Weeknight Cooking

We've tried to make our own pasta from scratch in the past – the process is long, delicate and takes a considerable amount of time to maintain.  Once you make your dough, in that case, you press it through your pasta machine, then handle it to shape, hang it to dry, maybe freeze it, then cook, usually a small batch.  The interesting part of making your own pasta from scratch is that if you do take the time to make your own, it's 200-times better than packaged, which leaves you in the 'pasta dilemma' whether to devote hours to making it yourself or not.

We had skipped this process for a long time, but recently bought a nice pasta machine on somewhat of a whim.  The process here is simple, but the results very nearly the same as the more high maintenance old way: dump into the pasta box a combination of semolina high-quality and regular flour, any other additives you might want (a hint of seasoning, spinach for example), turn the machine on, then

Fresh chopped spinach could be a pasta addition

add an egg and water combination through a sifter at the top.  The extrusion (think Thomas Jefferson's old imported macaroni machine) spindle mixes the powder and the liquid on its own for a mere three minutes, reverses itself, then begins to push through a chosen pasta dial well-formed strand-like pasta.  The pasta gathers in a nest on a plate and then you can either cook it immediately, depending on its consistency, or freeze it in order to firm its shape before boiling.  Five to six minutes later, pasta that is really nothing like the firm green box stuff, but inherently soft, tender and more lively in flavor, is yours. Add onto the boiled nest a homemade batch of pureed tomato sauce, and side with bruschetta toast covered in tomatoes and fresh spinach from the garden pots, and you have a great way to celebrate the new season.

Sunday Ads

It doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to smell the lingering soft aroma of a fresh batch of

Challah Bread Rolls

handcrafted challah meandering through the halls of the Ferry Building on a Sunday morning stroll, the sky outside the windows just opening from a night's fog sunken over the shoulders of the Nevada's,  lifting slowly over the Oakland Bridge. Spiced-in the aroma, as if from the baker's hand herself, a hint of cinnamon from handcrafted cinnamon rolls, the white of the frosting matching only the whites of the eyes of the children fortunate enough to come along with the parents for this sunday morning religious ritual at the Plaza.

A set of carrot cakes stand firm and cool in a case at the far end of the store; a stack of chocolate chunk

cookies look like a fine take home, but, secretly, in the back of the mind, the buyer knows these won't last through tomorrow and the Sunday night meal is already planned around the chocolate stack.

Mariposa Bakery is named after "butterfly" in Spanish.  "We selected 'Mariposa' because many people who adopt a gluten-free lifestyle transform their lives through food.  The butterfly is a perfect metaphor for such transformation.  Being a California based company, with all the Spanish influences in California, we decided the Spanish word for butterfly was perfect."

"Our start was simple.  Patti Furey Crane, Mariposa's founder, craved high-quality sweets while pregnant with her first child.  Finding few options at the time, she set to baking them herself.  And so, in 2004, Mariposa was hatched.  Mariposa's mission – create wholesome, hand-crafted food using the finest natural ingredients."

Ice Cream Sandwich

Nature Journal

5 June

Once we found out that Ishnala Supper Club was only three miles away from where we were staying, we had to make the trip.  Back roads in the Dells – just off the main Parkway – open up to a past generation of simpler lake resorts and many old defunct cafes and restaurants that seem barely alive, but they are (earlier in the day I had discovered on a jog an old log cabin tavern on Lake Delton.  I couldn't figure out how such a place, so hard to find, could have survived over the years, until I ran down to the water at its frontage and looked out onto the lake only to see Tommy Bartlett's lakefront auditorium seating directly across from the bar).  On our drive to Ishnala we passed a pack of old red cedar cabins that must have been part of the old Jellystone Park because one of the buildings said Cindy's.  We both agreed we remembered Cindy Bear from the Yogi cartoons of old.  Old Gasser Road moved deeper into the Dells lush woodlands.  Ishnala from the road looks something like a standard attraction advertisement, but as you weave down through the fringe of the Mirror Lake landscape (same road that was filmed in Johnny Depp's movie Public Enemies), you can begin to see

that you are moving toward some deeply wooded gem.  Ishnala looks a bit like a Hiawatha village scene out of a Disney animated movie.  The parking lot leads down a gardened path to a dark wooded building set directly over Mirror Lake.  Nooks and crannies along the walking paths around the restaurant open to views of the sparkling lake.  An old canoe hangs before the entrance – an old Ho Chunk canoe found years ago at the bottom of the lake; and an authentic teepee stands at one corner of the surrounding deck to initiate the Native American theme.

