what to do in upper lower michigan

Up North selfies with the Pappy the 25 cent forture reader.

Last weekend I made a quick pilgrimage up the mitten to spend a few days in Upper Lower Michigan with one of my dearest friends (from Dallas!), Cat.  When I was younger, my relatives (mostly great aunts and uncles) owned a fully-functioning farm (crops, livestock, hay-baling season, barns, a grainery, breakfasts of eggs from our own chickens, dinners of milk from our own cows, potatoes from our own fields, and hamburger ground up from our own cows, wood burning stoves & million year old beds you had to clean the dead hornet bodies off of before you could sleep) up in Cheboygan, MI, which we used to go spend weeks at a time at - something I didn't appreciate at all as a child, and now would kill to be able to experience as an adult (isn't that how it always goes?).

As a tiny kid I loved spending all day outside chasing barn cats & catching the tiny kittens under the idea that I could domesticate them & someday talk my mother into letting me bring one home.  As I got older, I graduated to begging my dad to take me golfing with him (AKA he golfed while I drove the cart and ate candy bars, and then we went and played some riveting mini-golf afterward) I remember being so bored by the farm as a kid that I literally brought my little 13" TV set and video game console up there so I could plug it in on the dusty couch in the "living room" & play Suikoden III all day long.  Seriously.  I could kick myself now - but to be fair, 16 year old me had no idea I'd one day be more obsessed with the idea of homesteading than with console gaming.

So I hadn't been up to Upper Lower Michigan for a number of years, and god knows when I ever planned on going again, until Cat revealed she was going to be in Michigan visiting her family who run the Dam Site Inn (shameless plug: this place is THE LITERAL BEST family style chicken dinner type restaurant I have ever been to in my life, and this is coming from someone who's been going to Frankenmuth, both Bavarian Inn & Zehnders, for just about as long as I've been alive), which is only about 20 minutes from my family's digs, and thus began a yearly tradition of Upper Lower Michigan excursions.

Extra lovely Polish family luncheon at Legs Inn.

In my church jeans (forgot to pack a pair that weren't oversized comfy travel pants...) overlooking the gorgeous Michigan coast.

Polish platter - veggies, three kinds of pierogi, kielbasa, sauerkraut, & golabki with the world's best sauce ever.

After a few visits we've sussed out our very favorite spots - we spent this past weekend revisiting all of them.  I haven't been up north during the fall in quite a while, and it's absolutely beautiful this time of year.  The leaves had all turned gorgeous shades of orange and bright red, and other than a dreary, rainy early Saturday, it was absolutely beautiful.  There isn't a lot to do up north except eat, but there were surprisingly few tourists, so we really got to experience the slow, easy pace of the area, indulging in a whole lot of whiskey sours, a bar simply called, "BAR," about a million fudge and popcorn samples, rice krispie treat tea, and homemade Dam Site noodles (thanks to the seriously awesome generosity and hospitality of the owners - thanks again for being amazing!).

My dream, since my first time at the Dam Site meeting everybody, has been to see it during all of its Halloween glory.  This year I finally got my wish.

Nothing is cooler than Pam's hundreds (literally) of super intricately carved pumpkins. I can't even fathom gutting all of these - or how many seeds you'd go through.

I love the wolves!!

The best breakfast in Pellston (or anywhere thereabouts).

My usual - 2 eggs over easy, 2 sausage patties, and 2 blueberry pancakes with fresh local maple syrup.  I judge diner blueberry pancakes by how blue the berries turn the batter, and these ones rank exceptionally high.

This is what cider mills in Upper Lower Michigan get up to......so cute!!

It's a huge shame that the family farm isn't up and running anymore (though we do still own the land & it is still standing, just non-operational), but we still have lots of family in the area, and trips up there are so relaxing.  Cat and I got away from our yearly trips for a little while because life got in the way, but after remembering everything there is to love about Upper Lower Michigan this year we're planning on remedying that.  (Plus, there's a new brewery in Harbor Springs that I haven't made it to yet!!)

beer science is cool

It’s almost my 1 year homebrewing anniversary!  I feel like our tiny little operation has come quite a long way from when we first started, with the most basic of starter equipment, brewing with just ever-so-slightly modified partial-mash kits, working through a rough patch of some weird sort of hybrid brew-in-bag + manual sparging deal where we could literally not get our final products up above the 5% alcohol marker, to now – finally able to produce a pretty solid beer & ready to move on to a fancy pants true all-grain sparging operation.

