5 Things: November 1st, 2019

Diet season is over. Between the leftover Halloween candy all but the most popular houses are holding onto, and the numerous impending holiday feasts you'll attend, there's going to be a lot to eat about these next few months. If you live in the cold North like we do, you can choose to view it as a matter of pragmatism: adding an extra layer of insulation to survive the harsh Winter.

Clearly food is on my mind, so it is convenient that I write for a deli's blog. Today, I'll tell you about some new food (and beverage) items at the Smokehaus, and if I run out of new foods to talk about, I'll just wing it the rest of the way.

One more reminder, before we get into the juicy selection of Things™ that await: We're in the midst of our MN Early Bird mail order sale:

Order now for the holidays and enjoy 15% off any order heading to Minnesota! Smoked turkey, ham, porketta, salmon, and more.

Enter code earlybird19 at checkout and specify when you would like your order to arrive in the order notes. You can use this code on as many individual transactions as you see fit.

This offer is effective through November 14th, 2019. Some boring restrictions may apply.

A new beer joins the roster.

Since we began carrying beer, wine, cider, and hard seltzer earlier this year, Fulton's Lonely Blonde has been a customer favorite. But seasons change, and beer menus do too, so once we run out o our stock of Lonely Blonde*, we'll begin serving Fulton's Standard Lager, a very sessionable all-malt lager that clocks in at a respectable 4.5% abv and is a perfect fit for the colder part of the year.

Smoked Molasses Cookies.

The newest addition to our lineup of baked goods is a hot topic in this increasingly colder season. Patricia has been talking about smoked molasses cookies since she started working at our deli, and the dream has finally come true. Made with a 50/50 blend of haus-smoked and unsmoked butter, and the perfect amount of haus-smoked molasses, these cookies are a great follow-up to any of our sandwiches, but to me they sound (err...taste?) like a great follow-up to a straightforward sandwich, like the Cold Turkey or Gorilla. They will be regularly available for $2 in the deli, on their own or in a Box Lunch.

Thanksgiving Dinner Pasties.

On Wednesday, I caught Patricia in the middle of baking off a huge tray of bread cubes. When I asked why prep had her making croutons, she gave me the best news I'd received all week, which you can likely guess from the preceding emboldened text: these bread cubes will become stuffing. That stuffing will be combined with Smoked Turkey Breast, gravy, craisins, and root vegetables to form ~*THANKSGIVING DINNER PASTIES*~

Be the first* to know when they're available. Keep your eyes on our social media pages.

Grab Thanksgiving Dinner by the crust and enjoy!

*After Patricia, whomever is working with Patricia, and whomever is available to post the news to our social media feed.

Our All-Staff Meeting is this Sunday at 6pm, and Sandwich Lab is just around the corner.

This seems like it should be two Things™, but it's happening as one. On Sunday, November 3rd, we'll be closing our doors at 5 p.m.—just a little bit earlier than usual—for an All-Staff Meeting. Please forgive us in advance if you were planning on stopping into our deli between 5 and 6 p.m. on your way out of town. (Perhaps you could just skip town an hour earlier to beat our closing time. It's cold and snowing here now—there's nothing for you anymore.)

And just a few short weeks after, many of us Smokehausers will meet for our annual Sandwich Lab.

Sandwich Lab is an event that emerged a few years back to calibrate our evolving/rotating cast of sandwich makers, to ensure that we're making sandwiches consistently, and of the utmost quality. The Summer rush is not the ideal scenario in which to learn the subtle art of NWS sandwich-making, and yet that is when so many among us must cut their teeth.

Sandwich Lab also offers us an opportunity to share our favorite personal sandwiches, to have them graded and analyzed (and ideally enjoyed). Last year's Sandwich Lab featured so many good candidates that we released them as monthly specials, beginning with the Breakfast Club, and ending with the G.O.A.T., which saw its last official day on the menu yesterday.

Who knows what will happen this year(?), but however it goes, it always ends up being fun.

ACTUAL SANDWICH LAB FOOTAGE

ALL-DAY SLIDERS!

In conjunction with our new-and-improved Happy Hour, we've added Smokehaus Sliders to the menu. Monday through Friday 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., 16oz cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Hamm's are $2, and all other craft brews are $1-off.

sliders-DSC03477.jpg

The sliders feature half-portions of your favorite NWS meats, and butter, on a cute little slider bun, and are available for $3 (or two for $5). HOWEVER, if you can't make it in between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., you can still get sliders all day at the low, low cost of $3 for one/$6 for two.

