Playing With Our Food

 The timing was perfect. “Where are we going to eat with Doug and Shellie tonight? Their choice, right?” “Ciao Mambo.” “Italian food. Benissimo!” To be honest, Lori and I ate at Ciao Mambo a couple of months earlier and it didn’t knock our socks off. But hey, it’s Italian food so just order something else and it’ll be just fine, right? He said : Our server started us off with bread, which is always a good thing. Now, when it comes to bread, authentic Italian bread has a thicker, chewier crust than what you find in America. Ciao Mambo’s bread wasn’t exactly authentic but it was decently close. And hey, it was topped with a generous helping of parmesan cheese (which makes just about everything better). I ate my share, asked for more and again ate my share (and then some). As for a main course, I decided to go with pizze al forno because well, can you never go wrong with oven-baked pizza. Plus, I felt like eating an entire pizza. More specifically, I ordered Abby's Favorit...

We have good friends who, like us, like to have a good time and enjoy food. We have a monthly dinner date together to both explore new and revisit favorite eateries. In fact, we were with them for several of the posts on this blog. This one is no different only this time we didn’t go out, we stayed in. In fact, we invited them over for a homecooked Italian meal. He said: I’m really not much of a cook but there are a few things I can make, and make well. One of them is the pizza bomb. Regular folks call it a calzone. Now, you can make your own dough and make your own sauce or you can take the easy route. So as a public service, here’s my simple version of Pizza Bombs for Dummies . Ingredients: buttermilk biscuits chopped ham shredded mozzarella spaghetti sauce flour vegetable oil Place a thin layer of flour on the countertop. Use a rolling pin to roll out and flatten one buttermilk biscuit, two combined if you use the smaller biscuits like I did for this meal. In the mid...

Road trippin' it is always fun, especially when you're banging out an annual tradition. Fall means big game hunting season and since my son Jace is no longer my in-state hunting buddy, we headed out-of-state to his place in Washington so we could go out on opening day.  We left Montana on a late Friday afternoon meaning we'd be driving when the dinner bell rang. We just didn't know if it would ring at our final destination, two states over and a two and a half hours later, or along the way. Silly question! We weren't even 45 miles from home when the right blinker clicked on and we found ourselves exiting the interstate highway in St. Regis, Montana. Now, we've stopped off in St. Regis many times over the years, not because it's the halfway point on our Frenchtown-to-Spokane route, but because it has a one-stop shop for everything the traveler wants/needs. The St. Regis Travel Center has a couple of stations of gas pumps, a convenience store, a massive gi...

If you don’t know it’s there, you may miss it. Why? Because it’s set back off the road and not in your line of sight when driving north toward the Mission Valley in western Montana. But once you do see and if you stop to partake, you’ll never not notice it again. I’m talking about the Buck Snort Steakhouse . Lori and I had never been to the Buck Snort before but our once-a-month dinning buddies, Doug and Shellie, are Buck Snort veterans so they showed us the way. When it’s a Doug-and-Shellie day, it’s important to plan accordingly so I ate my lunch at work at 11 a.m. That left me seven hours to fully digest and build an appetite for what was ahead. He said: This is my kind of place – a made-in-Montana log cabin, big game mounts with a decorative flair, a casual atmosphere and red meat on the menu. Despite a full selection of burgers, I went with Surf n Turf – an 8-ounce top sirloin with shrimp scampi, blackened or coconut. I went with shrimp scampi, fries (because we heard they’re ...

“Do you want to go with us to Pocatello?” That was the question from my daughter, Aubrey. Her family, University of Montana football season ticket holders, planned to make the 375-mile trek to watch the Griz play at Idaho State. “Heck yeah!” He said: Aubrey, Kenny and the kids picked me up from work and brought me lunch for the drive - some apple slices and a thick slick of Papa Murphy 5-meat pizza, just like I had on a Clark River paddleboard outing with Lori. Nothing like getting a road trip off on the right food, er, foot.  The first stop on our trip was an overnighter with family in Rexburg, 80 miles from our game-day destination. As we rolled into town, we hit dinner at Millhollow, self-touted as the oldest homegrown restaurant and the first to bring both frozen yogurt and toasted sandwiches to town. Millhollow sandwiches are basically “build your own,” which I did – ham, banana peppers, EXTRA pickles (always!) and honey mustard. And I washed it down with a smooth Just Pe...