to help drink them :-).
We also got lucky on this one because my sister lives in Tennessee. She was able to ship us some country ham, which isn't normally available here. That plus the Tennessee state fruit, which is the tomato, made for an excellent sandwich comprised of buttermilk biscuit with country ham and tomato jam. The recipe is at http://www.cookingchanneltv.com/recipes/buttermilk-biscuit-ham-sandwiches-with-homemade-tomato-jam-recipe/index.html. As we frequently do, we only made a half recipe and it was plenty.
