Episode 3930

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- This week we'll pick fruit in Mount Juliet, find a hidden gem in Dunlap, go for the gold on the ice and meet a family in the bagel business. Howdy folks. I'm Ketch Secor welcoming you to "Tennessee Crossroads." If you and your family are looking for ways to spend a little more time outdoors than we got a place for you. Coming up in our first story, Miranda Cohen travels to a beautiful orchard in Mount Juliet where you can pick your own fresh fruit, taste some amazing made from scratch goodies and disconnect. All the while learning about the importance of Tennessee farmers.

- [Miranda] It is perhaps the most perfect way to spend a Tennessee Day, walking the lush fields of a fruit orchard ripe with possibilities. This is Breeden's Orchard in Mount Juliet.

- It's one of the only orchards left in Middle Tennessee that still is a production orchard that does peach, apples and some other, we have pears, we have some blueberry bushes.

- [Miranda] Once owned by the Breeden family, this 12 acre farm is now owned by Amy and Andrew Dorfman, under the watchful Eye of General Manager Michael Seal.

- It's a family ran farm. It's a working farm. It's a place for families to kind of come out and just kind of spend all day and just kind of be out here to really kind of create a place where people can come during the springtime, the summertime, just kind of year round.

- [Miranda] You can pick your own fresh fruit or choose from a stunning array of colorful goodness from the country store. But the aroma coming from the scratch kitchen tells us these folks are in line for something else.

- During the weekends, in fall, it's crazy. You know why? Everybody wants an apple cider donut.

- Everybody wants an apple cider donut. They actually have apple cider in it, coated in cinnamon sugar, freshly fried, and make 'em daily. So that's the one thing I like to let people know. Like you don't have to stand in line all day Saturday to get them. You could come on a Wednesday.

- [Andrew] Anybody who's from the north who has come here, it's a taste of when they were kids. And when we get the apple cider donuts come, you can see the people buying go, "This just reminds me of home." And then we also have all the fried pies here for all the people from the south. And you have the peach, the apples.

- We also do regular cinnamon rolls. And then we have seasonal cinnamon rolls. So right now it's an apple butter cinnamon roll. In the summer, it'll be a peach cinnamon roll. We also have seasonal breads. So we have an apple bread, a pumpkin bread, a gingerbread, and then of course we have fried pies.

- [Miranda] The farm store is also stocked with fresh apple cider, chilled slushies, caramel apples, locally sourced honeys, jellies, jams, and much more.

- [Amy] Right now is like the best time because if you come in and say, I need a crunchy apple, I need a sweet tart apple, I need this, we've got it. If you can't find an apple in there that you like, you just don't like apples.

- [Miranda] And at Breeden's Orchard, the history of farming and importance of food sourcing is all part of the experience.

- [Andrew] We've changed it from just an orchard to a teaching orchard. We teach them about sustainability. You can come up here and you sort of get back to nature. You get to walk through, you know the groves, we have the bee barn. They can see some animals.

- [Miranda] So how important are bees to the orchard?

- Well, we wouldn't have fruits without, we would have no peaches, no apples, no pears, no blackberries, no blueberries, no flowers without the bees. It's, you know, it is the apex pollinator. Without bees, we would have no crop on all of our farms around the world.

- [Miranda] Hives of honeybees, goats, pigs, earth slides, a giant corn bin, even dance and story time.

- So how many of you guys know "Tennessee Crossroads"? Toady, we have a real special reader with us who's gonna also do Tootie time. Her name is Ms. Miranda Cohen.

- [Miranda] So we're gonna read Pete the Cat's Groovy Imagination. It is all a part of the very educational agra-adventure.

- If we lose a farm, they don't normally come back and we're losing a lot of them. So people need to come up and learn about the farms and sustainability.

- [Amy] I see so many parents just come out and kind of kids are no longer on technology. You come out here and that's not here. We've got these walking paths now that can take you around. People can come out, they can walk by the flowers. In the summer, they can pick peaches. We've got a couple of slides. We've got just sort of all sorts of fun. Get outside, stay outside, farm fun.

- [Michael] So just kind of unplug and come out and run around and just kind of experience the kind of lifestyle that a lot of us remember and cherish really the most part of our lives.

- I like to kind of give a shout out to all the farms that are everywhere, especially, you know, everywhere in Tennessee. Go support. It's an amazing blessing to have so many people come up here and whether it's to grab a gallon of cider or grab some donuts or grab some apples or just come out here and experience and chill out. We love it. We love it.

- Thanks Miranda. Well, if you've been watching us for a while you know our crew loves to venture off the beaten path. And Cindy Carter did just that a while back after discovering a popular restaurant near Dunlap. The Cookie Jar Cafe may be out of the way, but that just means folks arrive with an appetite.

