Wisconsin Breakfast

We planned on leaving Wisconsin early Sunday afternoon heading north where we were staying in St. Ignace, Michigan for a couple of days. So it was a rather lazy Sunday morning, sitting and visiting. Remember in a previous entry I mentioned we had cheese in some form daily? Before breakfast we had a cheese string with our coffee. Of course the topic came up as to how cheese strings were made and since I was online anyway I did a google. I came across a few theories including one where a mother thought that cheese strings should be banned because they are too much like a toy. Give me a break! Next she'll want to ban mashed potatoes and broccoli. My kids used to make hills with their mash potatoes and plant broccoli trees beside their gravy streams. Honestly, food should be fun. There's a lot worse things kids could be eating than a cheese string. Cheese strings are made simply by stretching and folding the cheese while it is warm to form strings much the same as pulling taffy. Mozzarella makes the best cheese strings because of it's natural elasticity.

Breakfast

The kids made a late breakfast so we wouldn't have to stop for lunch. We were looking at a 7 hour drive planning only to stop for a washroom break and possibly dinner. Our goal was to get as much travelling done during the daylight hours for sight seeing and picture taking. Unlike the route we took to Wisconsin the route to the Upper Penninsula was fairly straight forward so instead of being navigator I could be tourist.

It was a traditional bacon, eggs, hashbrowns and toast breakfast. The scrambled eggs were kicked up a notch with sauteed mushrooms and three cheeses (cream, mozzarella, cheddar). The hashbrowns were the shredded type something we don't see a lot of around our neck of the world. Usually the hashbrowns are diced or replaced with home fries that are larger chunks of potatoes. The shredded hashbrowns were browned in olive oil with a little butter. They were quite tasty. The bacon was peppered. Bacon can be purchased already peppered or you can pepper it yourself while frying using fresh ground pepper. Set the pepper mill to a larger grind.

One thing I've noticed is many people fail to experience the local cuisine when travelling. The two main reasons are familiarity is comforting when away from home and avoidance of stomach upsets. I'm of the school of try everything at least once and my stomach had just best keep up! When you try local cuisine you get to experience the food as it is meant to be. From there you can take that idea home and experiment either to duplicate the food or tweak it to the way you want it to be. That's what food is all about, having fun and experimenting.

We left their house just after 1 pm and made our way to US-41 that would take us to St. Ignace, Michigan. My mind was on the beautiful eye candy as well as all the wonderful food we had in Wisconsin. The cheese was tucked safely in the cooler. I hadn't seen how full the cooler was but I hoped there would be room for whitefish!

Note: The kids will be sending me pictures and recipes of some of their favourite dishes so I will be including them on this blog. Yes, food is a family affair. I look forward to checking my email because there are always wonderful pictures of the meals they have made.