Vaguely missing the South

I have told the story before about ambling to the bus stop one morning in Atlanta and finding myself behind two good ol' boys talking about dining at an acquaintance's house. Topic of discussion was apparently the protein portion of the meal, a possum that allegedly resembled a cooked chihuahua. At the time I was intrigued, but not intrigued enough to intrude on their conversation and ask how it tasted. 

I had no idea then (and still have no idea) just how one went about acquiring a recently deceased opossum in a metropolitan area like Atlanta, although I suppose it was possible to trap one on the patios of the apartment complex. We had a possum visit our patio occasionally. I remember thinking back then that the beast looked like road kill without ever having been flattened out on Buford Highway. I felt no desire to terminate it, toss it in the crock pot, and slow cook the beast. I mean, possums eat ticks. Who in their right mind wants to eliminate a beast that vacuums up ticks?

So what has me thinking about cooked possums today? I've been working on a new exhibit at the museum, a nod to Hunting and Fishing in Baraga County. The exhibit will include a cookbook published by the US Department of Agriculture's Cooperative Extension Service in 1943. During the war, meat was rationed. Beef was hard to come by for the average cook so the Extension Service decided to promote Good Eating from Woods and Fields. 

Good Eating has recipes for various wee beasties one doesn't see front and center on the dinner table very often these days. Granted, squirrel is still popular at wild game feasts (an event many sport hunters' clubs hold occasionally as a fund raiser). It's also a traditional ingredient in Brunswick stew, although modern recipes usually don't mention it. Today's cookbooks (and Google recipe search results) usually list chicken or pork as the meat of choice. But when was the last time you heard anyone talk about roasting a woodchuck? (Not a bad choice, incidentally, if one is ever lost and starving in the wilderness. Woodchuck has a lot of fat so just like porcupine would be a high energy food.) 

According to the S.O., skunk is edible, too, if you know how to handle it. He occasionally reminisces about the time back when he was young, he and his father stopped to visit with some geezer living the carefree bachelor life in a shack that had been part of a lumber camp. The dude invited them to dine with him. The S.O. did not recognize the taste; his dad told him later it was skunk. Whether or not it was is debatable, but apparently it was a possibility. Somehow the Extension researchers missed skunk as a culinary delight; there is no skunk meat loaf or skunk goulash in Good Eating.

There is, however, raccoon meatloaf and raccoon goulash. And more. Raccoon can be used in multiple ways.  As it happens, I once knew a source for acquiring the main ingredient (one raccoon) for those recipes. Whenever we drove from Atlanta to Hemphill, Texas, to visit the Younger Daughter we'd pass through a town just west of Vidalia, Louisiana, where the proprietor of a retail establishment there advertised regularly that they had "fresh coon today." The establishment was one of those typical deep South gas stations/convenience stores/god knows what places that look like it hasn't been open for business since the Eisenhower administration but locals will tell you serves the best fried chicken in the county (or, it being Louisiana, parish). We never stopped. Another opportunity lost; somehow I doubt I'll ever see another "fresh coon today" sign board. 

Which means I've never done a test drive of the following recipe. However, if you happen to have a source for a recently deceased raccoon, the US Department of Agriculture believes (or believed, 78 years ago) that this is edible:

Fricasseed Raccoon

8 Servings 

Cooking Time 2-1/2 hours 

 

1 raccoon 

2 tablespoons salt  

1/2 teaspoon pepper  

1 cup flour  

1/4 cup fat 

2 cups broth  

1. Clean raccoon and remove all fat. Cut into 8 or 10 pieces.  

2. Rub with salt and pepper and roll in flour.  

3. Cook in hot fat until well browned, add the broth, cover and simmer for 2 hours or until tender.

Mutant vegetables

Is it cauliflower? Is it broccoli? Web sites I consulted couldn't agree other than to note it is a plant in and of itself and not some strange product of genetic modification. I spotted a head of romanesco at Econo Foods yesterday.

It turns out Ecclesiastes is wrong. There is something new under the sun, at least for me. I had never seen one of these strange, alien creatures before. As I stood there admiring its weirdness, one of the produce minions gave me a pep talk about how delicious it would be roasted with some olive oil, garlic, maybe some salt and pepper. . . the next thing I knew it had crawled into the shopping cart.

Tonight we feast green stuff. Verdict tomorrow on just how edible something that looks like it should grow on Venus tastes.

