June 3, 2024 Lunch - Bagels shmeared with cream cheese and garnished with onion, white fish, avocado and salad greens. Dinner - Pappardelle Pasta in a tomato, garlic cream sauce with mushrooms, parsley, onion, sugar snap peas, and red snapper topped with burrata.

June 3, 2024 Lunch - Bagels shmeared with cream cheese and garnished with onion, white fish, avocado and salad greens.  Dinner - Pappardelle Pasta in a tomato, garlic cream sauce with mushrooms, parsley, onion, sugar snap peas, and red snapper topped with burrata.

Today we rested until 10:30. Suzette made coffee and I heated milk to almost a foam and added coffee and ate three oatmeal cookies with it for breakfast.

Then we sliced bagels into three slices toasted two each and shmeared each slice with cream cheese and garnished each with onion, white fish, avocado and salad greens and at 11:30 drove south to Lexington State Park where we walked down to the beach, along the beach and back up to a picnic table near the top of the cliff with a great view of Lake Huron and ate our bagel slices and drank 2022 Reserve Mont Redon Côtes du Rhône 

Then we drove into Lexington and bought gas and went to Jess’ Grocery store where we bought a chocolate cake and a bag of marshmallows.

Then we drove down to a public park with access to a jetty around a state boat harbor that protected it like a refuge from storms. I walked half way to the end and Suzette walked all the way. I still walked 4000 steps today.

We then drove back to the cottage and. Checked the market close. Nvda was not up $43., AppL was up over a $1.00, and Meta was up over $10.00, so another very good day for the portfolio.

When Suzette said,  “Let’s go get some wood,”

I replied, “Sure.”

We drove north almost to Sanilac before we found a bundle of wood on the side of the road for sale.

We then returned to the cottage and drank vermouths near the deck with a view of Lake Huron and Suzette made us a tapa of a slice of rye bread spread with mashed avocado.

Then at 6:30 we started cooking. Tonight’s meal was Pappardelle pasta topped with tomato, garlic cream sauce with sautéed mushrooms, parsley, onion, sugar snap peas, and red snapper topped with burrata.0

It was delicious with a few sips of Buglioni Il Desparato.

After dinner we made a fire in the fire pit and roasted marshmallows and ate cake with them and drank the last glassed of Reserve Mont Redon and talked to our neighbors from Hamilton, Canada.o

We went to bed at 11:00.

Bon Appetit

June 1, 2024 Lunch - Wings in Port Huron, Michigan. Dinner - Pappardelle paste with fish stew, sautéed fresh tomato, mushroom, red snapper, garlic, asparagus, onion, and sugar snap peas garnished with burrata cheese and parsley.

June 1, 2024 Lunch - Wings in Port Huron, Michigan. Dinner - Pappardelle paste with fish stew, sautéed fresh tomato, mushroom, red snapper, garlic, asparagus, onion, and sugar snap peas garnished with burrata cheese and parsley.

We got up and at 8:00 loaded the car and ate breakfast at the Inn. Yogurt, granola, fresh blueberries, and strawberries and hard boiled eggs, muffins, cranberry bread and cream cheese. Another example of eating to stave off hunger and muscle weakness.

We then drove to the Eastern Market, which is the largest outdoor market in the U.S. covering 43 acres and dating back to 1842. 

https://visitdetroit.com/directory/eastern-market/l

.

The produce was the most beautiful and the crowds were immense.

We were driving out to a remote area north of Detroit near Lexington so we tried to buy provisions for three days, including Michigan Asparagus, gourmet salad greens, tomatoes, avocados, mushrooms, sugar snap peas, and finally a 2 lb. Smoked Lake Superior whitefish.

We asked the fish monger where to grind good bagels and cream cheese and he recommended Detroit Institute of Bagels, so we drove there and bought 1/2 dozen bagels, cream cheese, and a loaf of rye bread

We then proceeded north to Port Huron to take the Boat trip for the sturgeon festival at 1:00. Since it was 11:30 we ate on the deck of Wings that overlooks the harbor that connects to the St. Clair River that connects to Lake Huron, where the Lady Huron sightseeing boat docks that would take us on the sturgeon tour at 1:00.

