Great Pumpkin Carly Brown

Some cookie doughs you can dip one tasting finger in and be done, wait it out until they become…cookies.  Other doughs hold within them some kind of magical elixir and tantalize in another finger, which might lead to a spoon, which could lead to a spatula until finally the slow moving transfer of impulses from eyes, mouth, and brain reach the resting ground of the stomach and it finally responds to say something like "wait, this is filling, plus we haven't started baking yet!" The best elixir (I mean dough) we've made yet was a batch of wickedly tempting white chocolate pumpkin cookies on saturday.

The keys to this batch were the perfect combination of taste and texture – taste built by Libby's canned pumpkin, pumpkin pie spice, two sugars and butter; the texture built not only by the addition of white chocolate chips

but what I found out to be the result of being overly patient with beating the dough until it
was whipped so thick that we'd dip a finger and a cookie's worth would grab and we did have to test it, for impurities…plus (we thought at the time) pumpkin is fruit, and nutritious with a lot of vitamins and minerals in it.  Here are the four cookies we got from the batch.

Cheeseburgers in Paradise

On the now annual pilgrimage to hoops mecca Beaver Dam, WI, it's a good idea to take a side trip down to the imaginary Caribbean

where you have to figure the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, the sand is white, and somewhere flying over it all looking for a good cove to land his sea plane is Jimmy Buffet, just waiting to sing "Cheeseburger in Paradise" for you.

Of only a couple of hands full of Cheeseburger in Paradise burger shacks nationwide, who would of thought that the Middleton shopping center at Greenway Station would have one?  But there it is, a cute oasis of palm tree and thatched vine also boasting the Badger game...

...which also happens to serve one of the best guacamole and bacon burgers on the entire west Madison beach.  Each burger on the menu can be ordered with Kobi beef, a premier Japanese cut that, when done well, holds the deep smoky burger taste we all hope for when we grill them ourselves.

We knew we were somewhere temporarily lost in Margaritaville when we realized we were sitting next to three glass garage doors -- better suited for open summer air than early November.

Merle's Secret Spice Rub

It seemed every rural diner and dive bar this side of the Baraboo Bluffline (worth its salt?) had its secret pork or beef roast spice rub,

which was prized by cooks like Merle at the Piccadilly like gold dust. Merle was an itinerant chef,

starting out as a military cook in Virginia, moving onwards, upwards, and backaroundwards as close to the eastern seaboard as he could stay, eventually settling down for six years at the Sweet Shack

not far off the airstrip at Captiva Island, Fl. His claim to fame, and what brought him oddly enough

to Lone Rock in Spring Green, WI of all places, was a summer stint as Jimmy Buffet's personal chef on Jimmy's famous Hemisphere Dancer, a vintage Grumman Albatross.

As Merle would tell all the pilots coming in and out of the diner, a lot of those 'tales' of Margaritaville were true, like the song "Jamaica Mistaica" was actually based on an encounter in Jamaica with Bono from U2, when the Dancer was mistaken for a drug smuggler plane and shot at by the local police.  It was on one of these trips, down to Brazil with Jimmy and the Coral Reefers, where Merle learned how to brighten his roast meat cuts with a citrusy, south American / Cuban spice concoction that kept the regulars at the Piccadilly flying in on wednesdays to the point of filling the lot, wing to wing, with Cessnas.

Merle set out ten "Boston Butts" – delivered from Shel's late afternoon the day before – in the morning, patted them down dry on the aluminum cooking surface and mixed together his secret rub with fingers as measuring cups and spoons.  His gold dust consisted of mostly equal parts cumin, onion powder (sometimes homemade if he had the time), cayenne, chili powder, and a dash of garlic.  This was a fairly standard rub at this point, but what brightened his was two extra steps.  On mondays Merle would  take the zest from lemons, limes and oranges and bake them until dry, then pulverize them down to

powder, adding both a citrus edge and a touch of color.  He smothered the meat every square inch and if he was making pulled pork he would add not only his citrus infused bbq sauce, but would spread a gentle glaze of honey first over the rub, then cook in a 300 degree oven 4-5 hours, or until the internal

 temp came to 190.  With two large prong forks, he would then split apart the roasts into as large of pieces as he could get, mound it on a home made sourdough hamburger bun, drizzle the top of each with three lines of more sauce and top with homemade coleslaw.

