Men’s Fitness recently deemed La Belle Vie as one of the 25 Best Bars in America. The  Parlez-Vous cocktail is noted as a standout. Bar manager Johnny Michaels, author of North Star Cocktails, calls it “a real favorite with the ladies.” For more information about Johnny and the North Star Bartenders’ Guild, visit their website.

Other midwestern bars that made the list are The Old Fashioned in Madison, Wisconsin, and The Aviary and The Violet Hour in Chicago.

Cheers!

Selected Minnesota Historical Society Press content is now available as part of Project MUSE’s University Press Content Consortium (UPCC) Book Collections.

The newly launched UPCC Book Collections provide libraries, researchers, and students with access to a wealth of high-quality book-length scholarship, fully integrated with MUSE’s electronic journal collections. With digital books from more than 65 major university presses and related scholarly publishers, UPCC collections will offer over 14,000 book titles alongside content from over 500 respected scholarly journals in a user-friendly environment with rich discovery tools.

To search for our titles, enter “Minnesota Historical Society Press” or “Borealis Books” in the search field.

Find out the answer to this and many other questions you may have about Indians but are embarrassed to ask this Thursday, May 3, with author Anton Treuer at the St. Paul Episcopal Church in Minneapolis. Birchbark Books is hosting this event to celebrate the publication of his new book, Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask. Anton Treuer is professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University.

Did you know that the powwow is a relatively new cultural form? Treuer writes, “today’s events are commonly secular, not ceremonial, and are widely practiced all over North America. They usually last anywhere from one to three days, and they are open to people of all tribes, genders, ages, and races. Powwows are primarily dance events, where people wear sometimes elaborate beadwork, feathers, and other regalia and dance to a wide array of songs performed by numerous drum groups, each comprised of anywhere from five to twenty singers.”

So, can white people dance at powwows? Treuer responds, “Yes. Although there are prohibitions against the participation of outsiders in ceremonial events and customs for some tribes, powwow has no such official barriers . . . Powwow music is considered and often called inter-tribal–open to people of all tribes and races.”

That said, if you haven’t attended a powwow before, here’s a primer on powwow etiquette.

May is American Indian Month, and there are several powwows scheduled in the Twin Cities. If you are interested in attending a powwow, the Drumhop website and the Minneapolis American Indian Month Events Calendar have  good lists of upcoming events.  Below are some Twin Cities-area powwows:

Saturday, May 5: University of Minnesota Spring Powwow

Friday, May 11: St. Paul Public Schools Indian Education Powwow

Saturday, May 12 to Sunday, May 13: Annual Mother’s Day Powwow at Cedar Field Park, 25th Street and 18th Avenue South, Minneapolis

(photo credit: Gerry Auginash)

Minnesota Museums Month is a statewide celebration of museums, their stories, and their communities. This May, visit a new museum in your community, take a road trip, or return to one of your favorites that you haven’t seen in a while. Museums of every type—art, historical, science, arboretums, zoos, and more—are participating.

The Minnesota History Center is one of approximately six hundred museums in the state! Check out www.museumsmonth.org as well as their Facebook and Twitter feeds for more information and events.

Minnesota Museums Month launches in conjunction with the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Museums. Being held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, the meeting will welcome more than five thousand museum professionals from institutions in every state and more than thirty countries. Minnesota’s vibrant museum and cultural community provides an ideal setting for this year’s theme, “Creative Community.”

Our new book Building Museums: A Handbook for Small and Midsize Organizations by Robert Herskovitz, David Grabitske, and Timothy Glines was released earlier this year. If you are attending the AAM meeting, please stop by the Minnesota Historical Society Press booth to check it out!

See you out and about at Minnesota museums next month!

We are pleased to announce that Diane Wilson’s book Spirit Car: A Journey to a Dakota Past has been chosen as the next book for One Minneapolis One Read.

From the press release from the City of Minneapolis:

“The Minneapolis City Council today approved Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past as the next One Minneapolis One Read book. This will be the second year of the citywide ‘read,’ where the entire community is encouraged to read a single book and join in a community conversation. The community read will launch fall 2012.

“Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past was written by Minnesotan Diane Wilson. Wilson grew up in a Minneapolis suburb and then followed questions about her family’s past to South Dakota and Nebraska, where she tracked down information about her maternal relatives through five generations. The result of Wilson’s quest for discovery is Spirit Car, a book of vignettes she created in her desire to honor the lives of her Dakota Indian family. The story of Wilson’s family begins with a vivid account of the 1862 Dakota War in Minnesota and then follows her family members’ nomadic travels across South Dakota and Nebraska in their struggle to survive.”

Author Diane Wilson is also the director of Dream of Wild Health, a ten-acre farm in Hugo, Minnesota, whose goal is to help American Indian people reclaim their physical, mental, and spiritual health by teaching the old ways of growing food and leading healthy lives. She is a Mdewakanton descendant; her mother was enrolled on the Rosebud reservation. Spirit Car was her first book and a Minnesota Book Award winner in 2006.

Spirit Car and Wilson’s second book, Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life, are available from  fine booksellers and popular online retailers.