Note to Kid: See, we do know that vegetables other than potatoes exist.

Was this a bucket list item?

Can I now say my life is complete (or close to it)? We had lunch at U.P. Chuck's bar in Kenton yesterday. We drive by the place all the time but it's usually not at a time of day when we're thinking about lunch. And even if it is the right time of day to be thinking about food, let's be honest. An establishment that features a drawing of someone upchucking on its tee-shirts doesn't strike me as being a place I'm real keen to patronize. But curiosity and hunger finally won out, so we pulled into the parking area alongside the building.

Note to anyone else who might contemplate stopping there: if you're driving a car, be careful when you park. The drop from the pavement on Federal Forest Highway 16 to the parking spaces is an abrupt one. You might not notice it in a truck, but in my little Ford Focus it felt and sounded like we'd just driven over a curb.

U.P. Chuck's is a typical small town bar. You kind of feel like you're stepping into a smoke-filled room even though smoking hasn't been allowed indoors in bars and restaurants in quite a few years in Michigan. I'm not sure what the building's original function 100+ years ago, but it's been a bar/restaurant/hotel as long as I can remember. The only thing that's changed on the exterior in the past 50 years is the name. There have been some updates to the interior: a new bar and tables in the past decade or so, but that's about it. The interior space was smaller than I expected -- the building is a decent size, but the actual main bar room doesn't take up much of the first floor. There is more space off to one side, but it looked like it didn't get much use, at least not in the summer. The lights were off and I got a vague impression of chairs stacked on tables. No doubt things get a lot busier during hunting and snowmobiling seasons. Most of the reviews on Yelp are from people who found it while hunting or sledding, although the place does get some summer tourists.

The menus we got handed were really short: just basic bar food like hamburgers, a couple of other types of sandwiches, a variety of deep fried snacks (the usual mozzarella sticks, mushrooms, zucchini, pickles, and whatever else Sysco sells breaded in humongous plastic bags), and pizza. This was a really good sign in place that had exactly one person working. I tend to get really suspicious when a small eatery has an elaborate menu -- that's a sure sign everything is coming off the Sysco truck pre-cooked and just gets microwaved in the kitchen.

Anyway, the S.O. ordered a Reuben and I got a cheeseburger -- a basic cheeseburger or hamburger is the test item I tend to order if we're eating someplace I've never been before. I figure if a place can make a decent hamburger, it's probably worth a return visit. So where did U.P. Chuck's fall on the decent burger scale? Kind in the middle. The burger was a decent size and it was cooked right -- sufficiently well-done that a person doesn't have to feel paranoid about E. coli or other food-borne illnesses but not so well-done that it's bone dry and bearing strong resemblance to a hockey puck. Normally it would fall into the really good category, but there was something ever so slightly off about the taste, like maybe the grill hadn't been kept as clean as it should be or the meat was hitting the end of its useful shelf life. Or maybe the cook decided to sprinkle on some seasoning I'm not used to tasting on burgers. Who knows? If I was a mustard user or had raw onions on the burger, that slightly off taste was subtle enough that I probably wouldn't have noticed it. Was it enough to keep me from eating there again? Nope, whatever the taste was it's been more than 24 hours and I haven't started upchucking. Still, the next time we stop there it'll be to try the pizza.

Downside to U.P. Chuck's: a couple moronic anti-Obama posters on one of the bulletin boards. I have a hunch this would be a good place to not talk politics because odds are Trump fans drink there.  

Like a lot of local establishments, there are framed photos (or photocopies of photos) of historic scenes hanging on the walls. Kenton used to be a good-sized town, thanks to a sawmill operating there. It was never a huge city, but it covered several blocks with businesses and houses. The main street had two-story commercial buildings for at least a block on both sides of the road; the town itself was big enough that it even had a wrong side of the tracks neighborhood, Finn Town. Finns were at the bottom of the social ladder back in the 1890s -- recent immigrants who spoke a stranger than usual language and practiced odd customs (e.g., sauna) -- so tended to end up clumped in the crappier housing. The photo above shows the main street in about 1910. I have no idea which one of those buildings is the current U.P. Chuck's (it might be the 5th one back on the left), but I do know that none of the other two-story structures have survived. And, considering how naked the hill in the background looks (that's a pretty thin line of trees) I think I know why Kenton faded into obscurity -- it's hard to keep a mill going once all the trees are gone.

