Why I Started Northwoods Table
Seasonal cooking and renovation projects from our Northern Wisconsin lake house. Recipes, paint colors, and the real process behind them.
I live up here year-round — on a lake, in the kind of place a lot of people only get to a few weeks a summer. It’s a specific way to live: long winters, short summers, four hours from the nearest big city, and a whole rhythm built around the water and the seasons. I love it here, and I wanted a place to write about what it’s actually like to live it, not just visit.
By day, I run a marketing consulting business, working with brands and organizations to help them grow. My husband, Jeremy, and I also own KJ Collective, where we design and restore Northwoods spaces together. Our work lives are full, creative, and deeply rooted in building something real.
If there’s one thing that connects all of it — our home projects, KJ Collective, my cooking — it’s this: it’s usually not that much more work to do something right. Not the expensive version. Not the perfect version. Just the version where you don’t take the shortcut.
I think about that every time I’m cooking. I grow vegetables in the summer, source ingredients thoughtfully, and go out of my way for the good version of simple things — this summer it was beets, which I’d only ever bought before, and which turn out to be a completely different vegetable when you grow them yourself. Every August I process 8 dozen ears of corn for the freezer, the same day it’s picked, because there’s an old rule that you should have the water boiling before you even pull it off the stalk. I can’t move that fast — there’s a three-hour drive between me and the farm — but I still get it done the same day. It’s totally worth it.
I think about it in the house, too. We had a bathroom with slate tile in the shower that I hated for four years before I did anything about it — not because I couldn’t decide, but because I didn’t want the fast fix or the easy fix. I wanted the right one. When Jeremy finally tore it out, one problem turned into another and he ended up gutting the whole shower. Two months later, it was done properly. We’re also still married!
I believe the quality of a meal begins long before the stove is turned on. I believe the same thing about a room.
This is where I’ll write about what that actually looks like up here — the meals I make and the recipes behind them, the rooms we’re redoing, the paint colors that hold up through a Northwoods winter, what things really cost, and what we got wrong along the way. The version with the extra step still in it.
It lands in your inbox — the recipes people are always asking me for, the exact paint colors, where I actually buy things, and the stories that don’t fit in an Instagram caption. If that sounds like your kind of thing, subscribe and come along.
If you love the Northwoods — whether you live here, summer here, or just wish you could — and you love food, home, and doing things properly even when it’s a little more trouble, you’ll feel at home here.
Thank you for sitting at the table with me.
— Kristin
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