Go! Pack! Go!

Last week we served Crab Louis salad in honor of Fishermen’s Wharf. Chuck also did his best to replicate a fancy flounder dish and found that flounder is simply not widely available in Wisconsin in the fall.

The Packers lost to San Francisco.

We had a wild week in between games with little time for research into foods of Washington, D.C., home of the team called the Redskins. We joked about serving pork. We suggested turkey. We attempted a play on words for fiscal cliff or gridlock. Finally, I did a search or two on my smart phone as we drove to visit La Petite in Lake Geneva.

We found the half-smoke. The half-smoke is a sausage served on a bun, covered in barbecue sauce, sometimes half pork and half beef and sometimes sliced in half lengthwise before cooking. It’s as close as D.C. comes to having its own indigenous food.

A stopover in East Troy took care of everything. We picked up a turkey pot pie at The Elegant Farmer and planned to cook it for Sunday lunch. A few miles down the road we bought our own travel lunch from a BBQ truck and found already cooked and seasoned sausages that looked perfect for our version of the Half-Smoke. A pot pie, a pound of sausage, a bag of ice, and our cooler, and we were in business.

We made it home from Lake Geneva Saturday night just in time to cook the half-smokes and listen to Prairie Home Companion on public radio. Sunday lunch, the turkey pot pie, was delicious. Bonus: it left several leftover pieces for lunches later this week.

But the best bonus: Green Bay beat Washington, 38-20.

Cincinnati, bring it on. We’ll be ready. We’ll serve – so, readers, what kind of foods do Cincinnati residents call their own? Help me out with suggestions, please. We Cheeseheads are hungry for another Super Bowl.