Diane Wilson at the book launch for Beloved Child:

Today’s blog post is a poem by Kim Ode, author of Rhubarb Renaissance.

Meet her Wednesday, April 11,  at 7:00 p.m. at the Merriam Park Library as part of the Eating, Reading & Living Well program hosted by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and sponsored by Mississippi Market.

RHUBARB

Come midmorning, my sister and I

Would be shooed from the sandbox

To pick a dozen stalks of rhubarb

For that day’s pie.

There is a knack to picking rhubarb.

Grab too high and you snap the stalk.

Grab too low and you lose the leverage

For that crucial tug from the root,

Like pulling a boot from spring’s muddy gumbo.

Then we would take our lives in our hands

Lopping off leaves coursing with enough poison

To kill a congregation –

Or so we’d come to believe

Given the stern order never to taste them.

The work was both gratifying and disconcerting,

Entrusted to wield foliage so deadly

We could not feed it even to the hogs,

Bur heaved the leaves into the ditch

Onto a wilting mound that grew with every pie.

So, if I hesitate over that first bite,

It’s only a flicker of remembering how it felt

To bring those stalks into the house,

Hoping we had not been trusted too much.

–Kim Ode

For recipes and rhubarb inspiration, see:

Star Tribune feature

Spiced Couscous with Rhubarb and Figs recipe featured on Oprah.com

Kim on Wisconsin Public Radio (Archive 4/9/12 @ 11:45)

Farmers’ market and CSA season is upon us! Find out what to do with the readily available bounty of veggies from veteran CSA subscriber and food writer Tricia Cornell at The Eating, Reading and Living Well series at the Merriam Park Library on Wednesday, April 4, at 7:00 p.m. The program is presented by the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and sponsored by Mississippi Market. Tricia will share her new cookbook, Eat More Vegetables: Making the Most of Your Seasonal Produce.

What can you do with all those mustard greens? How about making Midwestern Bibimbap? Tricia’s recipe, below.

Midwestern Bibimbap

My favorite use for pickled mustard greens is in my own simplified version of bibimbap. Classic Korean comfort food, bibimbap is “all mixed up.” It comes to the table as a lovely composition of pickled vegetables and rice, and then the diner gets to do the mixing up. If you’re lucky, a Korean restaurant will serve it in a hot stone bowl—dolsot bibimbap—that cooks the rice and egg to form a tasty crunchy crust on the bottom. Many versions include sautéed beef or chicken, but for a quick supper for one, I stick with just the egg.

1 cup cooked brown rice

¼ cup pickled mustard greens

¼ cup finely grated carrot

¼ cup bean sprouts

¼ cup steamed spinach, squeezed dry

1 egg

hoisin sauce, optional

Place rice in a deep, single-serving bowl. Arrange vegetables in wedge shapes on top. Fry egg sunny-side up. Slide it onto your pile of vegetables and stir with chopsticks or fork, breaking up the yolk. Add hoisin sauce to taste, if desired. Serves 1.

Pickled Mustard Greens

At my local markets, these beloved Hmong greens (zaub ntsuab) are labeled “mustard greens,” “mustard cabbage,” “bamboo cabbage,” and about a half a dozen other things. Look for long, thin, dark green leaves with relatively thick stems and tiny yellowish flower buds. They are among the first green things to show up in the market and are available well into the fall. They’re great in a stir-fry, and their slightly bitter flavor works well with all kinds of pork.

This is a fermented pickle that will keep in the refrigerator for several months (this recipe has not been tested for home canning).

4 cups water

2 tablespoons salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1 dried red pepper

1 large bunch mustard greens, rinsed, dried, and cut into 1-inch pieces (to yield 4 cups)

Mix together first 4 ingredients (water through pepper), being sure to dissolve sugar and salt. Stir in mustard greens. Place mixture in a scrupulously clean opaque bowl and cover with a plate, weighted down if necessary. You don’t want an airtight seal, but you do want to be sure that all of the mustard greens stay submerged. (A pickling crock is, of course, ideal, but you can approximate one with a bowl and plate.) Keep in a cool, dark place for 3 days. Transfer to jars with tight-fitting lids and store in the refrigerator for up to 3 months. Makes about 4 cups.

“Treaties are about more than who owns what,” says the website associated with this excellent traveling exhibit, Why Treaties Matter. “They tell a story about how people relate to one another, and how people relate to the land.”

Relationships are key: family ties defined relationships for the Ojibwe and Dakota, business relationships did the same for the whites. The striking contrast between these worldviews is the subject of the exhibit.

Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, puts it succinctly: “We cannot have a complete understanding of what it means to be Americans without knowing about these relationships, whether we are Native Americans or not.”

This week is the last chance to see the exhibit at All My Relations Gallery, its only stop in Minneapolis (although it will be at Fort Snelling May 1-30). The statewide travel schedule, the story of the exhibit’s development, and additional materials are available here. The exhibit is sponsored by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council, the Minnesota Humanities Center, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Find a way to see it–you’ll learn something valuable!