I feel like I will never stop learning & being amazed by all the million variables that can completely make, break, or change a brewing outcome.  Every time I listen to someone talk about their brewing experiences, or go to a lecture on the process, I come away with some new bit of info that I had no idea about.  Just last week I learned that the temperature of your wort can completely change a hydrometer reading – I never realized how important it was to chill before you take readings! I think that's part of the reason I love homebrewing so much - when I was in college, my favorite classes were always the ones I had literally no previous experience with, because it felt like I was learning something truly brand new (hello Japanese, Logic, & Music Theory).  Beer is the same way - be it the science of brewing itself, or just the cool random knowledge that comes with it.

Our last two completed beers (a Rye IPA with honey & peppercorns, and a wet hop harvest ale brewed with the fruits of my very own Cascade & Centennial hop plants) were pretty damn delicious, but let me tell you how fun it is to stand over your wort pouring measuring cups full of hot water through a bag of 15 lbs of grain for 90 minutes….not very.  So, we at long last bit the bullet & bought everything we needed build ourselves a sparge unit.  My dad & our brew buddy put together the prototype sparge shelving unit & away we went.

 

There’s still a lot of work to be done before we have a finished product – not to mention the learning curve of using it (we let the water through far too quickly – a 60 minute mash was done in about 20…needless to say, we had to do some fancy guess work from there to re-saturate the grain and try to get some more sugars out).  I also made my very own yeast starter!!

I designed the recipe we used on this one from scratch, taking a “robust” style porter and giving it a fall spin – we added a chopped up & roasted, caramelized pie pumpkins first to the sparge water to steep & then to the mash for a little Halloween flair, and then saturated the boil with farm fresh Michigan maple syrup.  I also added a crap ton of biscuit malt in the hopes that the end result would taste like a warm, cozy, fall breakfast - pumpkin spice waffles with syrup & a hint of coffee. (If I get even half of that I'll be happy).

Sometimes I think the entire reason we brew, though, is for the excuse to come up with incredible new things to grill while we do it – this time around we stuffed a 4 lb pork roast with chorizo, tomatoes, raisins & almonds and let it cook away for a couple hours….godly.  I mean, just look at that beauty - I didn't even mind eating it for days afterward.

home improvements

Can't get enough of them!

For some reason the “Spring Cleaning” bug has hit me and hit me hard………in October???  Suddenly I’ve become obsessed with home improvements & finally completing a lot of projects I’ve had in the works (or have been waffling around about actually getting started on). 

I decided over a year ago that I wanted to convert the second bedroom in my condo (I live in a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom loft condominium) into a mini-studio so that I could work out from home – both in hopes that this would give me a little bit of a push to do more strength & conditioning type exercises (which I never find myself motivated to do at the gym), and so that I’d have the ability to get in a workout, quick as it may be, on days that I can’t make it to the gym, or the weather is nasty, etc., etc.  I’ve been talking about it for probably two years now, but never had the time/motivation to really bring it to fruition until this past summer when I decided now was the time, no excuses.  That room had been functioning as my “junk room” – full of an old desk, boxes of holiday decorations and things I’d never gotten around to unpacking, my old sofa, a bunch of old electronics……needless to say, it took more than a little while to clean, organize, purge, and get it ready to move everything out and tear up the carpet.  Once all that was done though, it was a pretty simple task to rip everything apart….and then wait a month for the install.


The install itself took less than a half a day, though, and the results are a million percent beautiful!

The beginning of my beautiful new space <3

The close-up!

Got in my first home workout the other day - can't wait to have the mirrors & TV all set up as well!

I got my floors through Home Depot, (they sell the materials & contract out the work), and I am SO SO impressed.  I am considering the same flooring in my bedroom in the future, and I would 100% go with the same process.  The floors look GORGEOUS – I tested them out after my Kalamazoo trip left me feeling like I needed a little extra workout in my life Sunday night, they perform great & brighten up the whole room.  I just bought two big studio mirrors to mount & spent more than I care to admit on home gym equipment so I can recreate my beloved barre classes (new obsession!) at home, as well as picking up a TV mount for the wall.  Can’t wait for the whole thing to be finished at last!

