greg willis

Food in US national parks sucks. And if it doesn't suck, it's because you've paid way too much for it. Each national park allows one company to run food and lodging (and by allow I mean pay for). So it's a monopoly. No matter who the concessionaire is -- Glacier Park Inc, ARAMARK, Xanterra -- the monopolistic nature of such an arrangement means that you have no alternative but to eat their food, and they have no incentive to make their food better.

Luckily, Glacier NP is not as isolated as, say, Yellowstone. Small towns dot the periphery of the park, and allow the visitor to circumvent the monopoly and taste real food. So here's my take on where we ate. Your mileage may vary.

Great Falls, MT

Brian's Top Notch Cafe
718 Central Avenue
Lives up to it's billing. We ate breakfast and the food was quite good -- imaginative and huge. And the banter between Brian and his mom provides the floor show.
Recommended

Dante's Creative Cuisine
1325 8th Ave N
OK. The dinner we had here wasn't bad -- and it's not a chain, so that's good. But it kinda left me flat. Even though everyone was very friendly, it had a vibe of pretension. "Creative cuisine?" Really? Maybe for Great Falls. Or maybe I was tired and at the end of the trip.

East of Park

Serranos
29 Dawson Ave
East Glacier Park, MT
Solid Mexican food, nice atmosphere in the restaurant.
Recommended.

Park Cafe
3147 Hwy 89
Saint Mary, MT
Popular place so either eat a bit early or be prepared to wait for a table. Decent sandwiches, but oh the pies! Their slogan, Pie for Strength, could not ring more true -- at least with their pies. I think mine was mango-raspberry - mmmm.
Recommended.

Two Sisters
Hwy 89, near Babb, MT
Easily the find of the trip. The food is creative (really), the service friendly, the beer cold, and the decor funky. We ate here three times, 2 dinner & 1 breakfast, and would have eaten more, but we had reservations across the park. I can't say enough good things. If you are within 2 hours drive, go there -- you won't regret it.
Highly Recommended!

Italian Gardens Restaurant
Swiftcurrent Motor Inn
Many Glacier
I have a photo here so that you can positively identify it and avoid it like you would roadkill. It's the kind of restaurant that makes you never want to eat again. Crappy decor, crappy service, crappy food. They screwed up pizza, how can you screw up pizza? Go to the adjacent store and buy a prepackaged sandwich and eat it outside. I'm serious, you'll thank me.

West of Park

Spruce Park Cafe
10045 Highway 2 East
Coram, MT
Oh sure, it's in a Exxon. But there are few places in this country where you can get this combination of folksy local hangout, comfort food, and great pie. Yes, this another decent food, great pie place that seem to pop up in Montana. Well worth the trip from Lake McDonald Lodge.
Recommended.

Waterton

Zums
116B Waterton Avenue
Waterton, AB
Had dinner. Average food. Nothing much else to say.

The Lamp Post
Waterton, AB
Even though we just had lunch here, the menu seemed thoughtful and the food was excellent. Definitely a more sophisticated place.
Recommended.

When I was in my officework days, we would have holiday parties. If you like largish parties (35-50) co-workers serve as a perfect party filler. Some you know well, others barely -- but everyone knows each other. There's little for the party-thrower (me) to do except refill.

But now I have clients, not co-workers. And clients are much fewer and a bit more formal. Any holiday party with them would require a level of social effort that tires me just to consider it. So sorry, Tiny Tim, no party for you.

But back when the co-workers were egregious in their HR violations, part of the reason was the egg nog. So for those whose holiday spirits require some, well, holiday spirits - I got yer recipe for:

Egg Nog

Ingredients

• 1 quart milk
• 2 cinnamon sticks
• 1 vanilla bean, split
• 5 cloves
• 10 blades of mace
• 12 egg yolks
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 cups dark rum
• 1 1/2 cups brandy
• 1 tbsp vanilla
• 1 quart hanf-and-half
• freshly grated nutmeg to taste

Instructions

Combine milk and spices, including vanilla bean, in a heavy saucepan and let them infuse over the lowest possible heat until flavors expand. Meanwhile, combine yolks and sugar in a large bowl and whisk until mixed.

Bring the milk to 180 degrees, then gradually mix in into the yolk mixture. Return the milk and yolk mixture to the saucepan. Cook over medium heat, stirring steadily, until it reaches a temperature of 160. If it goes much above 160, you'll get custard instead of nog.

Strain mixture into a large bowl and let cool to room temperature. Once cooled, scrape the inside of the vanilla beans and add. Stir in rum, brandy, half-and-half, vanilla, and nutmeg.

Refrigerate eggnog for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight. Just before serving, dust the top of the eggnog with additional nutneg.

12 servings

(based on a recipe published 27Dec89 in the NY Times.)

Yeah, I know that football season's almost over. But the most important games are coming up fast. And some kind of spicy wing things really do fit with the football watching. All the recipes that I found, however, usually involved deep frying or an amount of oil that wings, being kinda fatty anyway, certainly don't need. So what to do?

Make your own damn recipe (if you're me, that is). So here's my recipe for:

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 pounds chicken wings (about 14)
• 1 cup cider vinegar
• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 4 tbsp Tabasco (or other hot sauce)
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1/2 tsp corn starch
• salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

A few hours before cooking, place wings, vinegar, and soy sauce in a large zip-lock bag and place in the refirgerator to marinate.

