5 Ways NWS Can Help You Win the Holidays

First of all, welcome back to 5 Things™, returning on an atypical day after an atypical absence. We're right on the cusp of my favorite holiday, Halloween, so I'm feeling festive. This week's edition is a special one, focused on our upcoming holiday mail order season, and the many ways in which Northern Waters Smokehaus can help you "win" the holidays.

It's an audacious claim to make, but I'm somewhat certain that by the end of this article, you'll have a clear advantage over your holiday competition. No longer will your guests be "saving room" for more exciting meals to come, leaving you with an abundance of leftovers to deal with in the following weeks, and if they do, hey, you've got Smokehaus leftovers.

Here we go, in no particular order:

1. Roast a whole hunk of meat:

We've got options: our smoked Berkshire ham, smoke-roasted porketta, maple-sage smoked Ferndale Market turkey breast, and smoked pastrami are all guaranteed to launch your guests' taste buds right into the stratosphere, and preparation is simple enough: braise alongside some choice seasonal vegetables, allow to cool, carve to perfection, profit.

Here's a handful of ideas to get the brain moving:

2. Catch "The Worm" with our Early Bird sale:

Oof. That's a gross one, but, low-hanging fruit that it was, I had to go for it. Would it have been better if I'd said, "The Proverbial Worm?" Perhaps.

More about our actual Early Bird sale follows:

October 24th through November 14th, you can take 15% off your cart when ordering online, by entering the coupon code earlybird19 before checkout.

15% off everything is nothing at which to shake a stick, unless you're shaking that stick with joy. Here are the sales's details:

• You can use the code on as many transactions as you like, within the timeframe of the sale.

• The 15% discount applies on everything except items already affected by another sale, and is applied before shipping costs.

• The discount cannot be combined with other coupons.

• As long as you finalize the transaction within the sale's timeframe, you can have your items shipped whenever you like. Perfect for planning your holidays ahead of schedule.

3. Read some of our previous blog posts about NWS and the holidays:

While I've got some great ideas for improving the proverbial wheel, now isn't the time to re-invent it.

Here's a handful of links to previous years' writings about NWS Mail Order and the holiday season.

4. Memorize these cutoff dates:

For those who prefer to wait until the last minute, whether it's waiting for that holiday bonus to clear, or simply living on the edge, these are the hard-and-fast cutoff dates you ought to remember:

Tuesday, November 19th – Last day to order to receive before Thanksgiving. Wednesday, November 20th for Minnesota

residential shipping addresses.

Tuesday, December 17th – Last day to order to receive before Christmas. Wednesday, December 18th for Minnesota

residential shipping addresses.

Wednesday, December 18th – Last Day of Shipping before Christmas AND New Year's Eve

Tuesday, December 24th through Sunday, January 5th 2020 – NO SHIPPING! Mail Order Office closed for the holidays.

Monday, January 6th 2020 – Normal shipping schedule resumes.

Keep these dates in mind and you'll have your favorite NWS goodies on hand, on time

5. Don't forget about these upcoming holiday deals:

Pigs in Space is our special Cyber Monday deal. From 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. (00:00:01 - 23:59:59) on Monday, December 2nd, Minnesota and Midwest orders will have free shipping, and continental shipping will be half-price.

Holiday Gift Card Frenzy is the working title I'm giving to our annual gift card sale. For every $100 of gift cards purchased—whether $10x10, $20x5, $50x2, $100x1, or some combination of the like—you'll receive a bonus $20 gift card, and there's no known limit on how many bonus gift cards you can accumulate. 20% back for yourself, or to spread the gifting a little further, is pretty great. Offer available in-store only (whether you wait in line, or order in-advance for pickup), online gift cards do not apply.

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5 Things: August 23rd, 2019

Summer isn't over yet, but the morning air is crisper, and the pace of life is slowing down. The tall ships have come and gone, the flood of students is just beginning to trickle into town. Walking past our deli, it may not always appear this way, but life is on the calmer side, at least for a few weeks.

But that doesn't mean life at the Smokehaus is any less interesting.

We have new faces in the deli.

Faces.

For those keeping score, over the past few weeks we've steadily mentioned that we're hiring, and as a result, we already have a handful of new staff training in. I'd caution the world to be patient with and/or kind to them, since they are new and the pace of our little deli can be overwhelming, but they're already performing like seasoned veterans.

Labor Day Mail Order Sale.

Labor Daybor

Beginning August 26th, we're running a mail order special: 20% off your cart (online only) when you enter the discount code bluecollar. The sale runs through Labor Day (9/2). However, if you want your food to arrive in time for Labor Day weekend celebrations, place your order by Tuesday, August 27th—those orders will be shipped on Wednesday (8/28) and arrive by Friday (8/30). Otherwise, you can schedule your shipping date for whenever you'd like. Pro-tip: this is the best mail order sale of the year, so if you know exactly what you want to order for Fall and Winter holidays, this is a good time to do it.