We ordered a full jazz hamburger with four meat patties and four slices of American cheese and onion rings.  Suzette ordered a brown ale that was delicious with a flavor of toasted barley. I was surprised that the Brewery of which Wings was a part of brewed a really refreshing apple cider and ordered a pint of it.

When the hamburger arrived we were pleasantly surprised because we were each served a plate with 1/2 half of the burger and a pile of fried onions. The burger easily fell in half into two double meat and cheese open faced burger halves that we could easily pick with our fingers to eat.

Wings and its beer and apple cider and burgers exceeded our expectations.

After lunch we took the special sturgeon walked down the quay and boarded the Huron Lady and took a. 1 1/2 hour boat ride out into Lake Huron to see sturgeons but the only one we saw was a four foot male that was released from the U.S. research boat after the biologists ran the trot line without having hooked a sturgeon. I slept inside on the way out and watched and stood on deck for most of the sturgeon trot line check and release and trip back to the dock.

After the boat ride we tried to find fresh fish but the vendor we drove to was closed so we returned to a liquor store in town and bought a bottle of a wine I had never drunk, a 2018 Buglioni Il Disparato white from Trevenezie, north of Venice, near Austria and Switzerland.  The wine rated 4.1 on VinVino with over 30,000 ratings. There were several 4.5 reviews that noted the tropical fruit flavors. When we opened it we tasted the exotic fruit taste with its increased acidity, that could be compared to a good Austrian Gruner Vitliner.

I picked a bottle of Mont Redon Cotes du Rhone for $17.99 and Suzette found a bottle of Spanish red vermouth gran Reserva Perucchi marked down from $23.99 to $19.99 that we bought those three and a large cipolini onion and a head of garlic.

We then drove north and, while still in Port Huron, stopped at Krogers, to buy fresh fish but there was none, but we bought an orange, olive oil, butter, a lemon, milk, a bag of parradelle pasta, yogurt, and iced oatmeal cookies.

We then stopped at a Mejier mega store and found a fresh filet of red snapper and a container of two burratas.

We then drove the thirty miles north to the Wipp Inn cottages on Lake Huron where we had rented a small cabin. There is a deck with a good view of the lake but the neighbor had a backhoe down by the lake pounding on the failing wall to reconstruct it. The effect was horrendous. The noise was deafening and the pounding was shaking of the entire hillside, making it unpleasant to sit on the deck.

Suzette called the owner and he said he would comp us the stay.

So we settled down to cook, but first a made a canapé of toasted thinly sliced rye bread spread with a cream cheese and white fish shmear.

I then diced a tomato, five stalks of asparagus, one half of the red snapper, and de-stemmed a handful of sugar snap peas.  Then I minced four or five stems of parsley.

Suzette filled a pot with water and brought to a boil and boiled 1/2 of the pappardelle. While the pasta was cooking, she sautéed the vegetables and fish in olive oil and butter. 

We opened the bottle of 2018 Buglioni il ate a great meal desparato.and Suzette filled the cereal bowls with pasta and covered the pasta with the fish and vegetable mixture and then put one-half of a burrata on each

and garnished each bowl with minced parsley and ate a great meal.

Bon Appetit

June 2, 2024 Lunch - Whitefish and cream cheese shmear on bagel with avocado and lettuce at Vine N Berry Vineyard. Dinner - Walleye Fish and Sweet Potato Chips with Steamed Sugar Snap Peas and Asparagus

June 2, 2024 Lunch - Whitefish and cream cheese shmear on bagel with avocado and lettuce at Vine N Berry Vineyard.  Dinner - Walleye Fish and Sweet Potato Chips with Steamed Sugar Snap Peas and Asparagus 

We discovered last night that out cottage lacked a few basics. Although it had a coffee maker and paper filters, it lacked coffee and sugar. So when we woke up and dressed, we drove north to Port Sanilac to Sanilac Coffee for coffee. Suzette ordered a coffee with steamed milk and I ordered a latte, an espresso with steamed milk and milk foam.

We decided to split a blueberry muffin that the barista warmed for us in a microwave. That was our breakfast.

