Otter Ranch

I think this is the one....

After 35 years in fantastic restaurants, I've seen a lot of chicken. I've become pretty difficult to impress.

But this chicken?

The first time I cooked it, I knew I was dealing with som**hing different.

The Kadejan chicken at the New London Food Co-op is, hands down, the finest chicken I've ever cooked and enjoyed. Full stop.

The first thing I noticed was that it cooked like somebody actually cared how it was raised.
The skin rendered properly. The meat stayed juicy. The flavor wasn't hiding behind some bu****it seasoning or injection.

The bird does most of the work itself.

Then I learned more about the people behind it.

Kadejan is a family-owned Minnesota poultry farm near Glenwood that's been doing things the right way since 1989. Not because it's easier. Not because it's cheaper. It's obvious...because they care about quality.

And you can taste it.

I also want to give a shout-out to Jess (manager) of the New London Food Co-op.

Every once in a while I hear people wish more that the meat wasn't frozen.

Honestly? I'm glad it is.

The co-op isn't trying to be a convenience store. They're trying to connect our community with producers like Kadejan. Sometimes that means pulling tomorrow's dinner outta the freezer today.

Seems like a pretty fair trade.

What Jess and the co-op crew have built over there matters. Every time they make room for a local producer instead of another anonymous national brand, they're helping keep Minnesota's family farms alive and giving folks access to food that actually tastes like som**hing.

Nobody asked me to write this.

I just cooked some of their birds again today and felt compelled to tell people about it.

So thank you, Kadejan.

Thank you, Jess.

Thank you, New London Food Co-op.

You'll absolutely be seeing Kadejan chicken coming outta the Otter Ranch Trailer in the future.

Because when som**hing is this good, you can't keep it to yourself.

*side note* Ive picked it up at the Seward Co-Op in Minneapolis and cooked for friends there. People are on to this farm and those beautiful birds.

True story: This was my response, after the literary agent lady I've been hounding asked, "Could you send me a partial manuscript of your book?" ....

Dear Ms. X,

😆... A manuscript??

Do you know how fu***ng ADHD I am?

I don't have the patience, or the wiring, to march neatly from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 to Chapter 3 and so on, like some disciplined adult.

I have approximately 300 essays, 50 short stories, 17 half-finished projects, three books hiding inside other fu***ng books, and a filing system that appears to managed by a raccoon on m**h.

I'm not a chapter writer.

I'm an essayist.

My high school English teacher/mentor understood my....lack of focus. Mrs. Klein knew that I was more of a....butterfly, floating from one pretty thing to the next. She fostered my love of the essay. Ritalin and Adderall weren't an industry then, so my teachers let me roll with my undiagnosed mental s**t.

I digress....

I write field reports, stories, memories, lots of rants, and love letters to places. I even pen some obituaries for things that aren't dead yet.

Every piece is its own campfire.

Eventually somebody smarter than me is gonna have to have to walk through the woods, find all the fires, and figure out how they're connected.

That's my manuscript.

It's somewhere in the pile.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Always,

—Wayne

Lucky Duck
A Field Report from New London
By Wayne Stephen

Four years ago, Lucky Duck helped seal the deal.

Not by itself, mind you. I'm not completely insane.

There was the girlfriend, the lakes, the river, the pace....and the people. The feeling that New London still resembled a place rather than a marketing strategy. But Lucky Duck mattered.

You can't miss the building.

It sits up on the hill in bright blue and yellow, looking exactly like the sorta place you'd have begged your parents to stop at when you were ten.

The first time I saw it, I remember thinking, What the hell is that?

The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

People will tell you it's an ice cream shop. Or a candy store. Or a game shop. Or a rubber duck museum.

The correct answer is yes.

Man, I needed some Lucky Duck this week.

Not in a dramatic way or in a movie way. Just in the ordinary way.

My mom is laying in a hospital bed in Arkansas. My lady is down in Tarapoto, Peru. Earlier in the day I was sitting outside watching dragonflies patrol the yard when loneliness tapped me on the shoulder and politely informed me that it had arrived for the afternoon.

Not devastation.

Just quiet.

A little too much quiet.

Then I thought of Lucky Duck.

The last time I visited was exactly a year ago when Rayn was in Peru. I went absolutely feral on that visit. Bought enough candy to prolly loosen a dental filling and shorten my life expectancy by several measurable percentages. I had even started writing a story about the place afterward.

So I headed into town.

The moment I walked through the door, Tim was at the helm.

Now, if you've worked in restaurants for thirty-five years, you learn som**hing important: the greet matters.

Sometimes it's the entire game.

The Greeks call it philoxenia. The French call it soigné. The Nordics call it hygge. Hospitality has a thousand names.

Tim just calls it Saturday.

He greeted me exactly the way a person hopes to be greeted when they walk through a door. Warm. Natural. No performance. No script. Just a genuine welcome.

If you've spent any time around New London, you prolly know Tim. He's one of those people towns quietly build themselves around. Part trivia host. Part camp counselor— well, he should be. And Part civic treasure.

He's Kidd number four in the Davis clan of eleven siblings. A twin, no less.

Pro sports teams have franchise players. Restaurants have career servers. Small towns have people like Tim.

You don't replace them.

You build around them.

I knew before entering that danger lurked inside.

Not crime.

Candy.

The nostalgia hit me right between the eyes.

