5 Things: September 27th, 2019

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm ready for September to step aside and make way for October: the best time of the year. There's a whole lot of good things coming to Northern Waters Smokehaus in October. Let's take a look, shall we?

The G.O.A.T. arrives on October 2nd. Yes, next Wednesday you'll be able to feast upon this toasted bagel, dressed in creamy chèvre, toasted Smoked Andouille Sausage slices, local apple slices, and crispy lettuce for $9.50+tax. Catch me eating The G.O.A.T. during every one of my lunch breaks.

Enjoy these photographs of The G.O.A.T.

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Next week, our new wine list hits the deli. Keep your eyes on our social media platforms for updates and product profiles.

Are you a creative, yet unpretentious eater? Or a college student on a budget with a knack for maximizing flavor? Do you enjoy zhuzhing-up a grocery store frozen pizza with special ingredients; instant ramen, with a little bit of extra love from the produce section? So do we. And we're glad to work at a place like Northern Waters Smokehaus, where there's plenty of potently flavorful ingredients to bring to our home kitchens.

That's why we're launching #NWSMadeItFancy — the hashtag dedicated to documenting your culinary ingenuity under the influence of Northern Waters Smokehaus. Playing the game is simple: grab some NWS ingredients, find creative uses for them in your favorite "un-fancy" foods—frozen pizza, instant ramen, macaroni and cheese, instant stuffing, cornbread mix, you name it—document it, and share it with the aforementioned hashtag, and...profit?

We'll be keeping an eye on the hashtag and sharing our favorites. Join in with our staff and followers to create a whole lot of fun community content, featuring your favorite items from our deli. Will you be famous? No promises. Will you make our followers feel happy and inspired? It's probable!

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Glensheen gave us a ton of basil! Imagine a literal ton of basil. That would be a very large pile of basil. Back to business: At the end of the season, the folks at Glensheen have a ton of produce and not much to do with it, so they donate it to the community. Basil tastes great, but it doesn't exactly feed people, so it isn't high on the priority list for the handful of local organizations feeding the marginalized populations of our community. We're grateful to make use of this windfall, and look forward to providing you with the finest Glensheen-tinged Italiensks, Silence of the Lambwiches—that's how you pluralize it: you're welcome—and Spring Rolls.

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A ton of Basil (Rathbone)

There's a ton of otherexciting Things™ coming up this Autumn at NWS, but I need to hold onto some content for future 5 Thingses—there's another useful pluralization for you. So I'll leave you with the best news I've heard all week—Our DM is returning from vacation, and D&D starts again this Monday! Back to Waterdeep, and into the Undermountain—home of the Mad Mage—we go. Will we return? Who could know? Prepare yourselves for session-recaps for which you never asked, and tidbits of the hijinks of the Midnight Axe, which will have doubled its ranks. That sounds like easily double the hijinks.

Before my words become

quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

This is the way the blog ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

5 Fish Sandwiches That Are Making Waves——5 Things: 9/20/19)

This week has been quite a ride, with Eric and a handful of others attending the Fortune Fish and Gourmet Expo on Monday, bringing back a whole heck of a lot of chocolate "samples," which made a great Tuesday morning "breakfast"; a ton of huge delivery and pickup orders throughout the week (on Thursday, they made 130 box lunches by 11am in the basement); and a number of us took sick days this week—hopefully the days off do the trick and the illness ends there—so we were playing with a smaller team this week. And the ride isn't over. This weekend, we'll be catering the wedding of a beloved former coworker. Who says all the fun has to stay in Summer?

Last week, I mentioned that five of the top seven bestselling sandwiches at our deli are fish sandwiches, and since I'm approaching this week's blog somewhat fatigued from making dozens of each of those fish sandwiches respectively this workweek, I have opted to tell you a little bit about each of them, in no particular order.

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The Cajun Finn

The sandwich: Haus-baked ciabatta roll, scallion cream cheese, Cajun Smoked Atlantic Salmon, pepperoncini, roasted red pepper, lettuce.