Speaking of Mail Order, here's our updated holiday shipping schedule: [Outdated link removed - Ed.]

Bookmark this page as an easy reference when ordering for holidays, and you'll be guaranteed to get your orders at the perfect interval for gifting or entertaining. Become the master of your own destiny; know for yourself exactly when to place orders, and when to have them shipped for best results.

Monday night D&D returns to The Midnight Axe.

Images unrelated.

The Summer season of our unofficial office Dungeons and Dragons crew is coming to a close with a short adventure tying us back into our ongoing campaign, right before our DM heads on an extended vacation, leaving us to fend for ourselves.

This Summer, we set our main campaign to the side, in order to focus on a handful of smaller, unconnected adventures. Not only did this allow each of us to test out a number of character ideas, and novel settings, but it also gave us time to miss our main characters, as distance does indeed make the heart grow fonder.

"The Midnight Axe" is the name—generated by rolling percentile dice against a chart of fantasy party names—of our primary party. When we're not embroiled in a scavenger hunt for a cache of money embezzled long ago from the treasury of the Manhattan-esque city of Waterdeep, and avoiding/averting the frequent pitfalls of gangs whose rivalry we earned incidentally, we're just trying to earn a mostly-honest living running a tavern called The Malt Solstice. However, some way or another, we've gained some notoriety as adventurers—and it's drawn some public interest.

In our session on Monday, Harrison (our Dungeon Master) presented each of us with three characters (shout out to Harrison for developing fifteen character concepts in a single weekend) who are looking, for one reason or another, to join our ranks. This coming session, we'll be embarking on a mission with our chosen secondary characters to discover their strengths, and how they'll fit into our adventuring party. Perhaps they'll join us on the front lines, perhaps they'll stick around headquarters and craft potions nonstop, perhaps they'll alternate between venturing into the Undermountain (where our campaign has us heading) and providing security at the Malt Solstice. Only time will tell.

Character biographies forthcoming.

Patricia's corner.

Let's get personal.

Let's get one thing straight: Any week that there are not five immediately obvious other Things™ to talk about, Patricia is going to get a nod. Ever since she moved to full-time baking, we've become accustomed to carrying an assortment of cookies—chocolate chip, ginger, peanut butter curry, carrot cake cookie sandwiches with honey cream cheese, coconut macaroons (which are gluten-free*), and most recently chocolate walnut flourless cookies (also gluten-free**)—pasties, cheddar crackers, savory scones, and even personal pizzas. This week's pizza featured smoked bacon, blackberries, and chèvre, and her pizza sauce, in general, is composed of the odds-and-ends bits of tomato from the morning's prep.

That's honestly one of the best things about Patricia's approach to baking for NWS—by utilizing more parts of the foods we use, we generate substantially less waste as a business, which improves our model of sustainability (not to mention profitability) overall, and in the process, we end up with these delicious, fan-favorite items in our deli

*/**: It's worth noting that these are not baked in a completely gluten-free environment. In terms of ingredients, they are entirely gluten-free, but those at serious risk should be aware of the chance of cross-contamination.

I got to observe production of Country Pâté.

Observe.

Compiling recipes for the cookbook is great fun, but not without its challenges. In addition to needing to massively scale down some recipes—we're operating under the assumption you'll never need to make one-hundred pounds of Smoked Whitefish at home—other recipes in our own workbooks lack, well, instruction.

Country pâté, for example, is just a list of ingredients, which our skilled production crew understands how to massage—eh, grind—into the savory loaves we all love. Brandt happened to catch me during a fresh air break yesterday to let me know he was making it.

Seeing that static list of ingredients—browned bacon and onion; Berkshire liver, pork and back fat; brandy; cure; rosemary and thyme; etc.—ground once and then half again (to achieve the preferred inconsistent consistency), mixed with what could reasonably pass as TLC, and packaged to chill overnight before being packed into loaf pans and slow-cooked, was enlightening, and proof that someone needs to write down those steps, because there's a lot of them. If not for our own benefit, certainly for the book.

Once again, I'd like to give a public shout-out to the smokers for the sheer volume of high-quality product they consistently churn out.

I've done it again. Yesterday, I stared at my week's notes and wondered, "which five Things™ am I going to write about? Are there five Things™ that may intrigue or inspire our readership(?)," and here I am, writing Thing™ six-and-a-half. I hope you're happy.

We hope to see you in our deli this weekend—whether you wait in line, or skip the line via pickup —or your name and address in our delivery system. If you're going to be near Canal Park/Downtown, make sure you bring ear protection, because the Tribute Fest will be rocking hard.

Stay tuned in the next handful of weeks for some new sandwich options—including your blogger's own contribution to the Sandwich Lab specials—and exciting collaborations.

NWS HAS A NEW LOYALTY PROGRAM!

