We had no tartar sauce to go with the fishies we caught, so I had to improvise.

Essentially this is making a mayonnaise and then converting it into tartar sauce. You could start with mayo and jump to step , but the homemade mayo tastes a lot better.

This recipe can be doubled or tippled as needed, but this amount was good for 4 servings.

• One egg yolk
• 1 tsp of lemon juice or white wine vinegar
• Salt
• Pepper
• .5 c extra virgin olive oil
• .5 c non-fat, plain yogurt
• .25 c chopped dill pickles
• lemon juice to taste
• hot sauce (optional)

1. Put the yolk, lemon juice or vinegar, salt and pepper in a bowl. You’ll need a decent size one to get enough whisk action to emulsify the ingredients. That means something at least twice as big as a cereal bowl.
2. Whisk like crazy while slowly adding a few drops of oil to the mixture. Increase the flow to a light drizzle. The oil should be mixing into the egg at this point and thickening. If you just have oily yolk, you added too much oil too quickly or didn’t whisk fast enough. Keep adding the oil until it’s all worked in. That’s mayo. It’ll be much more yellow than Hellman’s, but that’s because they probably use Clorox bleach in theirs.
3. Fold in the yogurt and pickles. You can add a little minced garlic if you want too at this point.
4. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Add more lemon juice or hot sauce or anything else that would be good in there tasting as you go.

I had never made lamb of any sort before this dish.  It felt a little exotic and intimidating, not to mention that you don’t really find it in the supermarket (we bought the lamb at the St Paul Farmer’s Market in case you were wondering).  However, this couldn’t really be any simpler and it made me want to be a French shepherd.

The meat will be fall off the bone tender and the lentils will be flavorful and delicious with the juices, wine, and stock.

Below is what the recipe called for, but we only had two shanks and upped the lentils to 1 lbs and the liquid accordingly to cook them.

• .75 lbs ‘French’ lentils (the greenish brown ones)
• 2 carrots chopped
• 1 large onion chopped
• 3 ribs of celery chopped
• 2 bay leaves
• 3 cloves of garlic finely chopped
• 3 sprigs of fresh thyme or 1 tsp of dried
• 400 mL of red wine
• 400 mL of chicken stock
• 4 lamb shanks
• Salt
• Pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.  Heat the first 9 ingredients in a dutch oven or other heavy oven safe pot on the stove over high heat until boiling.
2. Nestle the lamb shanks into the lentil and veg and cover.   Turn the over to 375 and put the pot in for 1 hour.
3. Take the pot out and gently stir everything around.  Add salt and pepper to taste at this time.  If the mixture is starting to dry out, add some more stock or water.  You don’t want a soup, but you need it to be quite moist to taste good and cook properly.  Re-cover and put back in the oven for 1 hour.
4. If  meat is done, that is super tender falling off the bone done, crank up to 400 degrees and cook uncovered for 20 minutes to brown the meat a bit.
5. Season as needed and enjoy.

Although they may have been the only four that she caught, Rachel won the first brief competition in panfish angling.

Needless to say, they were tasty fried with a little seasoned flour.

The scary thing is that all of these trees were feet from the cabin and appeared pretty healthy from the outside.

No need to comment about the fact that I am a dork, I already know it.

So the picture didn’t turn out as well as the meal really looked or tasted, but I think it is a pretty impressive presentation anyway.

The ‘goulash‘ that I grew up with was never one of my favorite meals.  It was probably the fact that it had onions in it.  If you didn’t know this about me, if you put any hint of onions in something, it would be a sure fire way to make me gag at the dinner table, literally.  I was a gross kid.

This is a slight departure from tradition as it uses chicken instead of beef as well as the addition of dumplings cooked right in the pot.  If you want crustier dumplings, make more small ones, but I think the contrast between the doughy inside and the crusty outside is best.

• 2 Pounds boneless, skinless chicken, cut into 2 inch chunks ( I used a whole chicken, but you could use all dark meat for more flavor and moisture or all white meat for less of the bad stuff for you)
• 1.5 c flour, plus a little more for dusting
• 5 Tbsp COLD butter cubed
• 2 Tbsp olive oil
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 2.5 c chicken stock
• 1 c sour cream
• 1 large white onion, finely chopped
• 1 red pepper, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 Tbsp hot paprika ( or not hot, but it tastes better and doesn’t add much heat, trust me )
• 1 tsp thyme leaves

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Salt and pepper the chicken pieces and lightly dust with four. In a large skillet, melt 1 Tbsp of butter in the olive oil. Add the chicken and cook on high until browned on both sides (8 minutes). Take the chicken out and leave the oil and crusty bits.
2. While cooking the chicken, get a food processor, pulse the flour, baking powder, .5 tsp salt, .25 tsp pepper (use quite a bit more coarse cracked black pepper if you like pepper. I think I used a Tbsp and the dumplings had some good little peppery bites). Pulse in the remaining 4 Tbsp of the cold, cubed butter until it looks like a coarse meal. Whisk .5 cup stock with .5 c sour cream and drizzle over the mixed ingredients and pulse some more until it forms a loose dough. If you don’t have a food processor, just mix everything using a pastry blender or a whisk so that the butter gets worked in similarly.
3. Add the onion, bell pepper, and garlic to the skillet and cook over high heat until soft (3 minutes). Add the chicken back into the skillet along with the paprika and cook for a half minute. Ad the rest of the stock and sour cream to the pan with the thyme and bring to a boil.
4. when everything is lovely and boiling, scoop some quarter cup (big spoonful) dumplings into the pan and bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes or until the dumplings are cooked through. Crank up the broiler and broil on the top rack until the dumplings are golden.
5. Serve and eat.

No, there is no recipe to follow.  Those are the names of our three chickens.

They were named in order of their observed intelligence, which I took to also be the order in which they would survive a predator’s attack.

The Hen House Hilton

Rachel’s interior decoration would have been better.

That was the score for today at least. We ventured out to a lake in the Superior National Forest to throw our lines in from shore on this hallowed fishing day and were greeted by a healthy young Northern Pike.

I say young and healthy instead of small because one day this will probably be the state record for length and weight, but it wasn’t quite there yet today.

Lottie is still a little skittish around water, so she found her own catch of the day in the woods.