I also had an slight closet incident a few weeks ago…………

I heard a huge banging noise followed by two cats booking it out of the bedroom....never a good sign.

He seems undaunted by the disaster...

Needless to say, rather than trying to remount the one tiny shelf that came with my condominium, I went out and bought a whole new Rubbermaid closet set, which I LOVE.  I have a tiny obsession with organizational things, so this was right up my alley, and I spent an entire morning restructuring my entire (way too large) wardrobe.

I admit I may need to do a little bit of purple-hearting before this closet collapses, too.

Also re-did my bedroom at last - still a bit of decorating to go, but it's leaps and bounds above where it was.

Next up……pulling out my summer garden & decorating for Halloween!!

(FYI……..neither Home Depot nor Rubbermaid in any way shape or form sponsors me or this post & all opinions are my own!)

west michigan roadtripping

It’s October!

Even though it feels like it was literally summer for about fifteen minutes, I’m pumped for fall.  Stereotypically, I love sweaters and burning leaves and pumpkin everything and apple picking and all things Halloween.  I also love the crisp fall weather (I broke out a pair of yoga pants for an evening walk the other day and I can’t remember ever being so comfy before in my life).  Of course, thus far it still feels mostly like late summer – which is making me crazy because that first taste of fall has me itching for it to get cooler, even though I’m not really ready to stop wearing dresses every day and go back to dress pants for work.

I’ve been saying goodbye to summer with a slew (okay two) of West Michigan roadtrips.  Western Michigan University is my Alma Mater, and I have a ton of nostalgic feelings associated with the four years I spent living on that side of the state while I was in school, so I never pass up an opportunity to go back.  In early September, my best friend in all the world turned 28 and on her birthday Taking Back Sunday, The Used, & Frank Iero and the Cellabration were playing in Grand Rapids, so a group of us journeyed out there to spent an evening moshing (like old people) and drinking microbrews.

My very favorites!

I saw these guys in April; saw them again in September, loved every second just as much.

At The Hideout in Grand Rapids you can get a "flight" that consists of literally one of every beer they have on tap.

Special props to the 9am Hazelnut IPA, the Maple Oak Pilsner, & the Cinnamon Red Velvet Ale.

The presents my boys sent me home with - AKA why I love them the very best.

It was truly the best time – I almost felt like it was MY birthday, surrounded by my favorite people, listening to one of my favorite bands, and coming home loaded up with a stock pile of beer courtesy of three separate GR/Kalamazoo/Flint-centric friends.

Not to mention we had decorated Alyssa in a fancy blinking crown which we surrendered to the mosh pit during TBS’ late song (makedamnsure) - & it just happened to crop up again the next morning…..!

I also had another Kalamazoo visit planned for late September – it was a quick one, but jam-packed with (surprise!) beer and adventures.  Last summer my college bestie Tom and I took a quick southwestern Michigan beer tour – but we didn’t make it quite all the way down the side of the state, so we’ve been planning the follow-up ever since.  With an entire beautiful day laid out in front of us, we got extra-motivated and decided to drive all the way out to 3 Floyd’s in Indiana, the mecca of metal music/weird Asian fusion style/super hoppy beers with outrageous names. 

It was a little disappointing that they didn’t have cases of Zombie Dust, but we made out with some bombers of Arctic Panzer Wolf, Broodoo, & Chevalier, not to mention a glorious cheese platter, and more than a few half pints.  Standouts included Secret Sub Lair, Space Station Middle Finger, and my favorite weird experimental beer of the journey, Oh Myyyy Takei, made with sake & kolsch yeast. Um, YUM!

The line outside of 3 Floyd's........at 12:30 (they open at noon).

Showing off the spoils!

And the locale <3

The very best part about 3 Floyd's is a solid toss-up between the beer itself, and the names of said beers.

WAR MULLET.

We also hit up (for the MI part of our tour) Pleasant House (where we ate a lunch of the best pasties in the universe), Greenbush and Tapistry, with a side jaunt over to Journeyman Distillery (that gin, though...) before calling it quits for the day (two breweries shy of what we had planned – we’ll get you next time, Cravings & Arclight!), heading back to Kalamazoo, and collapsing with a gross amount of Big Burrito, more beer, and a night full of Hyrule Warriors.