Additional tourist information: there is a rustic (basic) US Forest Service Campground about 3 miles from Kenton, the Sparrow Rapids Campground. It has six sites and is free.There's also a nice wayside/picnic area on the north side of M-28 close to where the highway intersects with FFH-16.

We have met the tofu tacos

How could anything go wrong when Po is on the package?

and they were actually edible.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that the Woman's Day February Month of Menus included a number of vegan options, including tofu tacos. I was intrigued -- both the S.O. and I have been the recipient of the "eat less red meat" talk from our primary care physicians thanks to cholesterol numbers that are less than optimal -- so I decided we'd try the recipe. It actually fell early in the month, but first Larry's had no tofu in stock and then there was the pepper problem. Larry's Market in Baraga is a nice small town supermarket, but it is small. It does have a surprisingly cosmopolitan range of merchandise, stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a store its size, but there are limits. Tofu was one of them.

That is, of course, until I happened to mention to someone working there that I had been hoping they carried tofu even though I hadn't been expecting it. Voila. The next time they got a shipment in from whoever distributes that stuff, there it was. Tofu. (Side note: Lord, please don't let Larry's be stuck with almost a full case of tofu just because one person wanted one package!) I had planned to wait until we got up to Houghton or Marquette but I no longer had to.

Of course, I still had to wait until we got to Houghton or Marquette because of the pepper problem. The recipe called for a poblano pepper. Like I said, Larry's is small. Fresh pepper selection there falls into bell peppers, jalapenos, and occasionally those bags with mini multi-colored sweet peppers. The recipe called for cooking half a red pepper and half a poblano and then garnishing with fresh jalapeno. Poblanos aren't a real hot pepper, but they do rank several slots higher than sweet bell peppers on the Scoville scale. Tofu is bland (to say the least) so I wanted a pepper with a little bit of a kick to it. Ordinary green bell peppers weren't going to make it into the frying pan. In any case, having cursed Larry's with a stash of tofu, I wasn't going to suggest they expand the pepper selection, too.

Well, as luck would have it, Marquette with its multiple supermarkets is between where we live and the town of Trenary. On our way home from the Outhouse Races on Saturday, we stopped at Econo Foods. Poblano pepper problem solved.

I made the tacos yesterday. They were a surprise. They weren't bad. I can actually see making them again, especially if an occasion arises where we have friends or relatives visiting who prefer not to eat dead animal flesh. The biggest issue (if you can call it that) was feeling a little weirded out because the crumbled and fried tofu had a texture and general appearance similar to scrambled eggs but a color and taste that was totally different.

Tofu Tacos with Romaine slaw

Finely chop 1/2 each small poblano and red pepper, 2 cloves garlic, and 1 small onion. Saute mixture in a large nonstick skillet with 1 tbsp oil for 4 minutes. Crumble 14 oz extra-firm tofu (squeezed of excess moisture) into the skillet and season with 1-1/2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp ground coriander, salt and pepper; saute until golden brown. Spoon into corn tortillas; top with sliced romaine and jalapeno. 

Gotta love the way they jazz it up by saying "with romaine slaw" when the "slaw" consists of some shredded lettuce.

Things I did different: I used a whole poblano and no red pepper and used medium firm tofu (it was the only option available) instead of extra firm. It's possible that if I'd had the extra firm, the texture would have been a little less scrambled egg-like. If I do this recipe again (or something similar) I'll use two whole peppers, not just one. It has also brilliantly occurred to me that a person could probably take ordinary taco seasoning and substitute tofu for the ground meat those seasoning packets tell you to use. I have a giant package of Sysco taco seasoning so one of these days I may experiment with it.

I am still mildly in shock. Holy wah. Tofu is edible. Who knew? 

A few thoughts on why small businesses fail

The other day the S.O. and I drove over to Hurley, approximately 100 miles one way, to help the older grandson with his income taxes. He'd never done them online before and was a little apprehensive about the process, something that's not going to be true in the future. Companies like TurboTax have gotten it down to where if you can read at anything above a 3rd grade level, you can follow their instructions and fill in the blanks with no trouble. We had a good time bonding over his taxes, we imparted some words of wisdom ("Try not to blow your refund as fast as we would"), and headed home. It was not a bad way to spend an afternoon. It kind of made up for the unpleasant experience we'd had at lunch.