Arrowhead bar juts out onto the lake itself and you can watch kayakers paddle underneath.  Out on the lake there is very little traffic other than paddles, a result of a low wake rule which keeps most boats off.  A couple of anglers scouted the banks across the lake with slow casts.  Today the sky was still moody and only partially sunny, but when its was it kindled the stretch of lake right off the balcony where we sat.  Pieces of sun would reflect onto the live-growing pines climbing through the restaurant floor.  As I ate my plate of roast Wisconsin duck, I thought I could taste the Mirror Lake waters.

Voyageurs

"Who could have dreamed someone a century or two hence would plant a few of their flowers of gold somewhere along the route in the far interior? Now when the iris blooms it will serve as a living symbol of an era when songs of the voyageurs floated among the islands, when feats of daring were commonplace along the wilderness roads they traveled."
                –Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point

Our start for the La Crosse River wasn't all that early in the morning, but we found out later it was the right time to view the constant swirl of late spring wildlife along the banks.  We were reminded once again on our trip that the La Crosse River might very well be the most undervalued wild resource in the area; following its path, even with the imagination, from the falls at Lake Neshonoc, down through the meandering golden green pastures of West Salem, through Veteran's Memorial, past Valley View Mall, and through the valley backwaters is so much

more enjoyable than driving the same route...it's a slight surprise that more La Crossites don't give up the steering wheel for the Voyageur's paddle altogether.  La Crosse IS in among these banks – the thirty some giant turtles we saw sunning on the bobbing logs, the solo heron woken by our faint clap of the paddle against the down flowing current, geese, mallards, a beaver, a deer's head popping up out of a safe bed at the jump of a bass who completely cleared the water to grasp the fallen Mayfly.  At one point, nearing

the Myrick Park biking trail overpass, we could see in one panoramic view a bald eagle high above gliding like falling paper, two pelicans airplaning just above our heads, and a lost gosling trying to find its way up the bank seeking the sound of parents above.  Every turn, every eddy, every snap of the oak limb, some wild creature presented itself.

As you reach the tail end of the La Crosse River, you are indeed at the very point where "three rivers meet."  To the north the Black chugs into the Mississippi, which is coming right at you at 12 o'clock – the La Crosse Queen rolling its red paddle straight ahead.  We tugged at our own paddles a little more firmly and crossed the great blue channel to Pettibone, the precise birthplace (first known settler shelter), of La Crosse and sunned like blue turtles.

Cass Bridge above on the way to Pettibone Park

Cap' N Mikes Holy Smoke

Down at the far end of the Saturday Ferry Plaza Market you can find Cap 'n Mike and his wife Sally

still, after nearly 30 years of farmer marketing, selling their world famous smoked salmon.  Cap N' Mike had been a Methodist minister for years but heard the call of the wild, got his captain's license and took ship, poles, bait and hooks to sea at the famous red-triangle region (famous white shark feeding ground) of Bodega Bay, located 44 miles north of San Francisco and just across the inlet from Tomales Bay, home to Hog Island Oyster.

Bodega Point, Sonoma County

"At my first farmers market in Redwood City, I didn't have labels or fancy packaging.  No prices even.  I just guessed at what each piece was worth.  I tossed my first batch of smoked fish on the table and it was gone in just over an hour.  And it's been fun ever since.  I found my wife and a world of friends at the farmers markets. Bringing the best fish to the best people, it's all about loving what we do."

The story goes that back in the 1990's Sally was a customer at the Marin County Farmer's Market and apparently had "her eye on the 'salmon dude.' Turns out he had his eye on her, too! They got married on Bodega Head."  Holy Smoke keeps it simple but the best, showing up – nothing more than tent kiosk at the Market – as rated one of the top ten seafood restaurants in all of San Francisco by many sources.  

The specialty is the lox sandwiches, put together with ACME brand bread (also a vendor at the Market), homemade cream cheese, the thinly sliced smoked salmon (lox), red onions and sometimes capers.  The quality comes from the passion.  "When the salmon calls, you've got to answer.  That's exactly what I did.  Who would have thought that almost 30 years later, I'd still be doing it and enjoying it.  Bringing the freshest fish right out of the cold North Pacific and slowly, over Alderwood coals, making the best smoked fish there is!"

