You can also find a whole lot of local products at Bluff Country Co-op – which has a mission to buy the “least traveled” products available. It’s a double-win: you get the freshest stuff out there because it came from 12 miles away instead of 2,500, and you help a local grower, which gives you good karma. And who doesn’t need a little more of that?
Even cooler – if you want to make the food for yourself, you just need to go to the Winona Farmers Market for a dazzling array of locally grown goodness, from vegetables to the O’Neil Farm’s incredible lamb. Oh yeah, and honey, local jams, herbs – you can feed yourself awfully well after a trip there, even in the winter. What’s that you say? A Farmers Market in the winter? Well yes, twice a month even, except it’s inside the Winona Mall for your shopping comfort. Check it out: www.winonafarmersmarket.com/
But what is especially awesome to me about a meal at Signatures is that the chef can tell you where everything on the menu came from, and much of it comes from right here. That’s cool.
At the top of that list is Signatures Restaurant and The Grill – its newly spawned casual eatery in the bar area. The lamb I was drooling over was off of the new Signatures menu, and it was sourced from the O’Neil Family Farms just outside of town. And let me tell you this – I know lamb – my family raised sheep for decades, and I grew up eating it like other people eat beef. So it is with a certain amount of authority that I say this was completely fabulous and I promise you, I didn’t even have better lamb at Fleur de Lys in San Francisco – an impossibly swanky restaurant with a celebrity chef and everything. Seriously. If you put my two meals side-by-side, that guy doesn’t have a thing on Jeremy, Rico, and Joe back in the Signatures trenches. OK – I’ll stop fawning – in a minute. The lamb shank was accompanied by other deliciousness – port-poached pear, roasted vegetables, horseradish-havarti potatoes… mmmmmmm. This was sexy, delightful food, and anyone who thinks they need to drive to a bigger city to find gourmet fare is craaaazy.
It occurred to me recently that if suddenly every road and airstrip leading to Winona was shut down, we would still be eating pretty well here. Strange thought, I know, but stay with me. No, I wasn’t watching Doomsday Preppers, that bizarre show where paranoid people prepare for Apocalypse by building bunkers and canning potatoes (listen, do not send me letters if you love this show. It’s weird.) I was actually stuffing my face full of the most delicious grass-fed lamb you’ve ever had – raised on the hills right outside Winona. As I sat there with my eyes shut blissfully chewing, I realized that the food available here in this Mississippi River hamlet is perhaps the most under-appreciated attraction we have.
Posted by: Cynthya | Dec 28th, 2012
It may be frozen, but it’s still beautiful down here in our scenic corner of the state.
This will be a short contest because the time is near for the festival, so I will draw two (count them, TWO!) winners at 5 p.m. Tuesday, January 22, who will each get four tickets that can be used for any film sets, presentations, or workshops you want to attend. Use them all at once and bring friends, or keep them to yourself and attend four different things – it doesn’t matter. To enter the drawing, you have to leave a comment and tell me what film you’d like to see at the Frozen River Film Festival (hint, the schedule is on their website). You can only enter once, and the drawing will be via my very official method of cutting up the entries and putting them in a hat. I will announce your name here and on Visit Winona’s Facebook page Tuesday evening by 6 p.m., and you can swing by the Visit Winona office to pick them up starting Wednesday.
If I seem a little fired up, it’s because I just came home from a volunteer meeting for the festival – you’ll find me at the door ushering this weekend and introducing a film or two. And in exchange, they gave me a fist full of tickets, and I’m going to share them with you, because that’s how I am.
And you can get a free massage or some acupuncture this weekend, take in a yoga class, or just decompress in the Rejuvenation Station. Oh yeah, and you can keep your kids busy just about all day for free with the kids film set, craft center, and outdoor obstacle course. This festival is seriously the coolest thing that will happen for 100 miles this winter, and you should be here. Quit hunkering down at home alone and come watch movies with us. You can even bring your blanket. Everything you need to know is here: www.frff.org
Frozen River Film Festival brings in some of the very same films that PACKED the house at the Telluride and Sundance film festivals – you know, where people like PenГYlope Cruz and Mickey Rooney hang out – though probably not together. And some of the films being shown this week are narrated by some of those famous people, and some have even been nominated for Academy Awards. We’re not kidding around here, folks.
There are films about all kinds of things that people are doing all over the world – like the girl who spent a year adventure volunteering, environmentalists who are crawling across glaciers, and traumatized soldiers who find healing on fly fishing streams in Montana. Education, health care, why the lady at McDonalds sued over hot coffee… it’s all there.
Like action flicks? Then you’ll love Wild Bill’s Run, a real life Arctic adventure movie about group of guys who tried to snowmobile over the top of the world in the early ’70s. There is crime. There is suspense. There is danger. Move over, Tom Cruise. Or if you’re an adrenalin junkie, Wednesday and Thursday nights’ film set has extreme skiing, highlining, backpacking, and even the guy who slacklined in on Madonna’s Superbowl half-time show.
Yes, these are mostly documentaries, but definitely not the kind of stuff you fell asleep to in 10th grade social studies. (Social studies teachers, don’t call me. Some of those films are really boring.) These are films about action and adventure and life and the world, and they make you happy and sad and inspired and smarter. I wish I could say richer and more successful too, but that might be taking it too far.
Well not so fast, Danielson (that’s a Karate Kid reference for all you movie buffs). If you had never been to this film festival then you might think that. You’d be wrong, but I understand the stereotype.
Oh, “films” you say? *yawn* That’s just for intellectuals and students.
It’s cold. I know – the kind of cold that makes you want to hunker down under a blanket to watch a good movie. Well, here in Winona, we like to hunker down too, but we do it together at the Frozen River Film Festival, and we don’t just watch one movie – we watch about 40 of them. We celebrate our coldness. Heck, we named a festival after it. Stay tuned, and you can come celebrate too, because I’m going to give away tickets.
Posted by: Cynthya | Jan 21st, 2013
A travel blog about the best of Winona, MN
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