Tastes of The Angle – Mexican Shakshuka

When some, or all seven, of my siblings and their families come home to The Angle for Christmas, each family is tasked with serving up one breakfast and one dinner. This is no small feat, considering there could be as many as 46 of us when everyone is home.

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Nourishing Choices

First time ever – my four year-old requested vegetable soup for lunch. This was after I told her three times that No, she could not have the leftover waffles from her breakfast. I offered her my home-canned tomato soup and she countered with vegetable soup. I’ll take it.

She helped get everything out of the fridge, chopped, stirred and seasoned the soup. It was SALTY, but when we sat down to our quiet lunch, she was engaged and made up a blind tasting game where we had to guess which vegetables were on our spoon just by taste.

It was a good way to get a daily dose of bone broth into her, and I haven’t enjoyed such a peaceful meal in quite a while. She ate well.

Celebrate the small victories, right?

Tastes of The Angle

This is the salad that my meat and potatoes man requests on his birthday. You read that right…he requests a salad.  It’s also the only way my carb-loving nephew will eat something green. I made it once for everyone at deer camp, (you read that right, too) and they were all hooked. At seven-months pregnant, it was the one and only time I went to deer camp. I quietly traipsed through the woods behind the hunters or sat gunless in a tree stand to enjoy the solitude. Then, each evening I cooked up a storm; I think it was part of my nesting phase. Anyway, this kale Caesar salad was the hit of the whole week’s menu.

Tastes of The Angle

Bone broth has become as trendy as quinoa, kale and chia seeds. Suburbanites can drive-through a broth stand for their daily dose, and New Yorkers can pick up a mug right alongside their wheat grass shots.

Here in the wild woods, we make it the good old-fashioned way: with Lake of the Woods fish carcasses or Minnesota whitetail antler and bones or from young roosters and old hens past their egg-laying prime.

Tastes of The Angle

Living so far from civilization here at The Angle, I learned to get creative when craving particular flavors. Greek food, Thai, India, Ethiopian and Vietnamese had all been out of my cooking league when I lived in Seattle BECAUSE I lived in Seattle and had every kind of restaurant at my fingertips. But throw me into the middle of the middle and suddenly I’m brave enough to challenge myself to cooking with widely different spices and techniques.