Happy Thanksgiving

Hello Everyone,

Happy Thanksgiving. This morning my wife and I started talking about the many things we were thankful for and we kept coming back to our baby boy. Today he seemed more hungry then usual. Maybe he knows it is Thanksgiving and everyone eats a little extra food on this day.

At the lodge we have been preparing for this day for several weeks. Our Chef Nick Hayes slow cooked the first turkey all night. The rest of the turkeys are going to be put into the oven several hours apart. He is doing this so that when we bring out the next turkey for the buffet it will be freshly cooked and not held for hours. I think the Chef ordered five 30-pound turkeys for today...but that is not all he is serving. He is also serving a bison haunch, smoked ham, cranberry pecan sauce, rutamousse, maple sweet potatoes, green beans, wild rice, wild mushroom dressing, roast garlic acorn squash soup, gunflint Caesar salad, garden salad with our smoked tomato dressing, and for dessert he is offering apple crisp, pumpkin pie, pecan pie, and (my favorite) chocolate bread pudding.

Our chocolate bread pudding recipe is in the current issue of Midwest Living, page 148. This has been one of my all time favorite desserts and the guests always give us compliments on it.

If talk of all of this food isn't enough we opened the restaurant with the winter menu on it last night. I don't know where our chef gets his inspiration from but the food is excellent. He has some amazing sauces that really compliment the dishes. Whatever you do, do not order a dinner entree and ask for it with no sauce. We don't like the staff to tell our guests "no" when they have requests, but the sauces are so good that I almost want to tell our servers that they dinner entrees can not go out without a sauce even if a guest requests it with no sauce.

The last couple of days the weather has warmed up enough to melt the snow we had, then it dropped again. The past two days we got fresh snow on the ground to replace anything we lost. This morning it was a balmy 15 degrees out.

With all of the colder weather the lake is starting to look like it wants to freeze over. Many of the smaller ponds are frozen over. Today there was ice between the two dock cribbing's. Hopefully if the wind and the temperature stay down we might see a frozen lake soon. This would be a very early freeze compared to the last couple of years. Of course we will tell you on the blog when it does in fact freeze but until then we will be keeping our fingers crossed.

Well it is nearly noon so I have to go get ready to carve the food for the Thanksgiving buffet.

From everyone at Gunflint to all of you out there reading the blog, we hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Lee