We read a local tourist magazine that informed us of a Petroglyphs Park nearby and several wineries on the upper thumb. We returned the five miles to the cottage in drizzling weather to put on sturdier shoes and when we returned, heard the pounding of the backhoe, so we knew a road trip was the ideal choice for today.

We drove past Sanilac to Deckerville Rd. and drove inland to Sanilac Petroglyphs State Park and hiked 1/4 mile to a shed covering an outcropping of sandstone with a light covering of green moss into which a large number of petroglyphs had been carved 600 to 1500 years ago. There was an interpreter who described the petroglyphs and showed us that the rock lay only a few feet from the Cass River where many archeological sites had been excavated, some dating back 8,000 years. She stated that the carved rock was a ceremonial site.  

https://www.michigan.gov/mhc/museums/sanilac

We then turned our attention to wine and drove to the Backyard Winery where we met Barb Murray, the Proprietress. Already drinking was a couple from Traverse City.  We bought a flight of five wine tastings and Barb added a taste of their Dry Strawberry-Rhubaeb wine. All the wines were fruit wines made in low quantities of only about a dozen gallons each.

It turned out that Barb was an avid crafter who before she turned to making wine had raised sheep for their wool and still had enough wool to knit mittens and a very interesting cover for a bar of soap. 

Suzette bought mittens, wool covered soaps, and pot holders for Christmas gifts and we bought a bottle of what I considered her best wine, a semi-sweet cherry-pear wine made with cherries and pears grown on the property. 

We then drove to Vine N Berry Vineyard where the grown daughter of the winemaker poured us a flight of wines. As best I can tell the winemaking strategy at Vine N Wine is to add vegetables and fruits in the fermentation phase to flavor the wine. 

We arrived at Vine N Berry Vineyard at 1:00 and the first wine we tasted was Tomato that was a medium dry white wine, probably Riesling, with a mildly infused tomato taste.  We liked it a lot, so I told the daughter who was pouring after we tasted the carrot wine, if we could have another taste of it and have lunch at one of the tables in the tasting room. The protocol is 5 tastes for $5 to $10.

When she said, “Sure.” I fetched the whitefish bagels from the car and Suzette ordered a glass of plum wine for our fourth taste.

Suzette loved the sweet plum wine, especially when the daughter told us it was made with the small white Japanese plums with a red dot. It was the best plum wine I had ever tasted and we immediately decided to buy a bottle of it and a bottle of the earthy tomato wine. The tomato wine complemented the dense chewy bagel.

The two wineries we visited were small production wineries producing in 10 and 20 gallon fermenters, not the huge wineries we are familiar with in California or Europe that ferment over 1,000,000 gallons a year in a hundred 1500 liter steel fermenters.

The difference is similar to the difference between mass produced and hand made.

When you find beautifully hand made wines, such as these, they are very special.

We then drove to the fish market in Bay City and bought a walleye pike filet for dinner and stopped at the local Mejier mega store and bought flour coffee, a squeeze jar of tartar sauce and sweet potatoes to make fish and chips and drove home.

We rested a few minutes and then started dinner; fried fish and sweet potato chips with steamed sugar snap peas and asparagus, another incredibly fresh, healthy dinner.

I cut the walleye filet into four pieces that Suzette then soaked in milk.

I then de-stemmed the sugar snap peas and snapped the ends off the asparagus and cut them in half to reduce each stalk to a length of three inches from 6 inches.

Suzette then battered each filet in flour, egg, and flour again to develop a light crust and then fried the battered fish in olive oil, blanched the vegetables, and sautéed the Eastern White sweet potato wedges which she had cut the two potatoes.

I opened and poured glasses of the tomato wine we had bought at Vine N Berry Vineyard in the afternoon and ate a lovely dinner of finger food.

After dinner we went outside and started a fire in the fire pit and returned to the cabin and went to bed around 9:30. The magic fire starter was a paper towel that had been used to clean the pan that been filled with olive oil to fry the fish. 

The tomato wine went well with the dinner and the walleye was a thin flaked creamy textured fish that reminded us of haddock that is often used for fried fish in Maine.

Bon Appetit