- [Cindy] In the heart of Tennessee's Sequatchie Valley, country roads wind through picturesque pasture land, straight to the front porch of the Cookie Jar Cafe, where you can always stop in for a homestyle hot meal or a slice of pie.

- You wouldn't think out here in the middle of nowhere we'd do the business that we do, but we do. It's the epitome of, if you build it, they will come.

- [Cindy] Sue Ann Lockhart and her sisters built the Cookie Jar Cafe in 2002 on the family's ancestral dairy farm in Dunlap, Tennessee. And despite the somewhat remote location, the cafe has never lacked for business.

- [Sue Ann] We like to say it's Mamaw's cooking with a million-dollar view. And that's exactly where we are. You slow down a little bit when you come over here. Take a little step back even, 'cause most of our customers come outta Chattanooga and they're on Eastern Time, so I like to say even the time is a little bit slower over here on this side of the mountain.

- [Cindy] Time may move slow, but the tables sure fill up quick.

- [Sue Ann] Take this party of eight over there to Brent's big table, please. All right, she's gonna get y'all right over here.

- [Cindy] The Cookie Jar Cafe benefits from strong word of mouth because everybody talks about how good this home cooking really is.

- The food, all the food is really good, and the service. Desserts are wonderful.

- It's just a good country meal. There's not, it seems like there's not very many places left that served country meals, and this is a good place to get a country meal.

- [Cindy] The menu features plenty of hot entrees, and oh, those country sides!

- We have turnip greens, we have pinto beans, macaroni and cheese, mashed potatoes, white beans, cream, corn, deviled eggs, slaw, potato salad, fried okra.

- [Cindy] Delicious dishes made from recipes handed down from Sue Ann's grandmother.

- Her name was Ruby Johnson. We called her Mamaw.

- [Cindy] Sue Ann says when Mamaw was in the kitchen, local farmers across the valley made a beeline for her dining room table.

- That's what she was known for. She would have two or three meats and about 16 different vegetables, and you knew that 11 o'clock sharp every day that dinner was ready and it was time to eat.

- [Cindy] Today when it's time to eat, the Cookie Jar still has them beelining for a seat at the table.

- [Sue Ann] One of our top sellers is our grilled meatloaf. When we first opened, we cooked it like normal-style meatloaf in a loaf. But we had some leftover, and going back to the no food waste, we would warm it up the next day on the grill, and our customers absolutely loved it.

- [Cindy] And here's some friendly advice: Don't just try to save room for dessert, make this a priority. Your taste buds will say thank you.

- [Sue Ann] Our coconut pie, our coconut pie's probably our most popular dessert. We make all of our desserts from scratch, even down to the pie crust. We bought a pie press machine out of Canada 20 years ago, and we still use it every day. The butterscotch is probably my favorite. We actually brown the brown sugar, make the butterscotch from scratch, so it's one of my favorites.

- So, how sweet are the desserts here? Well, Sue Ann tells us they'll make 15,000 pies in a year and 150,000 cupcakes, all to satisfy the sugar cravings that come through their door. The Cookie Jar Cafe is such a staple in this community it's hard to imagine not being able to enjoy those delicious meals and stellar views of Lewis Chapel Mountain, but an electrical fire in 2023 devastated the cafe's original building, and Sue Ann considered letting it all go.

- It was a big decision because I didn't owe any money on the building and we didn't have insurance, so I wasn't really planning on building back, but the community kinda rallied around me and told me that they needed it, so here we are.

- [Cindy] The cafe reopened in 2024. Same Mamaw's home cooking, same breathtaking views. The petting zoo is also back, a nod to the family's farming history and a great way to pass the time while waiting to be seated. And, of course, there's the cookie jars. Sue Ann salvaged about 200 from the fire. The Cookie Jar Cafe just wouldn't be the same without 'em.

- [Sue Ann] It's our little slice of heaven, and we like to keep it that way.

- [Cindy] A slice of heaven and a slice of pie or cake or a serving of meatloaf. You'll find all your Southern favorites if you just follow those country roads to the Cookie Jar Cafe.

- I think sometimes people just need a moment to sit back and relax and just, you know, stop for a minute, and that's kinda what we are.

- Thanks, Cindy. It's a sport on ice that's grown in popularity in recent years, and it can be found now in Nashville. We're not talking about hockey though, but the sport of curling as Laura Faber tells us, you don't have to wait another four years for the Olympics to see it. No, you can watch it, learn it and play it right here. Right now.

- [Carl] Far as you can boys. Far as you can.

- [Laura] It's a sport that involves ice, granite stones, special shoes.

- [Carl] Sweep.

- [Laura] A broom for sweeping.

- [Carl] All the way guys, all the way. Bring it in.

- [Laura] And a lot of yelling.

- [Carl] That'll work. Great sweep guys. Good shot.