The best pasties I've ever had - steak & ale, traditional, and mushroom & kale. Plus peas & mint.

Quality ales - Snobbler is one of the best browns I've ever had.

Beautiful evening at Greenbush.

Ring of tasters - including a cherry porter that's my new favorite thing in the world.

Getting the crap side-eyed out of me at Tapistry by my college BFF while I drink blood oranges & oatmeal cookies.

Should have bought it.

Picked this comfy beauty up from the Greenbush general store!

The next morning of course was the traditional Crow’s Nest breakfast (the literally BEST brunch spot I have ever experienced in all 28 years of my life - I make a trip every time I get out to Kalamazoo) before I headed back to Michigan to resume normal life…….officially the worst ever.  

Omelette with sausage, mushrooms, sun-dried tomato, pesto, red pepper aioli & house made zucchini bread. No brunch is greater than Crow's Nest brunch.

I already miss my Kalamafriends, but I’m looking forward to my next weekend adventure – Northern Michigan bar hopping next weekend!!

ziplining in the dark

Last summer I did a glow-themed night 5k at Camp Dearborn and it was wonderful - not only did it feel great to run at night when it was a little cooler, but the environment at the park was fabulous. Campers with glow necklaces and sparklers say outside of their trailers with Christmas lights strung along them and cheered us on as we did two laps around the gorgeous evening scenery & I PRed my 5k time by over a minute!

The point of the story is that a bunch of friends and I have been talking about going to Adventure Park ropes course & ziplining for a long time & last Friday they were having a special "glow night", I remembered how fabulous that run was, and we were sold.

Suited up and ready to go (we thought).

Adventure Park calls itself an "aerial forest park," which is actually a pretty apt description. The park has 20 different "trails" of platforms in the trees connected by various arrangements of ropes, cables, wood and ziplines that form bridges between platforms. It all looks like a fun easy romp through an obstacle course, but IT IS NOT.

Coworker bonding time!

Being the badasses we are, after getting
our harnesses and going through the safety briefing, we decided immediately to start with the mid-level course, which put us 10 feet up in the air to begin and lulled us into an incredibly false sense of security about degree of difficulty. Fresh off of some pretty basic (though challenging) rope bridges & some awesome ziplines through the trees, we decided to conquer the next harder course (actually we tried to skip to an even harder one, but were chastised by some employees).

The second course took me and two of my brave friends 20 feet up in the air and began with a deceptively easy bridge, ladder, and zipline...and then immediately went crazy. Let me tell you, being short is NOT an advantage at a ropes course. At one point I got tangled up between my cable clips and the cables holding the platform up, swaying back and forth 20 feet above the ground and 10 feet away from a platform, had to back up to right the situation and finish crossing super awkwardly and oh yeah, the park lights died right in the middle of all this!! My lucky friends were safely back on the previous platform, as only one person is allowed on an obstacle at a time, while I clung for dear life to a tiny cable and inched my way forward until I finally made it to the next platform (but not before two more mini light failures!).

We did all (well, the six of us who opted to try it) make it through the blue course & were rewarded with a 20-foot free jump/repel at the end - once you convinced yourself it was okay to jump off of a platform that high off the ground into the pitch black, it was a grand old time.

I opted to leave my phone in my car (because I definitely saw myself dropping it from 20 feet up and being faced with hundreds of dollars in replacement fees), but we did grab a couple pictures as we were walking around before it got dark out.

We never made it to those impossible looking triangles, but we'll get you next time, double black!!

At times the course felt like it was never going to end, and I found myself dreading the next obstacle - but my friends & I pushed each other to finish, and honestly despite how I felt at the time, the adrenaline rush was amazing, and it was a really cool experience to find new ways to push my body's limits. It was crazy how much of the challenge was all mental - the biggest challenge of all was having to force your mind to override when your body says no.   It was so easy to forget that when you jumped on a platform onto the zipline, you'd be sitting in your harness - the whole time my brain was screaming at me that there was nooooo way I had the upper body strength to hang on for the whole length of the rope.  But in retrospect, I had so much fun!  We're all still talking about the trials and tribulations of the zipline, and planning to go back and conquer the black and double black courses. And, to top it off, it was a serious no joke upper body workout. I was feeling it for days!!

