Culinary Adventures with Camilla

On our way off the mountain earlier in the week, I noticed a sign near the California-Nevada stateline. It read: "40 Craft Beers on Draft." Ummm...heck yeah. So, when timing worked out after another day near the summit of Mt. Rose, we stopped at the sign. I actually had no idea what the name of the business actually was. Turns out it's the Mellow Fellow at King's Beach. The boys objected strenuously as we pulled into the parking lot. "Mom," they whined, "we can't drink beer. Do we have to stop here?" Yes, look at the line below '40 Craft Beers.' Sausages! Along with the ridiculous variety (read number-that-sets my-little beer-loving-heart-aflutter) of beers on tap, they also had local sausages. Game sausages. I was bummed that the last elk sausage was taken by the customer before us. But we were still able to get venison and pheasant sausages from Village Meats and Mountain Valley Meats. The boys' take on the sausag...

We don't play video games. Let me rephrase: I don't play video games. The boys will do a round or two of RockBand with Daddy when I'm not home, but we don't have smartphones or any other handheld devices that have games on them. I'm passionately 'old-school', so we have lots and lots of board games. Somewhere along the line, I picked up this game: Menu Mash-Up . If you like cooking and food, you have to try this game! We played it for the first time last night and had a blast. We laughed and laughed. And D pouted as we had to put it away...thirty minutes after his bedtime. He wanted me to wake him up early to play it this morning. I didn't. But we will be playing this again tonight.

Since Uncle Brian - "the best killer in the family" as Dylan calls him - had killed a deer earlier and offered me some ground venison, I dug up a recipe for a corn soup with venison from the Oneida tribe in New York. The recipe I found simply read: "Corn, wild rice, venison, water, wild greens. Cook corn in water with bits of venison, wild edible greens and a handful of wild rice." My version... Ingredients Fennel bulb, sliced onions, sliced ground venison yellow corn kernels chicken broth wild rice organic pea sprouts Procedure Cook wild rice. In a large soup pot, sauté the fennel and onion till they begin to soften. Add the venison and brown meat until completely cooked. Add yellow corn, wild rice, and chicken broth. Simmer for an hour. Serve with fresh, organic pea sprouts.