- [Laura] It's called curling. And here in Nashville, there is a club dedicated to the sport. Carl Beltz is known as the ice guy, and a member of Nashville's curling club.

- [Carl] We've reestablished the curling club in October of last year. They had about 20 members when I first got here, and we have already almost doubled their tripled the membership to 54 people already.

- [Laura] Curling is on the rise locally. Thanks in part to this place called Tee Line Nashville. It's the only place in the state built specifically for the sport.

- [Mark] What we have here is dedicated ice. So we don't have ice skating. It's a whole different level. And we say, good curling. You give a handshake. And it's funny, the winners buy the beer, at the end of a game and the winners sweep the ice. So it's completely opposite to the way in the NFL, we learned, but it's great camaraderie. And again, the people are so welcoming and that's why I think the sport's catching on so well.

- [Laura] Mark Bulger is the co-owner of Tee line. He's also a former NFL quarterback and curling enthusiast. Tee Line also offers bowling food and drink, but the three sheets of perfect ice is what draws the crowd. You can take lessons here, and this is also the curling club's home.

- [Mark] A lot of people think it's like shuffleboard, but it's more like closest to the pin or bocce, but the tough part is you're on ice. So just staying upright again and closest to the pin in golf. I'm a big golfer, so the strategy is a big part. It's co-ed, the age doesn't matter. I've been got my butt kicked, by 60, 70, 80 year old guys. But a female can come in at 15 years old and kick my butt too. So I think it's 98% of the population can curl. And I think that's what makes it unique.

- [Laura] There is much to learn, four players to a team with each throwing twice. The granite stones all also called rocks, weigh about 44 pounds. The ice sheet is 45 yards long. The goal is to get the stone to the house and as close to the bullseye or the button, as possible inside your opponent stone. The last push is called the hammer.

- Oh my god!

- The only uniform really for a curler is probably the shoes.

- Pretty much. And the shoes are the shoes are the key, because one shoe has a textured bottom. So you have better grip on it. And then you have another shoe that has a slider attached to it. So you can slide down the ice, when you're delivering the stone.

- [Laura] And then there is the game itself, harder than it looks. Good balance required, and so much strategy.

- [Carl] I equate the strategy a lot to almost a chess game on ice. Because it's, you're trying to work with what your team can do with what you know of the other teams, faults and their strengths.

- [Laura] The goal to have as many rocks as close to the center of the rings as possible.

- [Carl] The way it scores, you with being closest to the pin and everything, it's more like a Bocce ball because you spin it and it will rotate and curl into the area where you want it to go.

- [Laura] The curling is actually part of what you're doing to the stone, right? Or it's a movement to the stone?

- [Carl] It's the spinning of the stone. When you spin the stone, you'll control which way it's gonna curl. If you spin it clockwise, it's gonna curl to the right. If you spin it counterclockwise, it's gonna curl to the left.

- [Player] Come on.

- [Carl] The sweeping is to make the rock go further down the ice, or you can make it hold the line a little bit, or maybe curl an extra four to six inches, depending on which side of the stone you're sweeping. The sweeping is the hardest part. And most of us at our level or at club level, you have about a seven second lifespan on it, when you're sweeping a stone, because it's the second most aerobic activity that you can do short of cross country ski.

- [Laura] This Olympic sports started in Scotland in the early 16th century. But today players compete on ice that is perfect. Tee Line's official ice guys, scrape the ice sheet with five foot long razor blades. Then they create pebbles using water at 120 degrees. So ice freezes nice and tall. Finally, a nipper is used to even out the pebbles, cutting them all off at the same height.

- [Carl] When you're looking at a hockey arena's ice sheet, you can have a degree or two of plane, you'll never notice it on skates with a puck. Now, with a curling rock, if there's half a degree of play in it, it always gonna go that direction. So, we do our best to keep the ice as flat as possible. We keep the pebble as evenly spread across the sheet as we can. And the reason we do that is so the rock slide consistently and curl consistently throughout the game.

- [Laura] Anyone can play, young and old, men and women. Elizabeth Rose is hooked.

- I love the comradery, the community's great. And I hope that's part of what you all may have heard tonight is just lots of encouragement and moving people forward.

- [Laura] Elizabeth is talking about the spirit of the sport.

- [Carl] It's one of the few sports where we start off every game with a handshake and say, "Good curling" to every person on the sheet. And we finish the game the same way, because there's a lot of sportsmanship out here. We want to see these people having a good time. We want to keep them coming out. And like I said, the camaraderie on the ice is one of the things that sells people on it.

- Nice shot.

- Woo.

- [Carl] Nice shot too.

- Well, thanks Laura. Our final story started in Albania, landed in New York City and wound up in Music City. It's the age old tale of boy meets girl meets bagel. Vicki Yates explains how Benji's Bagel and Coffee House came to be.

