When I was a kid, a big snowstorm meant poking my three-pin cross-country ski boots into their bindings and climbing the logging roads behind my house. I tolerated the family activity — and it was plenty fun on the way back down — but I mostly looked forward to a warm lunch afterward.
At Goshen’s Blueberry Hill Outdoor Center, home base for the nonprofit that manages and provides access to an expansive network of trails in the Moosalamoo National Recreation Area within the Green Mountain National Forest, I found my new favorite version of those childhood memories.
Since its establishment in 1971, the outdoor center has served soup to skiers and snowshoers throughout the winter season. Offered from noon to 2 p.m., the soup is always hot, always vegetarian and almost always gluten-free. Last year, grill-your-own cheese sandwiches hit the succinct menu. Shari Brown preps it all across the street at Blueberry Hill Inn, which the late Tony Clark, her former husband, reopened the same year he started the outdoor center.
I met Brown for lunch for the second installment in our Dining Inn series, which highlights culinary offerings at the cozy inns dotting Vermont’s countryside. These lodging places for out-of-towners may not be top of mind for locals, but many B&Bs serve their fare to the public as well as guests.
Blueberry Hill’s simple winter meals in the Outdoor Center are just one way to dine at the appropriately blue-painted inn, which also offers three-course communal farmhouse dinners, soup and salad nights, occasional pancake breakfasts, and a bustling pond-side pizza night in summertime.
Brown hopes to expand those offerings, if she can find someone to lead the kitchen. It’s mostly her right now, she said. Since Clark died in 2022, she’s also been the innkeeper and food shopper while overseeing the Outdoor Center’s day-to-day operations.
Still, she found time to make me a grilled cheese. The sandwiches warm up DIY-ers as they cook on the antique woodstove and when they eat them, she said.
“People love it,” Brown continued, covering our sandwiches to help melt the cheese. “I think they love the ambience of it as much as anything else. And there’s nothing like a grilled cheese sandwich on a cold day.”
It was certainly cold the day I visited: 13 degrees. A hardy group of local middle schoolers huddled around the stove after tackling the snowy trails. I, less adventurous, skipped the skiing and went straight for soup and grilled cheese.
Brown preps the straightforward butter-slathered sandwiches at the inn — making them with Cabot Creamery cheddar and homemade bread or “a good Vermont bread,” she said — and stores them in the Outdoor Center’s cooler. They’re $5 a pop, just like the soup, and proceeds help support the nonprofit, which doesn’t charge trail fees.
Brown makes three to four gallons of soup per busy weekend day for the Outdoor Center, typically with leftover ingredients that might not otherwise get used. The day I visited, a perfectly seasoned miso base was packed with sautéed fennel fronds and big chunks of carrot, potato and cauliflower.
“Sometimes I think the Outdoor Center soup is better than the inn soup, which I spend a lot of money on and time,” she admitted with a chuckle.
Winter bookings at the inn tend to follow the snow, which had a slow start this season, Brown said. But Blueberry Hill is now fully covered, even if the valleys seem sparse.
“It’s a different environment up here, another world,” Brown said.
And that world is ripe for exploring, whether on skis or just for lunch.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Soup’s On | Warm winter lunch at Blueberry Hill Inn and Outdoor Center”
This article appears in The Wellness Issue 2025.
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