Football Fiesta

What makes a good Super Bowl Sunday? For those without their team represented in the game, they put stock in clever advertisements and a smorgasbord of food. In honor of the event taking up temporary residence in Arizona, we’ve compiled a selection of southwest-inspired dishes that will spice up your party.

No Super Bowl get-together is complete without a cheese dip, more specifically, our Spicy Pimento Cheese. Decadently creamy with a little kick that keeps you honest, this spread will be gobbled up before the field clears for the halftime show.

Finger food is a staple among game day platters, and our Black Bean Nachos with Three Salsas fill that spot with gusto. The trio of salsas dance together for the perfect combination of sweet and spicy topping. A major advantage of this recipe is the leftover salsas- they can be incorporated to another dish, like our tacos, or served in a bowl alongside chips for easy snacking.

It’s the host’s choice for what tacos of ours you’d like to serve, but we recommend the Steak Tacos with Dried Chile Salsa (bottom) or the Chicken Tacos with Roasted Tomatillo Salsa (top). These tacos are like two sides of the same coin, savory and comforting- the steak tacos offer a nice smoky and hearty flavor, while the chicken tacos are tangy and light.

Whether you’ve fired up the grill at your tailgate in Glendale, or are braving the winter elements in your northern back yard, these Chili Jam Chicken Skewers are worth every minute you watch them sizzle. Our Chili Jam is used as a marinade in this recipe, and does it ever fill the kabobs with flavor, leaving each bite of chicken extra juicy.

With a protein heavy lineup, it’s nice to include some veggies for the herbivores in the crowd. Our Sautéed Vegetables with Chili Jam are bold in color and taste; with a tinge of spice and a whole lot of green this dish is totally guilt free!

While it’s not quintessential Southwest cuisine, something just doesn’t feel right about having a football viewing party without wings; wings are the yin to game day’s yang. Our Apricot Hot Wings are sweet, savory, finger-licking good and definitely in the lineup for Sunday. Wash these puppies down with a cold beer and you’ll be in hog heaven.

Roadside Fruit Stands of Northern Michigan

Northern Michigan is teeming with fruit.  Orchards and berry patches line the rolling stretch of lakeshore between Charlevoix and Traverse City, and each orchard boasts its own little roadside stand filled with the abundance of summer.

For a brief week or two, almost everything is in season at once:  raspberries and blackberries,  cherries and blueberries, peaches and apricots and plums, all grown right here in the Northern Fruitlands.

I’ve been recommending this drive to customers in our Charlevoix store for almost a week now.  Each fruit stand has its own personality and unique offerings — golden raspberries at one, Balaton cherries at another, or the season’s first tree-ripened peaches, fresh from the field. 

If you’re in Northern Michigan this summer, add a stop at one of our roadside fruit stands to your must-do list.  And bring a big basket.

Early Glow Strawberries

A few weeks ago, I stood in a field in the early morning light and breathed in the fresh, sweet scent of strawberries.  I’d gone to visit the Bardenhagens’ centennial farm, a series of rolling green hills perched above Sutton’s Bay.  Justin discovered the farm in 1982 during his search for the ideal domesticated strawberry, a strawberry as brightly aromatic and intensely flavorful as the wild strawberries he remembered from childhood. He sampled at least a dozen varieties before falling in love with the Early Glow, a small, low-yielding berry so difficult to grow that  few local farmers even planted it.  

Gary Bardenhagen, our exclusive strawberry source for nearly 30 years, shares Justin’s affinity for the divine but difficult Early Glow.  Other varieties are nice for a while, he says, “but I could eat Early Glows all season long.”  So the low-growing green leaves covering the hills he’s recently passed on to his son Steve shelter thousands of the tiny red berries.

For three weeks each June, three generations of Bardenhagens spend their mornings in the strawberry patch, sorting through freshly picked berries, packing them into cardboard flats, and sending them out to local markets.  A berry picked in the morning could be in your kitchen by noon.

Or it could be in ours, simmering away gently in our copper kettles to be preserved for a year’s worth of intense strawberry enjoyment.

Rhubarb Compote

Last month, in our kitchen tour post, we showed you photos of Justin making rhubarb compote.  We didn’t identify it as such at the time, but we can tell you now: it was rhubarb compote and it was delicious.  It was so delicious that we snuck a few jars out of the R&D kitchen and took them down to Zingerman’s with us for a tasting we were scheduled to host.  We tasted our way through an array of classic American Spoon Preserves paired with Zingerman’s favorites and then served our rhubarb compote as the very last course, with a spoonful of whipped cream and a little square of graham cracker.  It was a big hit.  So big that the evening ended with one resounding request:  more rhubarb compote, please.

So we came home, scaled up the recipe, and bought all the local rhubarb we could find.  Then our kitchen staff got to work.  April, Jessica and Paul chopped up all the lovely red and green stalks, macerated the chopped chunks with sugar to soften and sweeten them, simmered the chunks and their pretty pink syrup gently in our copper kettles, and filled jars — 500 of them — with more rhubarb compote.

We’re happy to announce that Rhubarb Compote is now available in our retail stores. When you visit this summer, make sure you sample it on our tasting table.  Each jar is filled with soft, falling-apart chunks of  delightfully tart rhubarb preserved in a syrup that barely whispers of sweetness.   This compote is best served simply — with freshly whipped cream, spooned over Greek yogurt or ice cream, or my favorite way:  with nothing more than a spoon.