At the Grand Bohemian Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina, Chef Scott Ostrander conjures quality at the Red Stag Grill.

An excerpt…The locavore tradition in western North Carolina dates back to pre-Colonial days, when this was Cherokee country. Long before “farm-to-table” was a national trend, it was simply reality here—what else was there in this remote land of mountains and hollers and patchwork fields? You cooked what you grew, shot, or caught by rod or trap. Today Chef Scott Ostrander honors that tradition, elevating local ingredients with culinary flair at the Red Stag Grill in Asheville’s Grand Bohemian Hotel.

I’m in my hunting-gear and kennel building lacing up my boots with mother, Petunia, daughter, Merri-Merri—both Brittanys—and Misty, a sleek little English pointer. The three are hurrying me along with woofs and groans. The kennel dogs recognize the ruckus and sound off in a coyote-cadence concert, pleading to join us. After I load the hunting gear, I release the dogs and with cries of victory they scrabble out and race for the truck. Like rodeo clowns circling a mean bull, they run around the pickup begging to be loaded in. What a bright, sunny September Montana morning!

It’s almost 11 o’clock when I turn off the engine and step out of the pickup; I’m surrounded by distant mountains that glisten from last night’s fresh snowfall. The ranchers have collected the cattle from the high hills, so the land now belongs to the dogs and me. All is quiet—until the dogs start clamoring in their truck kennel compartments, each one anticipating being first out.

I have a personal kinship with the artist Chris D. (C.D.) Clarke that stems from common geographic history—I grew up outside Syracuse, New York, hunting and fishing, and Clarke was born in nearby Rochester, where he had the same outdoors upbringing as me. For example, he mentions hunting Tug Hill Plateau in Central New York during his college years at Syracuse University—that’s the area in which I shot my first ruffed grouse and spent lots of time hunting as a boy.

Clarke studied contemporary art at Syracuse, but by immersing himself in the subjects of the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Chesapeake Bay, where he lived after college, he seized upon the immediate impact of en plein air painting, in watercolors and oils. (The French expression en plein air or “in the open air” is used when artists set up their easels outdoors, in nature, and paint what they see around them—in Clarke’s case a dog on point and a hunter poised to shoot, or an angler casting a fly rod on a stream or a saltwater flat.)

“The Eastern Shore is where I got started with the plein air painting, the on-location work. Which has become my trademark. We lived in this incredible little town called Frenchtown, which had miles of salt marsh behind us and Chesapeake Bay in front of us, with endless subjects for a plein air painter, between all the old work boats, the crab shacks, and the marshes themselves,” Clarke says.