On the drive over, we decided to stop for lunch in Bergland. A new restaurant had opened there a few months ago, a place that calls itself JW's BBQ and Brew. We walked in around 12:45, the place was relatively busy but not packed (about a third of the tables were occupied and there were a couple guys sitting at the bar). Our first impression was good -- it's a brand new building and it does look nice inside. It's a seat yourself place so we found a table and waited for the server. Anyone care to take a guess at how long it took for a server to bother coming over to our table? Or, for that matter acknowledge our existence? There was a huge clock hanging on the wall so it was easy to time it. Ten minutes.

The fact that it took ten minutes just to get a server to the table did not bode well for this particular establishment. The S.O. and I looked over the menu and both opted to order items that should have taken nanoseconds to prepare. We both ordered sandwiches. He asked for the brisket with fries as a side; I ordered pulled pork with a side of cole slaw. Half an hour later. . .

I repeat, half an hour later we finally saw some food. It took so long the server actually wound up refilling my Coke once. That never happens. Never. Invariably when we stop for lunch somewhere half my drink ends up still in the glass when we leave. The fact the server did do that one refill meant we did decide to tip, although not as much as we normally would.

You know, I could semi-understand it taking a while to build a sandwich if there was some actual cooking involved, but when it's a barbecue place? The pork is sitting in a metal tub ready to go, and the brisket is ready for slicing. The only cooking our order required was the fries, and just how long do french fries take? Not half an hour.

After we got home, I thought about doing a scathing review on Yelp but changed my mind. We'll never stop there again, but who knows? Maybe if enough people bitch about slow service, they'll get their act together. I did leave a comment on their Facebook page about all the stuff they're doing wrong. I couldn't resist: their latest post was basically a Help Wanted ad. They're looking to hire cooks and wait staff. I suggested that if they do, they try training them. The server who waited on us didn't have a clue what she was doing.

A short list of stuff she did wrong:
1. She saw us come in, but made several trips to other tables and then back to behind the bar or into the kitchen before bothering to acknowledge our existence.
2. When she did come to the table, she came empty-handed to ask if we'd like to see menus. She should have had them in her hand. People don't enter restaurants and sit at tables just to enjoy the view of the parking lot. In fact, she wasted a lot of time and energy running around empty-handed. Obviously, no one ever bothered telling her one of the fundamental rules of working in a restaurant: your hands are never empty.
3. When she asked if we'd like menus, she did not bother to ask what we'd like to drink. We didn't get to order a beverage until she came back to take the food order -- the place sells beer, wine, and mixed drinks. Which beings me to
4. She should have been pushing the local beers they either have on tap or available in cans and bottles. She never said a word about any of the booze, but that's where the profit margin for a lot of restaurants with liquor licenses falls.  Doesn't matter if it's lunch or dinner, when customers come in, one of the first things the server should do is ask them if they'd like a glass of wine, beer, or a mixed drink. This is especially true if the kitchen has a tendency to be slow. We wouldn't have ordered anything alcoholic, but she didn't know that.
5. She did not push the daily special (a half-rack of ribs), nor did she mention the soup of the day.
6. She didn't try to sell us a dessert. They weren't very busy; it was a situation that calls for trying to get customers to linger and spend more money instead of encouraging them to leave.

I have a hunch she figured out we weren't exactly happy customers when she came to collect and we had the exact amount, right down to the penny, ready for her. There was going to be no cheerful "Keep the change" from us. The rather miserly (for us) tip she found after we left probably came as a moderately pleasant surprise.

Right now the restaurant is apparently doing reasonably well. It's been a good winter for snowmobiling, the motels in Bergland seem to be doing a booming business, and there aren't a lot of local choices when it comes to going out to eat. But you can't count on tourists to keep a restaurant going 12 months out of the year. You have to get repeat local business -- and they lost ours. How many others have they managed to turn off since they opened? I can see it now. Business will slow down, they'll start losing money, and you know who'll they blame? The government for all its onerous regulations. If only they didn't have to meet health department standards they'd be making money. Or if they didn't have to pay legal wages. Or if there were no taxes. They won't take a long hard look at themselves and realize that maybe, just maybe, they should have trained their staff -- or not hired their wife's best friend, their slacker brother-in-law, or a cousin or two.

