Eat Well; Travel Often: Day 7

Day 7: 5/24/15 (Deer River)

0 miles

We definitely earned our keep today. Rico was up with Janet and was introduced to the gardens. He picked some tulips to bring back to the sleeping beauty, Jillian. Once she finally emerged, we had a delicious brunch with mimosas, bacon, wild blueberry pancakes and Marty’s homemade maple syrup from the trees out back. For the rest of the morning and early afternoon, the boys and girls split up to tackle some chores. Rico headed over to the neighbor’s house with Marty to help repair a water pump. He got to drive a four-wheeler back and forth so he seemed pretty happy. Jillian and Janet spent some time in the garden planting beets, basil, carrots, zucchini, radishes, and swiss chard. Jillian was excited to see some asparagus growing and she got to eat some fresh from the garden. After the seeds were in the ground the girls went over to the garden across the road to transport some germinated tomato, zucchini, and cucumber plants. The boys met up with us there and we finished rather quickly. We were trying to think if it would be possible to make Minnesota a stop on the way back just so we could eat some of the fruits and vegetables from the garden, but it doesn’t seem likely L.

The rest of the afternoon was spent out on the deck to enjoy another day of great weather. We started a mini cribbage tournament and Rico ran the board until it was Jillian’s turn and she got him by 1 point. Janet is a tough competitor so she wasn’t thrilled about losing, but she was excited to finally see someone beat Rico. What’s up with this Italian having so much luck? I thought that was supposed to be the Irish! While playing we enjoyed a crab and artichoke dip that was a perfect pre-dinner snack. Marty threw a whole turkey on the grill for dinner – a cooking technique neither of us had seen before. Apparently it works just like an oven! Around 5pm every night, Murphy, their black lab, gets excited because she knows it’s dummy time and dinner time! The dummy game is pretty much just a game of fetch. Marty shoots out a dummy into the woods and Murphy waits for his command to retrieve. One of the times we fixed the GoPro to Murph’s collar so that video is a bit wild, but it was neat to see it from her perspective.

While we were waiting for the turkey to cook, we went for a short ride on the four-wheeler down to a small lake front. The biggest challenge was trying to avoid swallowing any bugs. Down by the water there were a few young kids fishing so we didn’t stay too long – didn’t want to scare away their dinner! Once we were back, dinner was pretty much ready, but before we had the meal, Marty had cooked up a few of the morel mushrooms for us to try. They were cooked in just a little butter and sherry with salt and pepper, but that’s all they needed. Jillian’s first thought was that it tasted like French toast, but no one else agreed. For dinner we feasted on the grilled turkey, tortellini with Janet’s famous essence of corn topping, a broccoli salad with grapes and bacon, and breadsticks on the side. We are seriously getting spoiled here, especially when it comes to food. After dinner Jillian showed Janet and Marty some of Sean's songs that he wrote and we called him up requesting an autograph. Later we tried watching an episode of Letterman, but slowly we all started to conk out starting with Janet then Jillian then Marty so Rico shut off the tv and left us all to find our way to bed eventually.