If the sandwich was served immediately, the coleslaw held its form well and the pork was hot. The sandwich was a hot / cold, sweet / spicy masterpiece that had taken the Sauk County BBQ Diners Award two of the last three years running.

Flying Sauk: The Sad Story of Peaches Lamar

Cruising now at 2500 feet due northeast from Lone Rock, within minutes  Kat came onto Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen at Spring Green.

While circling once over to get a better look, she decided her destination of turnaround would be Merrimac, a small town located at the edge of Lake Wisconsin 34 miles away.  To be able to later tell her friends Howie and Asta, fellow diner owners of Fitz's on the Lake,

that she buzzed over their place on a surprise solo flight would be her own personal contribution to local aviation lore.  She also decided, as she climbed back up to 3,000 feet, that the rolling hills and natural stone structures of the landscape below were not the same as a pilot

as when a passenger, that was for sure.  A short three line dedication to the awesome beauty of the Baraboo Hills from the pioneer days came to her like a refrain to a song:

                                         Our spirits fill with the glory of your rocky bluffs
                                         We tremble with awe at your green valleys
                                         Sweeping across the countryside to join the hills. 

Only minutes later, as she passed over what she thought must be the Natural Landbridge State Park, sight of the sandstone overhang that she had visited several times before,

what came to her were names of other Sauk pilots she remembered from stories told to her by her grandfather.


It sent a brief tingle down her neck to think of old Cecil Hess, an aviation pioneer and early

"Barnstormer," of the sad day and fatal story of Peaches Lamar.  Back in the 20's, Cecil used to offer rides to locals on his Waco GX for a penny a pound (up to $2.50).  He was an early stunt pilot performing at many southwestern Wisconsin fairs and rural farm gatherings.

A self-proclaimed "seat of his pants" flyer, he didn't fly with parachute or compass.  His favorite maneuver was the "whip stall" he once told an interviewer. "You almost make the plane stand on its tail and drop down.  Then you turn on the power and up she goes."  It was just such a celebration fourth of July 1930 that his parachute jumper Evelyn Holman decided that this was not the day for her to jump, so Hess forced a quick landing and recruited a young jumper in the crowd by the name of Mae Rox, who went by the professional "jumper" name of Peaches Lamar.

She accepted. "Miss Rox had jumped the day before, but strapped on the equipment anyway and was soon on her way to 1,500.  The crowd buzzed with excitement as the plane again circled the field. 'There she goes' shouted a spectator as Rox appeared below the plane." A local newspaper report continued the story the next day, "Down, down she fell and then silence settled over the crowd as realization seemed to come to everyone at once that something was wrong. Down, straight down, seemingly without a struggle fell Miss Rox and vanished behind a fringe of trees beyond the cornfield, into the marshland southwest of the airport." Peaches Lamar, sadly, was found 18-inches in the soft soil not far from the landing. "It was speculated that she had fainted upon exiting the airplane, failed to pull her ripcord and never knew what happened."

Tastes of the Trail




One of the great side benefits of buckets full of Halloween candy laying around the house – and stowed up in the pantry out of reach of sugar-crazed kids – is that you can use some of those suckers (Dum Dums, Tootsie Pops), as bribes to entice said kids out in the great outdoors when the sun decides to poke its face out of its two-week hiding.

Garland Trail, named after Hamlin Garland, one of Wisconsin's greatest and most famous writers,

who also happened to live a portion of his childhood about four blocks away from this small path bridge, is a suburban gem.  Beginning at a convenient parking lot at the tail end of the Clearwater Neighborhood, it climbs up through rustic oaks, a massive birch stand, berry bushes

and out onto one of the few remaining naturally occurring meadows we might find along creases of our bluff lands.  This one also happens to look out over Quarry Lane.  The trail / candy bribery usually burns off

once the hiking moves up hill, but once up there the complaints fade away and the scene rivals any cartoon that we've seen – the trees, losing their leaves, literally paint the landscape, the maples and oaks flare and trunks of birch look something like light tubes in the background brightening the forest.  