They're the perfect size for kids of all ages, and those who want to try a variety of our products without breaking belt loops or billfolds.

Thanks for stopping by 5 Things™. We at the Smokehaus hope you have a good rest of your day and stay hydrated. We love you forever.

5 Things: March 15th

This week, though still classically slow-season Smokehaus, was full of excitement.

1- For starters, we launched our first official NWS Happy Hour, which runs Mondays through Thursdays from 5-7pm and features our new Chicago-ish Haus-ki Dog. Happy Hour specials and hours may change seasonally, but we're excited about our current lineup.

2- Many of our employees have skills and backstories worth highlighting, if only there were enough hours in the day to interview and write about all of them. But we're making a start. In honor of her swift and popularly-heralded rise to NWS excellence through phenomenal baked goods, we published a profile of new deli employee & baker, Patricia.

3- Our cookbook dreams are coming to fruition. While specific details aren't yet available, we've been producing a ton of content. Our vision is intact, we've already produced a mock-up of an entire chapter, and last weekend we took care of one how-to photo shoot about porketta.

Enjoy some behind-the-scenes photos while you wait for the finished product.

4- Tonight (March 15th) we'll be popped-up at Hoops Brewing, selling smoked chicken wings, sauced to order with a variety of Northern Waters Restaurant sauces—maple sambal, soy ginger, and hausmade buffalo, to be specific. NWR may no longer exist with us on the Material Plane, but its legacy survives through the Smokehaus.

As far as I know, smoked chicken wings are a rarity in the Twin Ports, not to mention our particular variety, which are brined, “dried” to help form the crispy outer layer, kippered, then hit with a lot of smoke to finish them off.

5- I know the weather comes up frequently, but the battle between dwindling Winter and impending Spring rages on, and alongside the standard freezing rain, we also had a day of one of my favorite weather phenomena: creepy, heavy fog. Inevitably, we'll get a blizzard in mid-April, but for now, it appears the thaw is on its way.

Here are some more photos by Jacob in our media department, in lieu of pretty words. See you here again next week.

DSC01071.jpg

5 Things: March 8th, 2019

Welcome back, friends.

Glad to see you. The sun is shining where I'm writing, and this week had several discrete events worthy of the title "Thing™." Let us not tarry long on introductions, but hasten to the investigation of these Things™.

A couple of auspicious visits:

Northern Waters Smokehaus is pretty well accustomed to high-status visits. We've had the privilege of appearing on a few national cable network programs in the past decade, and while I'm not going to name-drop, there are a number of well-known individuals with local roots who join the masses and wait in line for our food when they happen into town.

Secretly, many of us behind the counter recognize them and get excited when they stop into the shop, but, consummate professionals that we are, we play it cool.

This week, however, I couldn't contain myself. I was working my first deli shift in what felt like several weeks, so my filter of professional boundaries was perhaps off-kilter, when I received a call from my dear friend, Flo, in the marketing department. The Pitchfork Music Festival had just announced its line-up, which featured, among other exciting acts, local global music legends, Low.

Flo and I have attended the festival together on more than one occasion, so I was excited to hear that the lineup had been announced, but I was doubly-excited to see none other than a member of Low—and co-creator of our famous Cajun Finn sandwich—waiting for a sandwich from our deli. This individual's identity will be kept vague, since I didn't ask permission to tell this story in a public forum, and even beloved artists deserve privacy, but they were quite understanding and played-along generously when I held the phone to my chest and shouted,

"Hey, you're playing Pitchfork [Music Festival](?),"

and again, slightly louder, when they didn't hear the first time.

It was a moment that has subsequently been described to me as "very Duluth." And that is the story of how I finally lost my cool and shouted details about someone's life to them while on-the-clock.

Listen to my favorite Low record below:

Another visit came from someone who, like it or not, has chosen a path that puts them right in the public eye: the 41st Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. Truth be told, I probably would not have known about this had I not chosen to unburden the office's Wi-Fi, and blog out of the deli.

As I typed away in a corner of our small seating area, Minnesota's public servant-in-chief enjoyed a sandwich—maybe a salad, I didn't ask—behind me. It wasn't until the hunger hit me, and I stepped behind the sandwich line to make myself some lunch, that he revealed himself.

Yes, I participated in an electoral process that prominently featured him, but I did not recognize him less than five feet away from me. Is this a tale of his humility, or of my obliviousness, or of something else altogether? The jury is out. The jury, in fact, has neither been consulted, nor even informed of the known facts.