First mate gift box, on its way to Quarry Lane

 

Under the Sourdough Rim:
A Midwestern

Council Bluffs, Iowa, had seen its share of 'overlanders' since the great rush to gold in San Francisco had motivated men from around the planet to pick up stakes and travel, in any way possible, to

find the El Dorado at Sutter Mill near Coloma California.  For those not willing to take the miserable route through South America and up around the Cape by ship, the trek over land was as trying.  The jungles of the lower continent might have held malaria and sweltering heat, but the 'overlanders' encountered lack of any water, paths incomplete and which often lead to nothing more than animal trails, or Indian tribes so varying in degree of malice that every native had to be seen as danger before friend.  The Watts

Boys had passed through one of the stop-over points along the Great Gold Rush Trail not on the way West, but back East where Major Shan Cordon waited with thirty-five of his finest high-plains men for the gold load the Boys had heisted from the Golden Eagle, a ship thought to be deserted in San Francisco Bay, but was a stockpile instead of creek gold found at Yosemite flats.  The Boys had feelers

all along the Trail, both ways, as a result of many promises they made out West of riches returning.  They caught wind of Cordon's men and found their route north along the bluff lines until they reached the Mississippi, then north through Wisconsin to what had been a town famed by its sawmill and timber industry.  The Boys, consisting of only nine, started as thirteen; all had healthy horses, three mules packing the gold, seven rifles between them, and each with at least one pistol, all as fresh as the day they were stolen.  Rudy Watts, one of the namesake of the clan, third born, sickly, but certainly the meanest, had fallen ill before they had split from Council Bluffs north, and needed a hideout.

Old man Watts knew the country from scouting expeditions he had made as a boy with his uncle who served as surveyor for the Steamboat packets of the early days.  The bluffs, he remembered, were tall and riddled with limestone fixtures perfect for small caves.  One, in particular, stood out, down at the base of Sourdough Bluff.  "Would you believe it, boys, uncle Prescott always said there was but one place to stop in Onalaskee, Wisconsin, that is the old brew caves of A. Knecht."  This sounded a bit on the unbelievable side.  Rudy here was sick with something in his guts that had him holding his lower side permanently, with the white fever and looked like he was dying, and here there was talk of a cave that was used for beer storage.  This was the same kind of talk that found them cornered at the Bay back in San

Francisco by a crowd of forty-niners twice their number and which put them back out on the run for what looked like a lifetime instead of spending that seized gold right there at San Fran on the booze and impressing women.  "Well, now, the ways I see it," said the elder Watts, we will most assuredly need a long term hole-up.  There's the river and Canadee not far off north if need be in a bad pinch.  For the time bein,' he said, we poke around in those caves we knows about and there will be the shelter, and yessir, it will be stocked with kegs of fine brew."

Trail of Columbines

"The point has changed little since those early days, and the silhouettes of the islands and the vistas across the water are much the same as they have always been.  I can sit here and dream of the past, for in the fleur-de-lis is a living bridge between the voyageurs and me."
    –Sigurd Olson, from Listening Point

Red Columbine, Aquilegia Canadensis

The Red Columbine had crossed its own bridge some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago during what is called the Pleistocene.  Like a roving band of animals who continuously seek suitable habitat, the Columbine, stemming originally from Eastern Europe, spread across the Bering land bridge from what is modern day Russia down through Alaska, on into the North American continent where it can be found today along the ridge line trails here in Greens Coulee.

End of Loggers Loop Trail, Greens Coulee Park Trails

Enwrapped as we are by these networks of coulees that used to be nearly all farming, it takes little time to move from the modern world to that of the past, the voyage of time Olson describes above.  This is the story for a majority of the La Crosse area: neighborhoods need look little further than over their collective shoulders to see the bluffs, their foothills, and relics of connected fields, to see living

history.  For Olson, his transformative moments occurred over and over again as he took canoe and paddle out onto the great northern lakes surrounding his shack at Listening Point.  As he felt the connection to the robust French Voyageurs of old, – cusping his hand-carved paddle, gliding over the mostly unchanged crystal waters – and spotting the fleur-de-lis flower as a reminder of French descent, we might find in the vision of a columbine the toil of the farmer as she stakes out a fencepost or he herds the dairy cow back down the lush green grazing slope, a log held over his shoulder for the night's dinner fire.