So you're probably wondering (or not, that's cool, too) where we've been since the last time I posted a month ago. I don't have much of a good excuse, except to say that Emmy and I have been avoiding restaurants and expensive things so we could spend all our money on gas and fancy food in Boston next week. That's right, Emmy and I are packing up the car on Saturday night and speeding off to New Hampshire to spend a belated Thanksgiving with my folks.
A couple things before I head off to my last night of work, though. I'd like to share with you our (very small) personal Thanksgiving menu, and the menu of Wisconsin Terrior that we're bringing home to share with the family. I would also like to add that I've discovered that I'm not a fan of acorn squash, raw cranberries are cool, and that my weight has finally dropped down to 132 lbs!
Thanksgiving, for those of you who don't know, is an American holiday that is a combination of the traditional Pagan harvest holiday and an homage to the first feast held by the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth in the eastern state of Massachusets. Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday until the mid 1800's, under President Lincoln. For a long time, though, it was seen in the American South to be a Yankee occasion, and it wasn't celebrated. For the Native Americans, Thanksgiving is known as the National Day of Mourning, to remind us that the genocide and racism that began with the first colonies at Plymouth and Jamestown still continues today. No actual record of the actual harvest feast at Plymouth survives, but we can guess that they ate fowl, eel, squash, maize, venison, and a few local fruits. Today's menu of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and stuffed turkey seem a far cry from what was available in 1621, but our menu has had industrilization to contend with.
Now, let's take a moment to talk about WWI and WWII for a second. I believe in my previous post about the Eat Local Challenge that I mentioned most local foods were produced by Victory Gardens after WWII. America and the other nations involved in those wars had a long time to think about how best to get what was at the time very fresh, very perishable, and not very portable food all the way across the ocean and into the hands of the soldiers fighting all across Europe and the South Pacific. That's when this whole hullaballoo about processed foods got started. And then? Well, the War ended and those processing companies didn't want to go out of business, so they turned right around and started marketing campaigns to get those processed foods out of their warehouses and into the kitchens of the 50's American Housewife. That's right, "I Love Lucy"'s time period was the height of processed food culture, and it's gone down a little bit since. So, if you want to blame anybody for this whole Evil Processed Food Culture, blame Hitler.
But back to Thanksgiving. Did you know that the typical cultural menu for turkey day is a mostly-New England menu? Turkey run wild in the NE backwoods, pumpkin squash are a very Native American food, and cranberries could probably have been found in some of the backbogs of Massachusets. No wonder the Southerns thought it was a Northern holiday!
At last, our mini-menu. I regret to say, as a foodie, that we didn't do anything particularly sha-zam or wow this year, but that's mostly because we're having a bigger family feast in New Hampshire next Thursday.
Menu:
~Rotisere (sp?) chicken
~Canned cranberry sauce
~Mashed Idaho potatoes
~Pillsbury buttermilk rolls
~Prairie Fume, a white WI wine
~Apple cider, from PA
As you can seen, everything we ate was processed and only the wine was local. Ech. I'm not doing that again, but it suited our schedule and our budget this year, so I won't complain too loudly. And now we have lots of left-overs for the drive out tomorrow.
Wisconsin Terrior. I think I'm beginning to taste what that means, now. There's something heavier, denser, and more meaty about the local flavors. I may pick up local cranberries and cheese curd tomorrow morning, but this is what I have so far:
~Praire Fume, an American Seyval white wine from Praire Du Sac, WI.
This wine was specially bred to survive the tough WI winters, where it can get below -10 degrees F for several days at a time. The Seyval grapes were brought specifically from France 50 years ago and the minerals they bring up from the hills north of the Wisconsin River are very obvious in this first-made wine.
~Cranberrry Mustard, by WI Wilderness Co. bottled in Milwaukee, WI.
The cranberries are from WI, up near Tomah (halfway between Madison and Eau Claire), but unfortunately the mustard isn't. Mustard, as it turns out, is very picky about where it likes to grow, and this mustard is bought and shipped from western Canada.
~Root Beer Mustard, by Sprecher, bottled in Glendale, WI.
Sprecher is a local company famous for their root beer and other sodas. They have restaurants, also. Again, the mustard is from western Canada, and I can't say where the root beer comes from, even though it is made/bottled here in WI. The ingredients do specify, however, that they contain Raw Wisconsin Honey, which I've always found to have a very nice, deep taste. Both mustards were purchased at the National Mustard Museum in Middleton.
~Extra Sharp Chedddar, 3 years old. by Carr Valley Cheese in La Valle, WI.
Cow.
~Caso Bolo Mellage cheese, 2 years old. by Carr Valley Cheese in La Valle, WI.
Goat, sheep, & cow.
That seems to be it for now, though I'd just like to add that Dad shipped me some local Vermont cheese from Shelburne (just south of Burlington) and the taste is completely different from all the cheeses we've sampled here at Fromagination. Just like a wine enthusiast, you really can tell where a different cheese is from. The answer? It's all in the terrior.
~Cheddar, 6 months old.
~Cheddar, 1 year old
~Cheddar, 2 years old.
