{"id":2132,"date":"2010-10-11T21:47:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-12T03:47:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=2132"},"modified":"2010-10-29T21:20:41","modified_gmt":"2010-10-30T03:20:41","slug":"valley-fish-cheese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/?p=2132","title":{"rendered":"Valley Fish & Cheese"},"content":{"rendered":"\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"rss\"<\/a>

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On our way back from Iowa the other week, passing through Prairie du Chien, we spotted\u00a0Valley\u00a0Fish\u00a0& Cheese<\/a> (it was hard to miss) and we had<\/em> to stop.\u00a0 You see, one of the quandries about being into local food and living in Wisconsin is the distinct lack of seafood options.\u00a0 We’re trying much harder now to make full use of what we do have here, namely freshwater fish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I’ve\u00a0been on the lookout\u00a0for a good smoked fish shop near our house ever since\u00a0we stopped in Calument Fisheries <\/a>in Chicago.\u00a0 We didn’t just stop in because of the Free Samples<\/strong> sign (although that helped); I\u00a0had heard\u00a0about Valley Fish from asking around for recommendations in the area.\u00a0 Mike Valley, the owner, started the shop over 25 years ago and it has become something of an institution in Prairie du Chien.\u00a0 And he is exactly the guy you want to buy your fish from.\u00a0 Mike is a fisherman, and he treats every product like it’s going to end up on his family’s table.\u00a0 Time after time I’ve found \u00a0that you can accurately judge food just by\u00a0seeing person responsible for it talk.\u00a0 All of my favorite food producers have a certain far-away look in their eye; they are talking to you but they are thinking about cheese\/tomatoes\/pears\/smoked trout\/etc.\u00a0 I guess it’s possible to be really bad at something you’re passionate about, but the fact that he has been doing it for 25 years says something is going right.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Valley packs a ton of products into their small space.\u00a0 Pictured above (going from lower left to upper right) you see Alaskan sockeye salmon, atlantic salmon, trout, shrimp (behind the trout), sturgeon, catfish jerky (behind the sturgeon), and catfish sausage.\u00a0 All of the fish is smoked on the premises using 100% hickory, and\u00a0some is locally caught (the sturgeon &\u00a0perch for instance).\u00a0 They also had several varieties of pickled fish (herring, bluegill, chubs, etc), various jerkies (alligator, snapping turtle, etc), frog legs, frozen trout cheeks, and more.\u00a0 Besides the seafood they had a\u00a0nice cheese selection, local\u00a0apples, frozen meats, &\u00a0drinks.\u00a0\u00a0 They also had instructional DVDs staring Mike in case you feel like smoking a fish or two yourself.<\/p>\n

This was all a lot to take in, but we were on our way home from a long day already, so we did a quick pass through the free samples and bought ourselves some catfish sausage and smoked sturgeon.\u00a0 Normally I would have gone for the trout as it’s my favorite, but I was feeling a little adventurous.\u00a0 We used the catfish sausage instead of pork in a bean soup\u00a0and it was a perfect substitute, bringing a new flavor to a dish we eat quite a bit.\u00a0 The smoked sturgeon ended up in a tasty chowder, which Leslie will describe in another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On our way back from Iowa the other week, passing through Prairie du Chien, we spotted\u00a0Valley\u00a0Fish\u00a0& Cheese (it was hard to miss) and we had to stop.\u00a0 You see, one of the quandries about being into local food and living in Wisconsin is the distinct lack of seafood options.\u00a0 We’re trying much harder now to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,44],"tags":[74,169,170],"class_list":["post-2132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-driftless-area-towns","category-made-in-wisconsin","tag-fish","tag-prairie-du-chien","tag-smoked-fish","no-featured-image"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2132"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2132\/revisions\/2163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}