- [Vicki] Bagels might not have originated in Tennessee, but they've settled in pretty well. According to a recent survey, 61% of Americans choose a bagel for breakfast at least twice a week. And if that number sounds high, just drop by Benji's Bagels and Coffee Shop. On any given morning, you'll see people from near and far stopping by for a big bite to eat. Nico and Becca Bendaj are creators and owners of the business, named after their son. Who doesn't love a bagel? Well, believe it or not, one of the owners of Benji's Bagels here in West Nashville didn't even know what a bagel was.

- Before I moved to the United States, I didn't know what a bagel was, to be honest with you. I didn't know what a bagel was. Although Albanians generally love bread. We love bread, we eat bread a lot. Bread is part of our life, daily lives, but never heard about the bagel. Then I met Becca in 2013, and that's how she introduced me to bagels. She was like, "Why don't we eat a bagel?" That was in Lower Manhattan, Lower East Side. So we went, and we ate a bagel, and I was not impressed with it. Every Saturday or Sunday, we'll go to a bagel shop in Astoria, New York. And the bagel started growing on me, and I started liking. So it was one of those things that we'd go to this bagel shop in New York City, and it was a bagel shop for everybody. You'll see teachers, firefighters, policemen, everybody would come there. So it was one of those things that you were like, it was not just the bagel itself, but the community. And I started enjoying the bagels. And then in 2016, I started making bagels at home. Just like, started rolling bagels, rolling the dough. And that's how I got involved with the bagels, and I start liking them.

- [Vicki] And while they were married and living in New York with 16-month-old Benji, they came to the conclusion that New York just might be too expensive for a young family. Meanwhile, Nico's friend encouraged them to come to Nashville, and Nico and Becca discussed it.

- He mentioned, "You know, if I get a job, do you think you wanna move to Nashville?" And I was like, "Well, you're my home. Let's just move wherever we wanna go." And Nashville has been a very nice blessing. Community is a big thing to us, and that's one of the reasons we love the restaurant industry in Nashville. In New York City, it's what's hot, what's trending, what's bougie, what's expensive. Nashville is all about local businesses and families. And I think that that is the most important thing and the best thing that we did, to move here. Well, I actually went to culinary school for savory, and now I just bake, which is hilarious. You ask me to put, you know, new sandwiches on the menu or do specific things, and I'm like, "All right, let's do it." New muffin, that kind of thing. It comes with a couple tries where I'm like, "Okay, now, now we've got something."

- [Vicki] And now their bagels are attracting a steady clientele. All of their bagels are hand-rolled and boiled, much like a traditional New York bagel.

- [Nico] I don't wanna say we know how to make it better, but we wanted to bring a New York-style bagel. So we source all our equipment from New York, particularly the major equipments, the kettle boiler, where we boil all our bagels. We bake the bagels on stones. So all the little things that we try to do to maintain that.

- [Vicki] There are, of course, plain bagels, everything bagels, rosemary bagels, za'atar bagels, jalapeno bagels. And they keep working on new bagels as well. And don't forget about the schmears. There's feta and olive, mixed berry, lemon caper. And not exactly sure what you want? Ask to sample them.

- [Nico] Becca, actually, she curated the whole menu. I was just doing the bagels. She, being a chef as she is, she went to the Culinary Institute of America. She actually came up with all these flavors of cream cheeses and how the bagel and cream cheese would work together. But not only that, but how the sandwiches would work together. So the cream cheese is a very, very big part of the bagel. But it's not only that, it's also the whole experience. From the staff, from the people who walk through the door, we're welcoming them and offering good food, fresh food every day.

- [Becca] You can put a lot into a product and get negative feedback from it. But, you know, we go in day in, day out, working so much. And the greatest way to know that it's all for something is just positive feedback, people loving our stuff as much as we love it.

- Becca and I, we put so much love and dedication in this space. And we, two little kids, there was the... You know, coming here, particularly the first six months when we opened, we were here together from, like, 4:00 a.m. My mom was taking care of the kids at home. She moved from New York to stay here with us for eight months. So, you know, just being here and the dedication, I think that's personally... And people see that, right? You can't fake that. That's one of the things... You can't fake, like, empathy, and you can't fake, like, the love for your product and what you do.

- Well, thank you Vicki. Hey, that's all over this week. But please check out our website at tennesseecrossroads.org. Watch us on the PBS app and make sure to join us next time. Thanks again for watching.

- [Announcer] "Tennessee Crossroads" is brought to you in part by...

- [Presenter] Students across Tennessee have benefited from over seven and a half billion dollars we've raised for education, providing more than 2 million scholarships and grants. The Tennessee Lottery, game-changing, life-changing fun.

- [Presenter] Discover Tennessee Trails and Byways where adventure, cuisine and history come together. With 16 scenic driving trails you can discover why Tennessee sounds perfect. Trips can be planned at tnvacation.com.