Holy Cow, www.shelburnefarms.org . Go there. Go there NOW. Their cheese is amazing, go buy some!
See you kids in NH!
xoxoxo, Kim & Emmy
A couple things before I head off to my last night of work, though. I'd like to share with you our (very small) personal Thanksgiving menu, and the menu of Wisconsin Terrior that we're bringing home to share with the family. I would also like to add that I've discovered that I'm not a fan of acorn squash, raw cranberries are cool, and that my weight has finally dropped down to 132 lbs!
Thanksgiving, for those of you who don't know, is an American holiday that is a combination of the traditional Pagan harvest holiday and an homage to the first feast held by the Pilgrims who settled at Plymouth in the eastern state of Massachusets. Thanksgiving didn't become a national holiday until the mid 1800's, under President Lincoln. For a long time, though, it was seen in the American South to be a Yankee occasion, and it wasn't celebrated. For the Native Americans, Thanksgiving is known as the National Day of Mourning, to remind us that the genocide and racism that began with the first colonies at Plymouth and Jamestown still continues today. No actual record of the actual harvest feast at Plymouth survives, but we can guess that they ate fowl, eel, squash, maize, venison, and a few local fruits. Today's menu of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, and stuffed turkey seem a far cry from what was available in 1621, but our menu has had industrilization to contend with.
Now, let's take a moment to talk about WWI and WWII for a second. I believe in my previous post about the Eat Local Challenge that I mentioned most local foods were produced by Victory Gardens after WWII. America and the other nations involved in those wars had a long time to think about how best to get what was at the time very fresh, very perishable, and not very portable food all the way across the ocean and into the hands of the soldiers fighting all across Europe and the South Pacific. That's when this whole hullaballoo about processed foods got started. And then? Well, the War ended and those processing companies didn't want to go out of business, so they turned right around and started marketing campaigns to get those processed foods out of their warehouses and into the kitchens of the 50's American Housewife. That's right, "I Love Lucy"'s time period was the height of processed food culture, and it's gone down a little bit since. So, if you want to blame anybody for this whole Evil Processed Food Culture, blame Hitler.
But back to Thanksgiving. Did you know that the typical cultural menu for turkey day is a mostly-New England menu? Turkey run wild in the NE backwoods, pumpkin squash are a very Native American food, and cranberries could probably have been found in some of the backbogs of Massachusets. No wonder the Southerns thought it was a Northern holiday!
At last, our mini-menu. I regret to say, as a foodie, that we didn't do anything particularly sha-zam or wow this year, but that's mostly because we're having a bigger family feast in New Hampshire next Thursday.
Menu:
~Rotisere (sp?) chicken
~Canned cranberry sauce
~Mashed Idaho potatoes
~Pillsbury buttermilk rolls
~Prairie Fume, a white WI wine
~Apple cider, from PA
As you can seen, everything we ate was processed and only the wine was local. Ech. I'm not doing that again, but it suited our schedule and our budget this year, so I won't complain too loudly. And now we have lots of left-overs for the drive out tomorrow.
Wisconsin Terrior. I think I'm beginning to taste what that means, now. There's something heavier, denser, and more meaty about the local flavors. I may pick up local cranberries and cheese curd tomorrow morning, but this is what I have so far:
~Praire Fume, an American Seyval white wine from Praire Du Sac, WI.
This wine was specially bred to survive the tough WI winters, where it can get below -10 degrees F for several days at a time. The Seyval grapes were brought specifically from France 50 years ago and the minerals they bring up from the hills north of the Wisconsin River are very obvious in this first-made wine.
~Cranberrry Mustard, by WI Wilderness Co. bottled in Milwaukee, WI.
The cranberries are from WI, up near Tomah (halfway between Madison and Eau Claire), but unfortunately the mustard isn't. Mustard, as it turns out, is very picky about where it likes to grow, and this mustard is bought and shipped from western Canada.
~Root Beer Mustard, by Sprecher, bottled in Glendale, WI.
Sprecher is a local company famous for their root beer and other sodas. They have restaurants, also. Again, the mustard is from western Canada, and I can't say where the root beer comes from, even though it is made/bottled here in WI. The ingredients do specify, however, that they contain Raw Wisconsin Honey, which I've always found to have a very nice, deep taste. Both mustards were purchased at the National Mustard Museum in Middleton.
~Extra Sharp Chedddar, 3 years old. by Carr Valley Cheese in La Valle, WI.
Cow.
~Caso Bolo Mellage cheese, 2 years old. by Carr Valley Cheese in La Valle, WI.
Goat, sheep, & cow.
That seems to be it for now, though I'd just like to add that Dad shipped me some local Vermont cheese from Shelburne (just south of Burlington) and the taste is completely different from all the cheeses we've sampled here at Fromagination. Just like a wine enthusiast, you really can tell where a different cheese is from. The answer? It's all in the terrior.
~Cheddar, 6 months old.
~Cheddar, 1 year old
~Cheddar, 2 years old.
Holy Cow, www.shelburnefarms.org . Go there. Go there NOW. Their cheese is amazing, go buy some!
See you kids in NH!
xoxoxo, Kim & Emmy