I have no idea just what percentage of new restaurants fail quickly after opening, but I have noticed they seem to come and go quickly. And, of course, I've watched  Kitchen Nightmares enough times to see the many ways in which people can drive businesses into the ground. I think if I was going to open a restaurant or a pub, I'd at least do a few marathon sessions of watching Gordon Ramsay or Jon Taffer (Bar Rescue) in action. Somehow, though, I have a hunch that instead of consulting with Gordon Ramsay via television, the owners of J.W.'s BBQ & Brew decided that hey, we like to cook -- we should open a restaurant -- and now the only question is how long it'll be before there's a For Sale sign on the building. Or, more likely, the smoldering ashes of the insurance fire. After all, there's precedent. That's how the last restaurant on that site went out of business.

We would, incidentally, put up with lousy service if the food was better than average. It's not. It's bland and it's overpriced. It's a shame, because there really aren't many options left on the western end of M-28.

Playing with food

There are times when I really wish the county historical society museum had a bigger budget. Today is one of them. Usually it's because I'm indulging in fantasies about purchasing a first-class exhibit case or a specialized filing cabinet, e.g., a map case. Our display cases are a mix of different sizes and types because almost all of them came from retail stores that were going out of business or engaged in major remodeling. As for map cases? Probably not going to happen unless we get lucky with one of our grant applications. But I'm not fantasizing about either of those today. Nope. I'm wishing we could afford to buy fake food.

We decided at our meeting yesterday to proceed with editing our "kitchen" display area. We've got a corner that's got miscellaneous kitchen-related items: a Hoosier cabinet chock full of various gadgets, old cookbooks, old spice and baking powder tins, etc. There's a wood-burning Monarch kitchen range, an old ice box, an ancient refrigerator (from the 1920s; it still works), and a lot of other stuff. It's all neatly arranged, but it's basically just a collection of old stuff -- there isn't much of an attempt at formal interpretation. Depending on who the docent is on any particular day, conversations with visitors can range from explaining how a woodstove actually worked to listening to people reminisce about the Jewell Tea dishes their grandmother had.

The display also includes a farmhouse-style table that had four or five place settings on it, but it was't really set up for an particular meal. It was more like the last person to work with that area decided that it made more sense to have the table looking like it was set for a meal than to leave it empty. Well, at yesterday's meeting we decided to edit the exhibit. When we open for the tourist season in the spring, the kitchen area will have four place settings on it, each one representing a different era. One will, of course, be the pioneer days. The dishes will be basic whiteware and there will be a sample menu -- what people would have been likely (or able) to eat back around the time Baraga County was established in the 1870s. Another will be the 1930s, the Jewell Tea dishes era, also with a sample menu and maybe a recipe or two. One will be the present (or close to it). (I will fight the temptation to just do a couple crumpled napkins and an empty Burger King bag.) And one will be the melamine years.

And you know what goes with the melamine years? Jello salad. Jello salad in all sorts of bizarre combinations. Jello salad that doesn't just sit there passively on the plate waiting to be slathered with Miracle Whip. Jello salad that sits on the serving plate staring at you defiantly and daring you to get out the serving spoon.

I guess we'll muddle along with the full-page color ads from Woman's Day or Good Housekeeping, but, holy wah, I wish our budget was big enough to buy a fake Jello salad.

Lunch

Wonder if they serve roof rabbit?

Another reason to miss the S.O.

Since the S.O. left for the tundra, I've been planning meals and doing the grocery shopping with all the intelligence of a slightly brain-damaged teenage boy. When the S.O. is around, I may have an occasional odd craving but I have the good sense not to indulge it. But today I found myself at Target on my lunch break, and this actually jumped into the cart. Along with a Dr. Pepper, a bag of Cheetos, and a package of Australian licorice. Even worse, I'm sitting here actually eating the stuff.

Maybe I should just take comfort in helping to support the economy of northern Wisconsin* and not think too hard about the way jerky looks like road kill. (I also think their Sasquatch ads go so far beyond stupid the only possible explanation is that everyone at the ad agency grew up huffing Aqua Net hair spray, but that's a topic for another time.)

(*I've actually been to Minong, but did not dine at Grandma Link's Restaurant, although I hear the food's not bad, nor did I browse the cars on the lot at Link's Ford, or look at campers at Link's RV Sales -- who'd a thunk that Link was an actual family name and not something made up by a corporate shill?)