Crazy for Grazin’ – Eating on Board | By Gail Greco

Dawn Sullivan

Crazy for ‘Grazin’

Eating On Board — ‘Rustique Life’ Style

Fall theme on the Mezzaluna Duo Grazing Tray Sullivan’s unique designs

By Gail Greco, Photos by Tom Bagley

“What goes around comes around” for Dawn Sullivan and her artisan food boards. For one thing, that means an all-around, back-again, rotating, painted creation she calls The Grazy Susan. Her art is at home on the kitchen table—and this time of year, her food boards are out and about for game-day munchies, leaf-peeping picnics, and Parkway overlook pop-ups!

Unlike a Lazy Susan that’s mainly for condiments, The Grazy Susan is a revolving food platter of little bites—so many you don’t know what to try first. So you graze, going back and forth for more until it’s all gone—but what’s left is still inviting. Eating off wooden boards is trending everywhere these days as an easy way to entertain. But Sullivan has taken the idea a step farther to create stylish boards, so interesting that you cherish them afterwards like a favorite work of art.

Her fixed grazing trays have carrying handles. There’s even a bone-shaped doggie treats board so no canine is left to graze alone. Sullivan makes her boards by hand at home in Blowing Rock in her 300-square-foot workshop, sectioned into prepping, painting, food-safe glazing, and drying stations. Dense fiberboard sheets are creatively cut by husband, John Sullivan, a recently retired orthopedic surgeon. He’s perfect for the job, ensuring good bones, as in his recent creation the Mezzaluna Duo, a circle divided into two matching trays for combos like entrees and dessert.

The artist adds the bold, exciting designs with paint, inks and oils in a technique called acrylic or fluid pour, easier for her than maneuvering brushes since she has limited use of one hand. The end result is dazzling, “like one-of-akind precious gems,” describes Russell Normand, Blowing Rock shop owner of Neaco, the first to retail Sullivan’s boards locally. “Two customers bought them right out of her hands the first day (in August) as she was bringing them in!”

Flowed onto the surface, or as Sullivan likes to say, “spread like crème anglaise onto a North Carolina blackberry pound cake,” the paint explodes as the artist directs and pivots designs by way of moving air. Using the wind of her breath, she forms ripples of paint like waves tickling the shore. Abstract patterns scurry forth when air is blown through drinking straws, and from a hair dryer or even a compressed air keyboard duster. A food torch pops bubbles, blooming intricate cell-like patterns.

Observations trigger designs, like a swaying tree branch or dramatic rainstorm. A grazing tray in delicate swaths of white and gray marbleizes, “like a passing cloud.” The Grazy Susan reminds her of a time at age 13 when she realized a metaphor while riding the Ferris wheel: “If I work hard, it will come back around for me.” So she built a replica of the big wheel out of tin. And when her teachers saw it they finally agreed she would be the first girl admitted to the all-boys’ metal shop class. An avid cook and entertainer, she now wields a chef’s knife rather than a tin cutter, and uses her boards to present her food. (Her family cookbook is just being published with that blackberry cake included!)

Food boards originally arose in popularity for home entertaining, as diners caught onto the idea from restaurants serving charcuterie on wooden cutting boards. But they are not the same thing. Technically, charcuterie means only dried meats on a board as they do at Lost Province in Boone, with five different charcuterie boards on the menu, depending on the meats from Italy and Spain, and the San Giuseppe Salami Company in nearby Elon, NC.

Some restaurants combine dried meats with cheese and condiments as they do at The Beacon Butcher Bar and The Gamekeeper in Boone; The Inn at Gideon Ridge in Blowing Rock; and Reid’s Cafe and The Chef’s Table in Banner Elk. Erick’s Cheese & Wine shop in Sugar Mountain at Tynecastle will customize a charcuterie board “with any other foods a shopper wants, and then they really do become something other than a charcuterie board,” confirms shop owner Jessie Dale.

Filling boards with the food is easy when you choose a theme: holidays, movie night, or seasonal, such as the game-day and fall boards that the artist topped for CML (pictured above). “The idea is to jam-pack the boards with edibles. I leave that up to local caterers who do a great job of that here.”

Eight years ago, Sullivan began Rustique Life, creating artisan woods for interior designers, painting her designs on kitchen countertops or making live edge tabletops out of hickory, walnut, olive, and other hardwoods, varnishing them to highlight their natural grain. But the food boards are the mainstay of what she loves to do, and it looks like she’s into the latest graze now—even helped create it!