Top Ten

A To-Die-For Dinner at Home: Taste of Success To Go

Brace yourselves. The Great Lakes Culinary Institute’s Taste of Success Event is coming April 16, and not only does it promise to be one of the best meals you’ll get to eat all year, you get to wear your sweatpants to the shindig. That’s because this year’s event will be held at your home. Works like this: You reserve your to-go package now ($200; generously serves two), pick it up at the Great Lakes Campus (715 E. Front St., in Traverse City) between 4pm and 6pm April 16, and then go home and stuff yourself silly with stuff the culinary students make explicitly to showcase their skills. What kind of stuff? Oh, not much, just a box of charcuterie items and accompaniments; a 16-ounce serving of soup with garnish; a “global tour box” that includes a sampling of dishes from Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Mediterranean regions (complete with reheating instructions for any item that should be served hot), and a dessert box that includes four to six petit fours and four to six other confections. “For two,” they say. “Elastic waistband for days,” we say. Go on and indulge guilt-free; proceeds go to support the culinary program students. To purchase your package, search “Taste of Success” at nmc.edu.

Family Camping & Navigation Courses are on!

Greilick Outdoor Recreation & Education Center (GO·REC) is 500 wooded, lakeside acres in the midst of the Great Lakes Basin and, specifically, the lake-dappled forests just southeast of Traverse City. It’s a place you and your family can freely fish, watch wildlife, hike or mountain bike, rent campsites to pitch your tent, and — if you’ve never done any of that before — learn how. Coming up soon: Friday, April 9–Sunday, April 11, you and your family can take a Beginner Family Camping class, where you’ll camp in a tent for two nights, learn how to pack and organize, set up a campsite, cook outside, navigate challenges and safety, and more ($250 per family of five or fewer). Got that stuff down already? Consider honing your own navigation skills April 10–11 ($99) with an expert guide who’ll teach you to read a topography map and how to find your way without a compass (and with a compass and map), so you can cruise with confidence through the backcountry this summer. Find these and other courses offered this spring and summer at exploregorec.org.

Coming soon to 4041 US-31 Chums Corner!

Stuff we love Local Filmmaker Scores Amazon Prime Deal; His Movies Now Accessible Worldwide

Thanks to a recent deal, all of Rich Brauer’s movies are now available for viewing to anyone with an Amazon Prime account. The Traverse City filmmaker worked with several agencies — “[Before the Amazon deal came about] I had six different distributors for seven movies,” he said — but received regular royalty payments only from the one representing his 2004 movie, Barn Red, starring Ernest Borgnine. After meeting with all of them face to face at the American Film Market in Santa Monica five years ago, he decided to let the other distributorship agreements lag or outright canceled them. Now the one distributor is representing all his films and has reached an agreement with Amazon Prime to host all of his films (now numbering nine), as well as his upcoming Frozen Stupid 2: Open Water. He’s excited the movies are now available worldwide to anyone using Amazon Prime. “I don’t know what it means financially, but I’m happy to see them out there,” Brauer said.

tastemaker Mundos’ Avocado Bowl

Few things have been as life-altering to us MacBook-wielding creative types as the shutdown of in-house eating and coffee at so many of our beloved local coffee shops. Thanks be to Traverse City’s Mundos then, which has kept our still- homebased staff buzzed up, fed, and safe from going stir crazy. Its sun-lit, greenery-filled, and mega-spacious space just off Woodmere — made greener by a recent foray into selling stylish houseplants in hand-poured concrete pots — is good for the soul and, it turns out, the body.

Case in point: Mundos’ Avocado Bowl ($11.75). Petite but filling, this savory breakfast brought together, atop a just-right-sized bed of brown rice, the healthy protein and choline of two poached eggs, the good fats (and flavor) of several spotless green avocado slices, and the nutritional triple powerhouses of pickled cabbage and onions, kale, and tomatoes.

For a hot minute, we worried it might not be enough to see us through until lunch — it was Sunday brunch, after all — but we’re delighted to report that we worked the computer til noon then powered through a hike at Empire Bluffs that afternoon and didn’t feel hungry until well after 4pm. Unfortunately, we were hungry for another Avocado Bowl at Mundos, which was two counties over and, by then, closed.

Find the TC location of Mundos Roasting & Co. at 708 Boon St.; Suttons Bay location at 206 N. Saint Joseph St. www.mundosroastingco.com. Northern Express Weekly • april 05, 2021 • 5