He thanked us for the delicious food, introduced himself to us, and engaged with a few customers who overheard him. The details get hazy from there. Honestly, I checked out at that point because preparing my lunch was of greater urgency to me at that time.

I'm not going to take any political stances on the company blog, fear not, except that being kind and showing gratitude to service industry employees is good praxis.

A pop-up and a new event:

On Wednesday, we had a pop-up at Bent Paddle Brewing Company's tap room in the Lincoln Park Craft District. Such pop-ups are pretty old-hat by now. NWS setting up shop for a night at a local tap room wouldn't be much to write about—rather, I and others have written about it so many times that it seems unfair to count that among the Things™—however, we debuted a new item at this pop-up: The Haus-ki, our very tangential take on the Chicago dog. More about the Haus-ki, and our new Happy Hour, which is when we'll be selling it, is available here.

The Haus-ki.

The marketing department is all out on a project I’m about to tell you about, so here is a placeholder Haus-ki until I receive pop-up photos.

Some cookbook content fun:

This morning, a handful of the marketing & design staff are taking a break from their typical workday to prepare for a photo-shoot. It should be no secret that we have dreams of releasing a cookbook in the near future, and though we have a wealth of photography related to our business and products, there will never be enough.

This particular photo-shoot pertains to producing a porketta in a backyard smoking apparatus. Today's tasks are a lot of shoveling, creating the mise en scene for the shoot, and rolling the porketta. Tomorrow, we'll be enacting and documenting the rest of the process. It's supposed to snow tomorrow, which could undermine our work, or result in some pretty cool action shots.

A New 'Wich:

The Spinderella is in full-effect until April 1st! Worth trying at least once, worth double stamps on your sandwich card.

Baker appreciation:

Volumes could and will be written about the impact that our recently-establish Baking Department has had on our business, but I'll keep it brief:

Jerry's White Bread, Prince Myshkin Rye, Chorizo-Cheddar-Chive Biscuits, Rosemary Potato Rolls, and Ciabattas have further increased our pride of ownership in the food we make. I've always liked the bread we've used at NWS, and there are certainly some baked items we're still buying from outside vendors, but being able to say, "on a hausmade [bread of whatever variety]" feels good, and to top it off, it is high-quality product they're baking down there.

If you've noticed some bright yellow pasty-looking items during your recent forays into our shop, and been confused or intrigued, those are Lucy's Jamaican Hand-Pies, made with our fresh chorizo, and yes, they are a very delicious, filling, easy to eat (with one hand!) item that you should definitely not pass up.

And, of course, what would a 5 Things™ post be without a shoutout to Patricia, who used up all of the Royale With Cheese trimmings we've accumulated—since we began cutting our Buddies to a specific cost rather than selling them by weight—to make savory bacon-cheeseburger snack stick and tomato scones.

Closing thoughts:

We have a new sink! The other one was falling off the wall from years of overuse.

Fresh

Fresh

Do I even keep track of my Thing™-count anymore?

Announcing: Smokehaus Happy Hour

Hey!

Hey!

Time: Mondays through Thursdays, 5 to 7 pm, beginning Monday, March 11th.

Place: Northern Waters Smokehaus Deli→

Details: One of our new Royale With Cheese bacon-cheeseburger sticks, toasted and topped with mustard, celery salt, tomatoes, pickles, and pepperoncini on a hausmade ciabatta roll with your choice of a bag of chips or a can of LaCroix. $6+tax. Only available in-store. Friendship and goodwill in abundance, for you to carry into the rest of the world. Probably good music.

The Haus-ki is here.

We debuted our spin on the Chicago dog last night at Bent Paddle Brewing Company's tap room, but this dog is too good to save for pop-ups alone, so we're bringing it to you four days a week, live from our deli.

The Haus-ki.

The Haus-ki.

True happiness may come from within, but a Haus-ki couldn't hurt.

We're teaming this dog up with your choice the usual suspects—

—alongside the standard NWS accoutrements. For only $6 ($6.38 after tax)! There's not much more to say than this is a tasty treat for a hot deal.

Whether you want to stay a while to socialize, or just long enough to grab a dog, join us, and let's be happy together.

The first NWS Happy Hour is Monday, March 11th from 5 to 7pm. In the spirit of food bringing people together, this happy hour deal will not be available via delivery. We hope to see you there.