There is not much to say about the Cajun Finn that hasn't already been said. As a sandwich that easily outpaces the combined sales of half of the other sandwiches on our menu, it doesn't really need any further advertising. I mean, our marketing department still occasionally invests some time into telling you about it—heck, I'm doing it right now—but the rolling snowball that became an avalanche that is this sandwich became that way primarily through word-of-mouth, both literally, and via its generous inclusion in peoples' blog posts and social media chatter. A large percentage of our online reviews contain its name, sometimes even the negative reviews leave space for a caveat about the Cajun Finn being our saving grace (apologies to those reviewers for whatever happened to go wrong—likely our wait time on a busy day—but we're glad you enjoyed the sandwich nonetheless).

The Cajun Finn is available as a sandwich kit.

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The Sitka Sushi

The sandwich: Hero roll, wasabi mayo, sriracha, sliced cabbage, cucumber, gravlax, pickled ginger, cilantro, sesame oil & rice vinegar.

The Sitka Sushi: my first favorite Smokehaus sandwich and number-one recommendation. The name and contents are a nod to Eric's time in Sitka, Alaska. Formerly, we made it with ginger- and lemon-cured Alaskan Sockeye gravlax, which was deeply flavorful, but a little tough and unwieldy. Recently we have switched over to a softer, more buttery, traditional Scandinavian style of gravlax, made with Atlantic salmon, but the sandwich still packs a punch.

Imagine a rich musical chord, composed of interwoven consonances (cabbage and gravlax, bread and oil, cucumber) and dissonances (wasabi mayo and sriracha, cilantro and pickled ginger), rolled from the bass up the highest note, then sustained, with hidden, aleatoric melodies discovering themselves and chiming out all the while. Then, transpose that chord into a flavor pallet, and imagine every bite—thoroughly savored—as a new re-rolling of that chord.

That's how the Sitka Sushi hits.

The Slammin' Gordon

The sandwich: Naan, Smoked Salmon Pâté, diced tomatoes & cucumbers, cilantro, lettuce, olive oil & rice vinegar.

When I began working at Northern Waters Smokehaus, there was a sandwich called the Salmon Garden. Within days (it seemed), the sign for that sandwich had two vowels scribbled over, and became the Salmon Gordon. A few months passed, and then we had the Slammin' Gordon on our hands, and everyone just pretended like nothing happened. Here ends the very incomplete, abridged history of the sandwich formerly known as the Salmon Garden.

Smoked Salmon Pâté is delightful, due in part to the blend of our haus Salmon seasonings—dill, cajun, black pepper & coriander—working as a team to bring you this flavor, which is rounded out with garlic, lemon juice and horseradish. So if you spread it on our most decadent bread option—not only is the naan incredibly soft and pillowy, but also quite buttery—something good is bound to happen. The veggies and greens give enough of a nod to health-consciousness that it doesn't just feel like dessert.

The Northern Bagel

The sandwich: Lake Superior Bakehouse bagel, scallion cream cheese, Traditional Smoked Atlantic Salmon or gravlax.

This sandwich is great because it its simplicity of form belies its complexity of flavor. Lake Superior Bakehouse Bagels are so good you could probably just take a bite out of an uncut, un-toasted one and have a decent time. Add to that the sweetness and pungency of Traditional Smoked Atlantic Salmon, or buttery, spice-infused gravlax, and round it off with the earthy umami of scallion cream cheese, and your mouth and olfactory system have some serious flavors to sort out. Furthermore, it reads as a breakfast sandwich, eats like lunch, and isn't half bad at the end of the day either.

The Northern Bagel is also available as a Sandwich Kit.

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The Great Summer Caper

The sandwich: Lake Superior Bakehouse bagel, scallion cream cheese, capers, Black Pepper & Coriander Smoked Atlantic Salmon, red onion, tomato, lettuce.

I have to say—delicious as this sandwich is, I still remain skeptical of it. For starters, it's a very seasonal name, and yet—it persists on our board, due to sales. Secondly, it is a very tall stack of ingredients, which are very delicious together, but once stacked and cut in half, like to fall over—which is fine if presentation is unimportant, but ultimately a challenge in the middle of a rush. Still, this is a fantastic stack of ingredients. It's the mature version of the Northern Bagel.

A final note:

Tomorrow (Saturday, September 21st) at the Friends of the Boundary Waters Fundraiser, they'll be auctioning off a special NWS prize: the rights to name a new smoked salmon sandwich on our menu, which will run through Spring 2020. I can't wait to see Fishy McFishface on the menu.