There they were.

Big League Chew
Charleston Chews...The strawberry ones.

Razzles.

Candy necklaces.

Those glorious oversized Lemonheads that somehow taste exactly like childhood.

Gen X knows candy.

We know cereal mascots. We know Saturday morning cartoons. We know board games. We know toy aisles. We know jingles. We know what it felt like to ride our bikes to a convenience store with two dollars in our pocket and leave feeling rich. We know quarter candy. We know arcade tokens. We know the anticipation of peeling open a wax pack of baseball cards and praying Rod Carew was inside.

We were raised inside one giant marketing experiment and somehow survived.

Walking into Lucky Duck feels less like entering a store and more like entering a museum dedicated to all of it.

Not a museum of objects.

A museum of memories.

The thing people misunderstand about a place like Lucky Duck is that it isn't really selling candy.

It's selling artifacts.

Evidence.

Proof that childhood actually happened.

I wandered toward the Jelly Belly wall and immediately discovered KFC Jelly Beans.

Fried Chicken. Corn. Gravy. As jelly beans.
I pointed at them. Tim didn't miss a beat.

"Not good."

No sales pitch. No corporate enthusiasm. No attempt to move inventory. Just immediate honesty.

I respect that.

As a self-appointed Candy Sommelier, I appreciate a guide who isn't afraid to tell me when a vintage is flawed.

Then came the soda section.

Lord have mercy.

Peaches & Cream Soda.

Blueberry Pie Soda.

Peanut Butter & Jelly Soda.

I was willing to hear arguments for all of 'em.

But then s**t got weird.

Ranch Dressing Soda.

Mustard Soda.

Enchilada Soda.

Black Olive Soda.

I won't get in bed with a Ranch Dressing Soda.
I'm sorry. I'm simply not that adventurous. Some frontiers are best left unexplored.

The candy room itself deserves special recognition.

Parlour feels like the proper word.

It has the atmosphere of a very strange and wonderful library. Rows of brightly colored treasures. Jars. Bins. Shelves. Corners. Unexpected discoveries around every turn.

And ducks.

Dear Oprah, the ducks.

Thousands of them.

At one point I found myself face-to-face with Jean-Luc Picard....as a rubber duck.

I swear he was whispering to me to buy candy ci******es.

The deeper I wandered, the more I realized... Lucky Duck isn't really for kids.... No!

Kids enjoy it, certainly.

But this place was built by adults who understand joy.

The same way SpongeBob wasn't actually written for children.

The same way a piña colada isn't really a kid's drink despite tasting like ice cream.

The board game section got me. Someone had tipped me off about a game I needed to see. Tim knew exactly what it was.

Can't wait to bring it to Goat Ridge Brewing to play.

Then I found myself staring at a puzzle.

Man, I don’t even like puzzles. Yet, somehow I stood there considering the purchase of a puzzle like a middle-aged man contemplating an affair.

Dammit, that's what this place does.

It lowers your defenses.

The marble collection may have been the most dangerous display of all.

Kids play with marbles today?

Yet there I stood staring at them like they were precious gemstones.

Every Gen Xer had a marble.

Not just a marble.

THE marble.

The shooter.

The crown jewel.

The one you weren't supposed to lose.

Those little glass planets brought all of it rushing back.

Dude....Then I encountered the freeze-dried Lemonheads.

No.

Absolutely not.

Some things should never change.

The wheel.
Cast iron.
Willie Nelson.
Lemonheads.

You don't improve Lemonheads.
You don't elevate Lemonheads.
You don't disrupt Lemonheads.

You leave 'em alone.

The entire point of a Lemonhead is the fight. The tart shell. The slow surrender. The reward.

Freeze-drying a Lemonhead.... is like installing Bluetooth in a canoe.

Eventually I arrived at the chocolate case.

B's Chocolates.
Made over in Willmar.
Belgian style.

Tim told me that Mr. B had recently left this world.

Respectfully, I ordered two pieces.

One was raspberry cream.

I'm not exaggerating when I say it was the best damn raspberry cream chocolate I've ever eaten.

Not flashy. Not complicated. Just beautiful.
Dark chocolate. Raspberry. Cream.

The sorta thing that reminds you why classics become classics.

I left with my game.

My candy.

My absurdly sour candy necklace.

My dignity mostly intact.

And somehow I felt better.

Not because anything had been solved.

Mom was still in Arkansas.

Peru was still thousands of miles away.

The world was still doing what the world does.

But the afternoon had changed.

The mood had shifted.

Which brings me to what I think Lucky Duck really is.

It isn't an ice cream shop.
It isn't a candy store.
It isn't a game shop.
It isn't a duck museum.

It's a refuge for delight.

A stubborn little outpost devoted to fun in a culture increasingly obsessed with optimization, productivity, algorithms, subscriptions, passwords, updates, notifications, and squeezing every ounce of usefulness out of every waking minute.

Nothing in Lucky Duck is useful.

The marbles aren't useful.

The ducks aren't useful.

The candy necklace hanging around the neck of a fifty-five-year-old man certainly isn't useful.

That's the point.

Nothing in Lucky Duck asks for your Wi-Fi password.

Nothing requires an app.

Nothing needs a software update.

You simply walk in.

You smile.

You remember.

Sometimes thats enough.

Not bad for a little blue building on a hill.