Wisdom Sauce
The wind today doesn’t blow, it swirls in eddying leafy gusts. Trees dance naked in southern drafts, green tipped spring growth colors the horizon for the first time in months. Early May in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula runs the weather spectrum—from humid days overshadowed by big bellied storm clouds to bursts of snow flurries that keep […]
Recipe Lines
I’ve been cared for by almost every permanent neighbor within a square mile of my parents’ home on the north shore of Big Manistique Lake, and many other country “neighbors”. As a result, my early culinary background was diverse: Campbell’s Bean with Bacon soup at the Saunders’, sliced hotdogs on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese at […]
The Pasty: A Recipe Wrapped In Memories
Growing up in the Upper Peninsula, pasties become a part of your national identity—the food linked with wooded hills cradled in the arms of three great lakes. It’s the food that came with miners who forever altered the craggy, ancient, almost-mountains as they dug for copper, iron, and even gold. Cornish miners, communities with half-lives […]
Antlers and Meat
A TASTE OF DEER HUNTING CULTURE IN THE U.P.
The cold December night is silvered and silent. No wind stirs the empty tree branches at field’s edge. Deer creep from forest to clearing on hushed, cloven hooves. When clouds unveil the moon, their breath makes ghostly puffs. Delicate white hairs framing black button noses rime with frost. A thick pink tongue protrudes, licking away […]
A Northern Harvest
BLUEBERRY PICKING IN THE U.P. Marquette, MI – Bend and kneel. Feel grains of sand, pointed-pine needles, and sticky aspen chafe dig into wrinkled knee skin. The sandy two-track, edged in jack pines and quivering poplars, bakes in full sun, but the road-side is comfortably shaded. The berries grow best where sun and shade meet, […]
Tastes of Autumn
FRESH APPLE CIDER MINGLES WITH THE FEELINGS OF FALL IN THE U.P.
Sipping cider, tart cold rush against tongue and pallet, waves of gratefulness washed through me. I had touched, even for just a moment, each apple crushed to make this cider, flavoring it with memory. I did another mental inventory of our foodstuffs for the weekend: the last two packages of the previous fall’s frozen venison, […]
Heritage Beans
How Heritage Beans connect us as human beings through time and space… With a sound like a rainstick, black beans poured into the empty stock pot. When you run your fingers through their loose rattel, your eyes close, and it feels like touching pearls. Human beings have been cultivating and eating these hard black gems […]
