Sharon

Our great-granny USA road trip officially kicked off in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, with us driving past sand dunes and beach oats billowing in a warm breeze (because summer was just wrapping up on the Atlantic coast). We’d been tipped off on a local cooking hero, grandmother Sharon, who lives in a hurricane-battered home that has withstood 60 years of wind thrashings.

Its very beams were once trodden by sailors doomed to meet their end at Diamond Shoals - the most eastern point of the USA at which two deadly currents clash - only 10 minutes from Sharon’s home.