The backside trail cools once off the open meadow, so it's time to zig zag down the rocky trail but by then it's mostly smiles, 

the Tootsie Pop is gone, and it's time to bring to life the tastes of the season (porcini and cremini mushroom) in a soup back home…

Piccadilly Lilly: Back by Lunch

It might have been the early morning air or the too few hours of sleep from the short night before, but Kat did not to think very long about the note.  She looked over to the other side of the runway at Higgs's Airport office – no smoke rising from the morning wood stove yet – took the note back into the diner, flipped it over and wrote to Merle "back by lunch."  Merle would be in by 6:30 to start in the kitchen. If she saw him, she wouldn't get back in the Cessna,

that much she knew, so she hustled, almost sneaking, back to the plane, sat down in the pilot's seat, closed herself in, took a deep breath, looked out over the empty flat of the runway, quickly reacquainted herself with the instrument panel she knew well, hit the mix, pushed the carb, switch on, skipped the prime, hit the throttle and finally turned the master on and she was off, lifting at the column to gently rise up off the runway into the brightening turquoise.

Even though she had never flown as pilot herself before, she might very well have been the most experienced non-pilot of all the travelers at Lone Rock.  She was introduced to planes by her grandfather when she was young.  One Christmas, when she was nine, grandpa and dad were proud to have land the grand dame fortress Piccadilly at Lone Rock as part of a heritage tour.  Because they had been part of rebuilding the old bomber in Chicago, they were allowed to decorate the fuselage Christmas morning and Kat opened gifts huddled around a short but real pine tree decorated and sprayed with fake snow.

She'd logged hundreds of hours over in the other seat of her dad's Cessna '66.  She knew weather, wind and distance and most importantly could feel the interplay of machine and flight as well as anybody.  The morning had brightened.  She looked down at Lone Rock and had lost the details on the ground but gained the broad shapes of landscape geometry of Sauk County.

Piccadilly Lilly
(Totally untrue story of a totally true airport diner)

Lone Rock Airport, not far out of Spring Green, suited its name, thankfully thought Kat, on these quiet early mornings as she regularly got to the Piccadilly by 5:15. Just enough time to turn the thermostat back up to 70 and feel the one-room diner warm-up from corner to corner. She flipped through a handful of order sheets from Shel's County Meat, scratched out a few stock needs for next day's menu, then stirred up some of Merle's homemade oatmeal (dried diced-up back bacon and cubed apples was his secret). All this before 8:30 when the first wave (one, two, sometimes three) of single props buzzed up to the door step, noses bent like puppies sniffing people food.

This morning the body of a Cessna sat out in the lot glowing white as bone in the remaining moonlight.  A string of runway lights mirrored off of the windshield and down onto water streaks off the runway like set candles bright against the dark cement.

Kat set down her papers on the hostess podium and walked out to see if it was Ray's '67.  Ray had been flying-in daily from Waunakee for two years now, since Kat opened up here at the corner of the airport.  Ray wouldn't necessarily call if he didn't plan on flying-in for breakfast here and there, but the next morning you could overhear him telling the retired regulars all the who's the what's, where's when's and why's.  It was Ray and Kat's dad who helped rebuild the old Piccadilly B-17 Flying Fortress

way back and which inspired the name of the diner.  Kat hadn't heard anything this time around, and she knew Ray hadn't landed last night before closing.  She walked up to the small pilot's door and opened the latch.  The two-seater was empty, no doubt, the instrument panel completely dark except for the

dull hazy light of the outdoor lamp from out back.  On the passenger seat sat a white piece of paper though, so she stepped up, leaned in, picked it up and all it said was "fly me."