The Salmon Colored Dawn

I love food. It has been with me thru thick and thin.

The wind has stopped blowing, and it is time to grill.

There was a movie once where the guy in the insane asylum was asked by his shrink what happened. The guy says the wind done it to me. It was the wind. That's what its like on Mille Lacs sometimes. I was right there on the big lake for 25 years. If any of you wonder what happened, I'm like the guy in that movie. The wind done it to me. The wind plus some other stuff.

If you are going to grill out this summer( duh), do a sauce involving a half jar of orange marmalade( 6 oz), 1 tablespoon Balsamic vinegar, 1 tablespoon soy sauce, 2 tablespoons water, 1 chopped jalapeno pepper, 3 med cloves garlic, minced. Leave the seeds in the pepper. It is sweet and hot like a young lover, and streaked with color like an early morning sky on Platte Lake in May.

Do it on salmon and all the beautiful blond gamebirds like grouse and pheasant, and chicken, plus duck.

Oh, dispense w/ the charcoal and build a real fire w/ real wood. Ash, oak, maple, alder, cherry, apple, all available in this area. Even birch or popple. Popple is delicious is you are a certain kind of mammal w/ big front teeth and a wide flat tail.

It is good enough to eat.

Inside Outdoor Food

Periodically I remind readers that tho' I have a special focus on what is usually thought of as "outdoor food" - fish and game - all food is really outdoor food. Or used to be. You rarely see a chicken or a pig outdoors these days - a golden plump chicken barn holds fifty thousand or more indoors. I don't know how many hogs a hog barn holds, but I do know that I smell them and never see them as I drive down farm country roads.

Which is why I write about any food that I want to write about. Also, every food or recipe has a history and/or a story that goes w/ it. Food in the context of life lived, so to speak. Tina Nordstrom, for example, whom I have recently written about, in her New Scandinavian Cooking series on PBS, does all of her cooking outdoors - she has a nifty portable cooking range unit that she sets up outdoors at each unique location in Sweden. And then she goes to work. Even in winter. A Svenska Flicka indeed. Gotta love her.

Tip the cook.