An intimate and engaging Native food memoirIn these coming-of-age tales set on the Menominee Indian Reservation of the 1980s and 1990s, Thomas Pecore Weso explores the interrelated nature of meals and memories. As he puts it, I cannot separate foods from the moments in my life when I first tasted them. Weso s stories recall the foods that influenced his youth in northern Wisconsin: subsistence meals from hunted, fished, and gathered sources; the culinary traditions of the German, Polish, and Swedish settler descendants in the area; and the commodity foods distributed by the government like canned pork, dried beans, and powdered eggs that made up the bulk of his family s pantry. His mom called this survival food. These stories from the author s teen and tween years some serious, some laugh-out-loud funny will take readers from Catholic schoolyards to Native foot trails to North Woods bowling alleys, while providing Weso s perspective on the political currents of the era. The book also contains dozens of recipes, from turtle soup and gray squirrel stew to twice-baked cheesy potatoes. This follow-up to Weso s Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir is a hybrid of modern foodways, Indigenous history, and creative nonfiction from a singular storyteller.