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5 (or so) Reflections on the Summer Scavenger Hunt

The 2nd Annual NWS Summer Scavenger Hunt came to a close on Tuesday, August 27th, shortly after the following clue was published: "Kol's Stand and the Field of the North." This was, in retrospect, a very easy-to-decode clue.

There were five prize-winning magnets hidden this year, as opposed to last year's twenty (in honor of our twentieth anniversary), and that meant that each location had to be more challenging than the previous year. Whether we achieved that goal is debatable—week one, the magnet (hidden nearby Observation Dog Park) was discovered within hours; and week two, the hiding spot—near the Duluth Farmer's Market—was uncovered by Tuesday, probably due to the heavy rain on Monday.

Week three, as an act of—I don't know—vengeance(?), the first clue posted on our social media accounts led to the beginning of an extensive and forking path of clues throughout the Spirit Valley area. Then the first clue IRL went missing, and as the week progressed, we just handed out clues leading further down the path, until the magnet was discovered on Friday—within a block of the first real-world clue.

Personally, I—the Huntmaster—enjoyed that format the best, though with the small amount of time I could dedicate to following participants' engagement, I'm not sure it was successful. Perhaps the amount of time, resources, and effort involved in that week's hunt outweighed the value of the prize. Nevertheless, it was eventually discovered, and I took pleasure in the challenge—I had a starting point in mind, and a vague idea of an ending point, but had to come up with clues and locations to bulk up the middle in real time. So I deem it a partial success.

Week four's magnet was hidden exactly where our social media accounts directed participants, in Gichi-Ode' Akiing park, on the Lakewalk. With the massive construction project happening on Superior Street, it may have been an unappealing spot to check out, or participants may have just been worn-out and jaded from the previous week. However, the popularity of the Lakewalk and the Music in the HART series brought people to the area throughout the week.

That magnet was found on the final day of clues, though the previous week's winner formally requested the ability to "find" it days earlier, since they knew the precise location. We said no, because we have principles, and we remembered to write "one magnet per participant" in the rules and guidelines this year. This particular individual is also a friend and an understanding and tactful individual, so no feelings were hurt. (If you're reading this, Ryan, and your feelings were indeed hurt, I apologize for misrepresenting your emotional state.)

The final week, I got to revisit the neighborhood where I grew up. The neighborhood appears vibrant and well-loved, and my childhood home had been neither burned down nor demolished. It felt good. Except for when I immediately notice that the wooded area behind my childhood home—basically Narnia to me and my friends—is for sale for commercial development. That was a feel-bad moment, but that, I suppose is the price of progress. Let me know if you'd like to contribute to my Kickstarter to purchase it, turn it into my own druid grove, and defend it tooth-and-nail from the onslaught of ceaseless development.

Wow, that was a downer! If you have any thoughts on how to improve our Scavenger Hunt next year, share in the comments, or email me at ned@nwsmokehaus.com

A few bonus things:

For the sake of advertising the business-side of our business, here's a couple of noteworthy Things™:

The best mail order sale of the year ends at 23:59:59 on Labor Day. Or perhaps at 00:00:01 on Tuesday, September 3rd. I really couldn't say. What I can say is the discount code bluecollar gets you % off your pre-shipping cart when ordering online only.

pizza

Patricia made another awesome pizza. This week's combination was smoked Polish sausage, caramelized onions, and basil. Yum. I'm just waiting for her to do something wrong, so I can immediately let you know that she isn't an infallible beacon of culinary hope—but that time has not yet come. If you want to be on the pizza-cutting edge at NWS, check out our deli on Wednesdays. That is typically when the small batch of pizzas hits the shelves.

This is the last weekend to try the Lake Trout Experience. Lake Trout sandwiches are not something we are able to offer year-round, so if you've been waiting for us to make a Lake Trout sandwich, in an official way, and not just a heavily modified Fish Basket that you have to assemble into sandwich form yourself, get it while it's still here. Like all the other Sandwich Lab specials before it, you earn an extra punch on your Sandwich Lover Extraordinaire card, per S.L. special ordered.

As the cartoon pig says, "That's all, folks!"

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