Thursday, June 23, 2011

Made from scratch rhubarb muffins

The big rhubarb plant at Clearwater Lodge produced its first crop of the season, just in time for the summer solstice. In celebration of the fresh rhubarb and the longest day of the year and a full breakfast dining room, I decided to bake up rhubarb and almond muffins to compliment our famous buttermilk pancakes, and the reviews from both customers and crew were jubuliant.

The recipe came out of the official Clearwater Lodge cookbook, and so the exact contents are - naturally - top secret, but I thought the base combination of eggs and buttermilk and brown sugar made a pleasing still-life along with the chopped rhubarb and almonds.
I was pretty happy with the final product, but I'm always tweaking recipes as I go and I'd like to try this again with about double the rhubarb content. Surely some folks might find this 'overly rhubarby' but I can never get enough of that amazing sour flavor.

You can bet we'll be doing lots more with rhubarb here at Clearwater Lodge over the next few months, and I'm especially looking forward to combination pies using locally-picked berries - strawberries should be here very soon with the abundant rainfall over the previous 36 hours.

-am

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Pies at Clearwater and Cabin 2

We have had many people ask us if we would be bringing back the old tradition of having pie served at the lodge. Well, today we are pleased to announce that this Thursday, June 16th, we will be serving pies in the afternoon and evening at the Lodge. We talked with our neighbor and the granddaughter of Charlie and Petra Boostrom, Gloria Johnson, who used to bake for several previous owners and she will be baking pies for us also! Pies will be available starting at 2 pm on Thursday and cost $3 a slice. Anyone is welcome to come over, have some pie, and see some of the changes that we have been working on. Such as...We finally finished redoing cabin 2. This is a picture of the new master bedroom. This beautiful log bed really changed the look of this room. All the furniture in the cabin is now log and matches. We have really enjoyed having many people come by just to look at the cabins and see the changes we have been making. So many people comment on cabin 2 now and we think that guests will love the changes.This is what the living room and kitchen now look like. We got rid of the orange dinette set that was in here and replaced it with a rustic log table and chair set. We got a new log futon some new artwork and a new kitchen. The other bedroom also got a new log bunk bed.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Someone has to do research

As we prepared to take over operations at Clearwater my wife and I were very worried about being able to find time to get out and learn the lakes, fishing spots, portages, campsites and more. Last week I was able to slip away for an evening to try some fishing spots. And this week I took off for two days to learn more about a particular canoe route. While it may take a long time to learn as much as we feel is needed, at least the research is fun!
Ady really wanted to go on a canoe trip and I figure that she is now 4 years old and in my book that is old enough to go camping. So off we went. The first day we got started late since I was very busy at the Lodge and trying to get all my work done. So we ended up setting up camp and cooking dinner as it was getting dark. But she enjoyed sleeping in a tent and cooking over a fire. Kids sure love doing anything that gets them dirty!
The next morning we got up, finished paddling down Clearwater, across West Pike, portaged over into Pine Lake, and after fighting some wind, we made it over to Johnson Falls. Ady really loved the waterfall. Then we paddled to across little Caribou and over to Caribou Lake and finally portaged back to Clearwater Lake. We arrived back at the lodge tired but feeling that wonderful sense of accomplishment that always comes after a BWCA canoe trip.
And what a trooper Ady was, 15 miles of paddling and 3 miles of portages all in a single day, and still smiling at the end of the day.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

New Dock and New Canoes

We have been very busy at Clearwater the last month. Some of the changes have been big and some not as big. We decided to repaint the boats since they looked like this.
Then after getting the boats sanded and painted we didn't want to put them out at the dock since we knew that they would just get destroyed again. The dock had nails and stuff sticking out the sides. So we went and got some tires and lined all the docks with tires. Now the boats won't get beat up by wind and waves banging them against the dock!
After the tires went on we went and put new cleats in so that they all matched and boats could be more securely tied down. I thought the finished product looked pretty good.
We also got some new canoes. Last week we sent one of the staff to Mount Iron to get 4 new Wenonah Minnesota II's and two Souris River 3 man canoes. New canoes look great and will be heavily used this summer.