Good news, everyone! We've finally depleted our inventory of sandwich cards, which means we've rolled out our NEW LOYALTY PROGRAM! One free sandwich/salad per ten sandwiches/salads was a pretty sweet deal, but we wanted to shake things up, so we devised a new system to give you more rewards, more frequently.

Introducing the Sandwich Lover Extraordinaire card:

The former sandwich card worked as follows: Each sandwich/salad you purchase earned you one stamp on the card.* Ten stamps earned you one free sandwich/salad.

The new program works as follows: Twenty-one little fish; eighteen red, three blue. Each sandwich/salad you purchase earns you one hole punched red fish. Every six punches along the way, you earn earn the rights to a new prize, which can be redeemed immediately, or at your leisure. When you redeem your reward, we'll punch a hole in the respective blue fish.

Once you have purchased 18 sandwiches/salads, you'll have earned all three perks along the way. Maybe you used them as you got them, maybe you redeem all three at once after purchasing that eighteenth sandwich/salad. Maybe you redeem all three at once the next time you come in, or maybe you redeem them individually the next three times you come in. It's entirely up to you.

We will still honor completed "old" sandwich cards!

If you have filled out a ten-stamped sandwich card during the course of our previous loyalty program, you still get that free sandwich—and the stamps of any incomplete sandwich cards are transferrable to the new loyalty card.

So, what are the prizes?!

After six punches: One free snack stick ("buddy"), based on availability. Whether it's a Big Jim hatch chile beef stick, a Royale With Cheese bacon-cheeseburger stick, a Smokehaus classic Bison Buddy, or a Smoked Salmon Buddy, you're in for a treat.

After twelve punches: One free sandwich/salad. We've got a handful of options.

After eighteen punches: One free half-pound chunk of Smoked Atlantic Salmon—traditional, cajun, dill, or black pepper & coriander.

Why are you waiting? Start a Sandwich Lover Extraordinaire card today and begin reaping the rewards!

*Sandwich Lab specials—such as the Lake Trout Situation we're currently running—earn you two punches per unit purchased.

5 Things: August 9th, 2019

There's a whole bunch of things going on at the tip of Lake Superior this weekend. Before I get into discussing the week and weekend to come, I'd like to remind you that our pickup and delivery services are a great way to skip the line (except August 11th through 13th), and that Cajun-seasoned cheese curds are back in-stock in our grab & go case.

The Festival of Sail arrives this weekend. The tall ships and an enormous rubber duck will begin showing up today, and will remain in our harbor through Tuesday, August 13th. The Festival officially kicks off on Sunday morning, with a grand parade from 9-11 a.m. In previous years, the draw of this event has effectively doubled the population of our city. And that's not the only festival taking place this weekend. Friday and Saturday, the 31st annual Bayfront Blues Festival will take up residence in—you guessed it—Bayfront Festival Park. The Blues Fest draws around twenty thousand attendees each year, and consistently features high-caliber blues artists from around the world.

Another Sandwich Lab creation debuted in our deli. The Lake Trout Situation is Jacob's homage to the classic New England lobster roll and the Jersey Shore. Featuring a smoky, sweet lake trout salad, sliced red cabbage, and wasabi mayo atop a slice of buttery, toasted white bread, this sandwich is served open-faced (for hotdog-style consumption) and garnished with cilantro and crispy smoked pancetta crumbles. It's available for $10+tax in our deli & via delivery.

The Scavenger Hunt continues. The first week, a participant found the magnet within hours—next to the Observation Park dog park. This week, it was found on the second day—on the back of a sign at the Duluth Farmer's Market. With three weeks to go, and 7 superfluous clues written so far, I have something special planned for next week, so stay on your toes. The next clue comes out on Monday, August 12th. Follow us on our social media pages and check out the rules here to participate.

Patricia is at it again! This time with vegetarian tofu pasties, in addition to her standard array of cookies, crackers, and pasties. Our baking department, which also boasts two skilled breadmakers in Jerry and Adison (whom I don't praise enough on this blog, as they have supplied all of our rye, white bread, and ciabatta needs through the Summer), have developed a brilliant selection of high-quality hausmade breads and sweets. I don't ever want to go back to a world before the Smokehaus had dedicated bakers on-staff.

Did someone say "party?"

We're having a fish fry! The summer season is hardly coming to a close, but we're already starting to say goodbye to the seasonal hands on deck, and a handful of other coworkers/friends leaving for school, adventures in new cities, and at least one dream job opportunity. So we're taking an evening to celebrate, this Sunday, with a small gathering for our staff. Fried whitefish, smoked chicken wings, coleslaw, and crinkle-cut fries are on the menu, and my mouth is already watering two days in advance. Hopefully, the Sunday closing staff will be able to make it out of Canal Park! The deli will be open normal hours—10 a.m. to 6 p.m.—on Sunday.

Now that you've read this week's 5 Things™, go out and have a good rest of your day.