Once you're good to go, preheat oven to 375. Line a baking sheet with non-stick aluminum foil, then place the wings on the foil. Throw away that marinade, btw. Once the oven's up to speed, place the sheet with the wings in for 20 min. (This allows the wings to get mostly cooked and gets rid of some of the fat from the skin.)

Meanwhile, combine the hot sauce, honey, and corn starch in a small saucepan. Under medium heat, stir until it gets thick - certainly not more that a couple of minutes. (Both the corn starch and the honey make the hot sauce stick to the wings. Without it, only the memory of the hot sauce remains on the wings. And the honey ensures a good browning.)

After the aforementioned 20 minutes, take the wings out of the oven, and remove them from the sheet into a large-ish bowl. Pour the sauce into the bowl over the wings. Before you place the wings back on the sheet, pour off any fat (your heart will thank you). Pop them in the oven for 10 more minutes. I usually have some sauce left over, so when those 10 minutes are up, I take out the pan and spoon on the rest of the sauce over the wings. Put them back in for a final 5 minutes. (So that's 20, 10, and 5 -- 35 minutes total.)

Take 'em out, let 'em cool down a bit, and enoy the 3rd quarter. I supplement with carrots and radishes. I also use bleu cheese dressing, but I cut it with an equal measure of non-fat yogurt.

Enjoy! And let me know how they turnout in the comments!

When we go out west, it's usually in addition to any other vacation we have scheduled for the year. So to justify the expense, we usually try to go on the cheap. So the places I've reviewed here are not meant to be the best of the best. And although I'm not shy about throwing coin at restaurant or a hotel, it's all about the value. So lets see how things stacked up on this trip.

Moab, UT
Food: Moab Brewery

I am a middle aged man. Which means I'm -- at best -- halfway between having been born and going to die. Which is another way of saying that in 43 years I'll be dead -- it's just a matter of how long I will have been dead for.

As these epiphanies sink in, I start to think about 2050 and how best to reduce those number of years I will have been dead for.

So the doctor says cholesterol, while not high, is high enough to watch. Shoot. And I had just settled into a morning routine of an hard-boiled egg. So what's for breakfast?

Yes, granola.

But I'm picky. The store-bought granola has a fat content I don't control and stuff other than oatmeal. Non-mushy oatmeal, that's what I want. And I'm picky enough to just do it myself. In my defense, it's actually pretty easy to do.

Recipe (and no more mortality references) below the fold.

Amongst the many reason to travel to Namibia, you aren't going there for the food. It it bad? No. Is it good? Occasionally.

The typical schedule for a day in Namibia goes like this:

During the day, see beautiful and unique animals. And in the evening, eat them.

Game, my friends, is what's for dinner.

Restaurants
We ate in only a handful of restaurants, staying mostly in lodges far away from towns. Two stand out as exceptional.

What you have for dinner is one of the most intimate details you have in your life, yet also one of the most forgettable. What meal did you have, say, three weeks ago?

I do the cooking here around the ranch, and one of the hardest questions to answer -- I mean in life -- is what's for dinner. It is relentless. And I don't do the microwave or food-in-a-box -- lets just say that growing up I had countless bad experiences with cream of mushroom soup.

I bake rarely. The blueberry muffins, the occasional coffee cake, and maybe a cookie or two. Beyond that, nada. But it's a lot easier to write about the pastry products because it's the one aspect of cooking that I actually follow a recipe. Most of my cooking is the dinner-type. And most of that is me winging it.

Coffee cake is not the first thing on one's mind when the temperature is in the low 100s, but take your mind forward to autumn. The night was chillier than you expected and you had to pull up the blanket from the bottom of the bed. The morning air is crisp, and the Sunday sunrise is tardy. Your schedule includes no productive activity whatsoever. And from the kitchen comes the wafting scent of, you guessed it, coffee cake.

Enjoy.

Coffee Cake:

Recipe below the fold

Robert Rodriguez, the director (Sin City, Spy Kids) has a 10 Minute Cooking School extra on the DVD for Once Upon a Time in Mexico. (Personally, I prefer El Mariachi. Leaner on effects, but a better overall movie.) Anyway, in this cooking school he prepares Puerco Pibil (the dish that the character that Johnny Depp plays frequently dines on). Almost like a Mexican BBQ, it's good only the way that cheap meat and long cooking hours can be. I usually fudge and buy ground annato, that stuff's a bear to grind. Recipe below the fold.

Before spending 4 hours on the grill:

After:

Allow me to set the scene. It's late spring / early summer. No air conditioning. Sunday morning, say, nine o'clock. The birds have finally convinced you to rise from bed, only for you to settle into a chair downstairs. There's actually something to read in the newspaper. The whispy curls from your coffee waft into the morning air. What could make such a morning even more perfect?

Muffins.

Blueberry muffins, to be exact. The blueberries are fresh, ripe, and cheap. Some of them even have the baby blue powdery-ness to them. The tops are crispy / crunchy, the insides steamy as you eat one right after they come out of the oven.

I like food. I like it so much that I'm willing to work for it -- and that means cooking. I don't particularly enjoy cooking. If somehow fresh muffins were to magically appear, even possibly satanic muffins, I would eat with no second thought. But that's not how this world (at least my world) works.

And so I cook.

Here are last Sunday's muffins.

Recipe is below the fold -- which means click that next link.