A few weeks ago I was approached by the kind folks at Easy Canvas Prints offering me a free 8×10 canvas print, of a photo of mine, to review. Looking over their website, I was intrigued and just a bit skeptical. The site looked easy to navigate and making a canvas print, from one of your own photos, sounded like fun, but their pricing was so much lower than what local print shops charge, for canvas giclee prints, that I wondered about the quality of their product. But I was hooked, and quite curious to see if they could offer a quality product at such a good price.

I pulled out one of my photos, that I have been planning on enlarging for years but never got around to it. It’s a winter scene that I converted to black and white-the perfect compliment to our new kitchen. Using Photoshop, I added a quote that I had heard recently, “Winter’s must be cold for those with no warm memories.” It seemed appropriate as winter is one of my favorite seasons.

Downloading and designing my canvas was quick and simple and after about 5 minutes I was done. All I needed to do is wait for it to get made and shipped to me.

Less than a week later I received my print and I have to say, despite my misgivings, I was very happy with the final product. The canvas and wood frame were of sturdy quality and the print job was perfect. I was really concerned that they wouldn’t be able to capture the blacks and the whites as each had been enhanced in post production (aka Photoshop) to really make the picture pop. Their printing procedure was able to capture the deepest blacks and the whitest whites, reproducing the photograph as I had envisioned it.

Overall, I am very happy with the print I received and I’ve added Easy Canvas Prints to my “favorites” bar so I can find them easily when I decided which photo I want to put to canvas next.

I have been blogging for just over a year now and I realized that I have not done a great job in promoting Wisconsin products, which is unfortunate as Wisconsin produces a lot of great food. Of course everyone thinks of cheese when they think of Wisconsin, and rightfully so. We produce much of the cheese found in grocery stores across the US. Most of this cheese is of the relatively bland, supermarket, let’s appeal to everyone, variety, but Wisconsin also produces lots of world class cheese, produced in small batches by farmers and cheesemakers whose whole philosophy revolves around the adage of quality of quanity. In fact, one of my favorite blue cheeses in the world is produced here in Wisconsin, in an Amish community where the cows, that make the milk for the cheese, are hand milked, twice daily.

Wisconsin also takes its pork seriously. We are a state that loves bacon, ham and sausages. A number of years ago, long before I moved to Wisconsin, I was introduced to Nueske’s Applewood Smoked Bacon and it was love at first taste. This was way back when bacon was still “taboo,” and those of us uttering the phrase, “Everything is better with bacon” were looked upon as nutcases, to say the least, or as heretics. The pro-pork movement hadn’t yet made its backlash against the “remove all fats from your diet” mentality of 1990′s.

Having been raised on supermarket bacon, I was blown away by the depth of flavor the Nueske’s bacon possessed and I was quickly won over. Since then Nueske’s has been the bacon by which I have judged all others. That was until a few months ago.

My wife, in her job as an area manager for a cleaning company, picked up a few accounts in Wautoma, WI. She was then told by a colleague that she needed to check out Stoneridge Meat and Country Market. On that first trip my wife picked up a number of items but it was the bacon that took me by storm. Thickly sliced, this smoky, salty, slightly sweet bacon has quickly replaced Nueske’s as my bacon of choice.

Since she only gets out to Wautoma every few weeks, she makes sure she takes along a cooler and we stock up on their bacon. There are three varieties that we buy, the Pit Smoked bacon, the Hickory Smoked bacon and the Pepper Bacon. They might have a few more styles but these are the ones we usually get.

The bacon comes sliced nice and thick, between 1/8-1/4″ thick, and has a wonderful smokiness that supermarket bacon just never quite achieves. While salty, like any good bacon, Stoneridge bacons have a nice sweetness that compliments that saltiness, making it very easy to overindulge. This also presents the only downside to this bacon. Due to its thickness and slight sweetness, this bacon is easy to burn, if not closely watched. But cook it over medium heat and watch closely and you will be rewarded with a little bit of hog heaven brought to you by the folks in Wisconsin!!

If interested you can also find them online at Stoneridge Country and Meat Market. They do have online ordering, though I don’t believe bacon is on there. It would be worth a call though to see if they will ship some to you. Or if you know someone headed up this way, make sure they stop and pick some up!

What do Gaspe Flint Corn, the Harrison Cider Apple, the Cayuga Duck and the Fish Pepper all have in common? Well, according to the book “Renewing America’s Food Traditions-Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” we are in danger of losing these foods from our collective plates. According to this book, edited by Gary Paul Nabhan, we are in jeopardy of losing hundreds of local foods, and thus, losing a significant part of our American culinary heritage.

Written by members of RAFT (Renewing America’s Food Traditions) this book highlights a number of those foods we are in danger of losing. From wild plants and animals to Native American crops and domesticated animals, America’s culinary heritage is disappearing at an alarming rate. There are many reasons for the potential loss of these foods. Dwindling habitat and over harvesting are endangering wild populations, while changing tastes have contributed to the decline of many domesticated crops. One of the biggest culprits though is our modern food transportation system. Crops that don’t travel well or suffer significant loss of flavor soon after picking just aren’t profitable for farmers anymore. Many of these crops and animals are losing out to modern hybrids that grow more quickly, produce greater yields, or demand less care.

Luckily, for the foods showcased in this book, there is still time left to save them from becoming just a memory. If you have a garden plot I urge you to seek out the seeds of some of these plants and experiment with growing them and using the crops they produce. Support your local farmers, especially those trying to save some of these heirloom foods from extinction. It is not a wholly selfless act you will be committing. Once you try some of these heirloom foods you will find they taste so much better than most of the stuff you can buy at the local grocery store. That’s because these foods were bred for flavor, not bred for traits that made them easily transportable for thousands of miles. It is up to us to decide whether these foods remain an important part of our culinary heritage, or whether we allow them to disappear from our plates forever.