The weather has been gorgeous. We left the windows open overnight. I was woken up by birds chirping and a cool breeze at around 6AM. I felt very energetic and decided to head over to the Merry Christmas Mine Hill for a short hike. As I stepped outside, I was met with a heavy scent of apple blossoms. I put my headphones on for some Verdi. Over the top and romantic. Perfect, I thought. So I walk down Spruce St. where Thomas the Old English Sheepdog never forgets to say hello. I saw some lilac bushes (more appropriate, trees!) starting to bloom. The town is full of them. Some bleeding hearts and globe hyacinths. A short stop at the bridge between the two old willows where Brewery Creek runs where I observed some small plump clouds and blue sky through the curtains of yellow green. White flowers, yellow flowers, and trumpet flowers. At the top of the hill, there was a parade of apple trees with fat, white and light pink blooms. The arched wild raspberry vines made my mouth water at what’s to come later in the summer. The lush blades of grass were covered in dew drops and the wetness had permeated my shoes. Time to sprint back home for some tea. Spring, you show off!
If you are a spring lover, come celebrate with my friends and I this Saturday night at the Mineral Point Opera House for the “Winter Is Over” program.
Continue reading Spring Notes
It’s that time of the year again. On Saturday June 28th, La Farge, WI will host the Kickapoo Country Fair, which is Organic Valley‘s organic food festival. We went to the fair last year and had a blast. And, just like the last few years, Organic Valley has given us some free tickets and goodies to give away.
 Unrelated Ducks. So we’re giving away four free tickets to the fair, along with $50 in coupons for Organic Valley products. Now, what should I make you do…how about: to enter the drawing, comment on this article with your favorite fair memory (county fair, state fair, World’s Fair, etc). Winner will be drawn at random Sunday night at 9:00 PM.
Gun deer season was nearly a month ago here in Wisconsin. For those of you who aren’t hunters, or don’t know hunters, it’s difficult to understand how big an event this is. In Wisconsin, it’s like the Packers playing the Bears, Bratfest, and fried cheese curds rolled up into one. Now, I’m not a hunter. It’s not that I have a moral aversion to hunting. More like a moral aversion to sitting in the cold woods for hours. In fact, I believe if we’re going to screw with the ecosystem (pretty much a given) it’s our responsiblity to try to manage the results. And part of that is taking on the role of the predator to control the deer population*.
As a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, however, I decided to outsource my predation duties to another. My friend Jeremy Wilson was kind enough to share some vension from his freezer. A few nights ago we enjoyed some excellent tenderloin, which we prepared using Jeremy’s suggested recipe.
Continue reading There’s always next year…
Two weekends ago, we attended the Kickapoo Country Fair up in LaFarge, WI. It’s an event put on by Organic Valley to highlight local and organic food. We’d actually wanted to attend last year but had been busy. This year they invited us up to cover the event as jounalists–and I love it when people confuse us with the real media, so we just had to go. First impressions of LaFarge were…amazing. It’s a beautiful location. Definitely driftless, but quite different than our part of the state. I want to buy a little vintage British convertible to drive around those country roads on the weekend. The closest we’d been to LaFarge before was Viroqua. It just goes to show how much exploring we have left to do before we really know this area.
Continue reading Driftless Appetite at the Fair
 The smoked sturgeon we bought a few weeks ago from Valley Fish started a very interesting conversation about conservation (say that three times fast) in our house that I thought would be interesting to bring here. As you may know, many species of sturgeon are threatened or endangered. In fact, the sturgeon family (Acipenseridae) has recently moved to the top of the IUCN Red List of threatened species. Most critically theatened are the salt water “caviar” fish such as the Beluga. Less threatened, but still in trouble, are the freshwater varieties such as lake sturgeon. To back up one minute, let me mention the fish we bought from Valley Fish was shovelnose sturgeon (or sand sturgeon), which is still commerically fished in the area; more on this later.
Continue reading Consider the Sturgeon
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