Today’s blog post is by Ann L. Burckhardt, a former reporter, columnist, and editor for the Taste section of the Star Tribune.  She has written or edited over twenty-five books on food, including the original edition of the popular Betty Crocker Cooky Book as well as A Cook’s Tour of Minnesota and Hot Dish Heaven.

Many thanks to the creators of the marvelous Mad Men series for focusing attention on the 1960s, sometimes called the Soaring Sixties.  In the early part of the decade, especially, our country’s optimism was soaring and Americans were merrily buying houses and cars and having babies.

My own memories of the era are clear. Married three years, we bought a house in 1960. It was a bungalow with a well-equipped kitchen just steps from the dining end of the living room.  At last I could entertain friends for dinner, something impossible in our previous home, an apartment with a kitchen I could barely turn around in.

Also in 1960, I was promoted to Cookbook Editor at Betty Crocker Kitchens, General Mills, Inc. I traveled to national meetings , which featured one groaning board after another as new products by the likes of Kraft  and General Foods  were presented. Best of all was my annual trip to New York City to approve the pages of the latest cookbook before it went to press. The editors took it upon themselves to introduce this daughter of small-town Iowa to the best of New York’s eateries—on the expense account, of course. Most spectacular was the fabled Forum of the Twelve Caesars.

My then-husband and I formed a  gourmet dinner club with three other couples. Not gourmets in the caviar-on-toast sense, we savored an excellent meal and squeezed our budgets to sample the foreign (German and French) food at well-known downtown restaurants. The club met every third month, with one pair hosting a sit-down dinner: crystal, china, the works. Unlike Don Draper and friends, we served neither pre-dinner cocktails nor wine with dinner. The hosts prepared the main course; others filled out the meal: appetizer, vegetable and/or salad, and dessert. The main course was often a nice big roast. Vegetables were gussied up with sauces. Whipped cream–laden desserts were the climax.

Dinners for four or six at home alternated with potluck suppers at our church and with coworkers at our local theater group. We sought potluck recipes that were economical while being portable, hot dishes we could keep warm in a low oven (this being pre-microwave days) til serving time.

Occasionally, on weekends, there were luncheons planned to fete a bride-to-be or an expectant mother. At these, we served what the men (not included!) called “ladies food.” This meant ribbon sandwiches, creamy mixtures in ramekins, fancy salads, fruit in melon boats, tiny tarts or petit fours, and cups and cups of tea.

For a taste of the sixties, please try these two recipes from my Hot Dish Heaven, one of the 2006 New York Times notable holiday cookbooks.

Squash Gourmet

A delicious vegetable for a dinner of roast beef, pork, or chicken.

Hubbard squash large enough to provide 2 cups cubed squash

¼ cup sliced green onions, including some green tops

2 to 3 tablespoons cream or milk

1 cup sour cream

salt and pepper

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Cut squash in half; remove seeds and pith. Bake squash cut side down in shallow pan 45 to 60 minutes or until fork tender but not soft. Remove squash skin and cut into 1-inch cubes; store rest of squash for later use. Place squash cubes in 1-quart casserole.  Sprinkle with onions. Stir cream into sour cream to thin it. Pour cream mixture over squash; toss to distribute evenly. Season with salt and pepper. Bake uncovered 20 to 25 minutes, until steaming hot. Makes 4 servings.

Ladies-Who-Lunch Hot Salad

Perfect for a shower or bridge party or your own “Return of the Mad Men Series” viewing party.

1 cup real mayonnaise

1 tablespoon lemon juice

¼ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

½ teaspoon salt

2 cups chopped cooked turkey or chicken

2 cups chopped celery

1 cup toasted bread cubes

½ cup sliced water chestnuts, optional

½ cup slivered almonds

¼ cup diced onion

crushed corn flakes or Wheaties for topping

Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, combine the mayonnaise, lemon juice, Parmesan cheese, and salt; mix well. Combine the turkey, celery, bread cubes, water chestnuts (if using), almonds, and onion in a large mixing bowl; add mayonnaise mixture and toss well. Transfer mixture to a buttered 1 ½-quart casserole dish. Sprinkle crushed cereal around periphery of the dish. Bake uncovered 40 minutes, until hot through. Makes 6 lady-like servings.

Brenda Child and Michael Witgen, authors of two recent books on American Indian history, will share their research and perspectives on Friday, March 30, at an event hosted by Birchbark Books at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis.

Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community details the ways in which women have shaped Native American life from the days of early trade with Europeans through the reservation era and beyond. Author Brenda Child is a member of the Red Lake Ojibwe Nation, associate professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota, and a member of the Executive Council of the Minnesota Historical Society.

An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America explains that most of the continent’s indigenous peoples were not conquered, assimilated, or even socially incorporated into the settlements and political regimes of the early European colonies of the Atlantic world. Instead, Native peoples forged a New World of their own.  Author Michael Witgen is the Director of Native American Studies and an Associate professor in the Department of History and the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan, and he is a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe.

For more information on Holding Our World Together, see the Indian Country Today review and  author interview or listen to the audio interview with Brenda on MPR.