(And of course, afterwards we chose to reward our weary bodies with a pineapple/feta/jalapeno pizza and a night of watching Little Shop of Horrors like the bunch of nerds we are - so all is well that ends well.)

fermentation 101

David Klingenberger getting ready to teach us all how to ferment everything ever.

This post is a week overdue, so excuse my tardiness (as always), but the experience was so cool I can't help but backtrack a little.

David showing off the fermentation room.

A few months ago I discovered this really fantastic local foods vendor at The Eastern Market in Detroit.  Initially I was drawn in because they sold kimchi (which was my obsession at the time - seriously, but have you ever had a burger with peanut butter and kimchi, because if not, get your butt to Green Dot Stables and eat like twelve), but I ended up walking away with a jar of their Sea Stag sauerkraut - sauerkraut made with cabbage, carrots, burdock root & most excitingly, a bunch of sea vegetables (which I love love love).  From that point on every time I went to Eastern Market I'd treat myself to some new sort of fermented yum from The Brinery (and of course some new wonderful flavor of peanut butter from The Granola Tree - excuse me for a moment while I pimp their Almond Joy peanut butter as one of the most fantastic things that's ever been in my mouth - but that's besides the point).

Flash forward to last month when I heard about a workshop the owner of The Brinery was doing on lacto-fermentation - it involved a small "seminar" of sorts about the process of fermenting, a taste-testing of many Brinery products, a tour of their new facility at The Washtenaw County Food Hub (which is also a seriously cool place currently in development to support local farm & food businesses through a myriad of really awesome future plans), a hands-on workshop where you got to make your own sauerkraut, and a lunch prepared with loads of fermented delicacies.  It might not be the same sort of fermentation I'm used to (aka beer), but I couldn't help but want to go.

A little background about The Brinery:  It was founded by David in 2010 basically because the farm he worked at, Tantre Farm, had an excess of cabbage one year, and the fermentation was needed to preserve it.  From there, he developed the business into what it is now - serving tons of local farmers markets, even shipping out of state, and growing into a 10-ish employee operation that just recently moved into a new home at the Food Hub.  The coolest thing about The Brinery to me is their product innovation - recipes are my favorite thing about brewing beer, especially coming up with new and unique spins on old standards.  While you can get regular plain old sauerkraut at The Brinery, you can also get sauerkraut with watermelon radishes, sea vegetables, juniper berries, kimchi with local garlic scapes and ramps, pickled beets and carrots, multiple kinds of kvass, and most recently they've forayed into making their own tempeh (which I promise is incredible) and hot sauces (including a fermented play on sriracha!).

I also appreciate David's philosophy on doing things with "assisted manpower" - for example, they still ferment in relatively small batches in barrels, rather than using giant vats or any sort of automated system - but they have special-made machinery to lift & dump the barrels.  Different canvas, but when we were chopping cabbage and leeks and carrots to make into our own batch of sauerkraut, it felt just like being in my garage mashing peaches and portioning out hops for my next batch of beer.  Pretty cool.  Not to mention David was a remarkably personable & friendly guy - he stopped to chat with everyone in attendance, shared his exuberance for the craft and, when he found out I brew beer, even offered a trade - I left him with a bottle of chocolate porter & a bottle of coffee milk stout in exchange for some really great hot sauce.  Fermentation friends!

The Brinery fermentation calendar - kraut might be a little different than beer, but it was really cool (and maybe useful someday!) to see how a smaller scale business operates, especially with regard to things you aren't normally privileged to see, like scheduling!

Chopping up some cabbage (no worries - there was a mandoline & we didn't have to do it all by hand!), leeks, carrots & garlic for our own special batch of sauerkraut.

One of the other attendees offered to take some shots for me while we were mixing up our future kraut - I guess we both figured my briney hands shouldn't be anywhere near my phone.

The lunch provided at the end of the day was the icing on a really awesome cabbage cake - highlights were the black pepper tempeh salad (I went back for seconds...and thirds...), a bevy of fresh local veggies & cheeses, and of course the mounds of not pictured here sauerkraut & kimchi that littered the table.

I've done a decent amount of making jams & pickling, but this is my first foray into sauerkraut.  My batch from this workshop is still chilling on my countertop getting funky, but if all goes well I'm hoping to make my way into kimchi next!!