Bitterroot Tastings...

Eating in and around Hamilton, MT, over the last two weeks has been a treat! And being foodies, we were curious about how a small town would hold up to eating in the big city. Just fine, thank you very much! Mornings are best with a stop for great coffee at River Rising (http://www.riverrisingbakery.com/).

In the home-cooking department, there is the from-scratch cornbread and white chicken/chili -- made with extra-hot chilies -- at Mary Barton's house on a hill above Hamilton. It is some of the best chili I've ever tasted.

In our new home, there are still the pristine, end-of-summer spicy organic greens plus heirloom tomatoes that we purchased at the last Hamilton Farmers' Market (http://hamiltonfarmersmarket.webs.com/).

A few of those Hamilton organic greens.

While at the farmers' market, we have a breakfast burrito from a fantastic local food truck, owned by the restaurant La Mas Fina Mexican Food Taqueria (http://www.yelp.com/biz/la-mas-fina-mexican-food-taqueria-inc-victor) just north of Hamilton. The truck must be a new addition, if you read the Yelp review.

Farmers' market menu for La Mas Fina Taqueria.

And for dinners at home so far, we've paired the farmers' market salads with pasta and the pesto that we made from my garden, froze and hauled 1,600 miles to Hamilton. We also brought bouquets of fresh basil cuttings -- to spare them from a St. Louis frost. They all made it here in Zip lock bags in an inch or so of water, bags sealed as tightly as possible around stems and sunk into a sturdy box that wedged nicely between driver and passenger seats. Not a single spill, and the car had a heady licorice smell every time we brushed the basil.

Basil cuttings, transported from St. Louis.

Yeehaw!! One celebratory night, we go to The Signal Grill on Main Street (http://www.thesignalgrill.com/) where a bar/eating establishment has been in "the same location since 1898." I had an exquisite mesquite grilled House-cut Rib Eye. Alex ordered the Montana Mountain High Steak smothered in mushrooms. YUM. 

Part of The Signal Grill menu.

And one luminous late Sunday afternoon in nearby Victor, we dined on homemade 40-garlic-clove chicken, organic beet salad and fresh peach galette at Marie Anne Hasenkrug's dinner party.  I didn't take pictures and, in hindsight, I think I know why: The food was a work of art, and I was mesmerized!

Then there are all of the quick local bites. 

We like Tuesday-night Thai carry-out via the food truck, Buddha Belly, when it comes down from Missoula (http://thaispicy.net/BuddhaBelly.htm). The curry chicken is superb!

We grab tasty sandwiches for lunch from The Loft, on the second-floor of a Main Street building (http://theloftdeli.com/).

Lunch at The Loft.

And then, there is The Wild Mare. It's a wonderful, rough-hewn place (http://www.thewildmare.com/Home.php) with very little signage in the valley town that is Corvallis (mountain views to die for). Recently, we got great pub grub there, but there also is an extensive menu for the restaurant side of things, with dancing some evenings. We met up with Mel and Mary Alice Holloway for dinner. And after that, they took us to a meeting of the Bitterroot Cross-Country Ski Club. We joined! And in a raffle-type system, we won a free night to ourselves in January,  in a cabin ( http://www.bitterrootxcskiclub.net/photos.htm ) that's a 1/2-mile into a beautiful ski-trail system on the Continental Divide!! We can invite friends (have done so), cook a communal meal with ingredients that we bring in on skis, and also serve as hosts/caretakers of the cabin that night and the next day. What fun and what an honor.


One more foodie/gardening event: Yesterday, I helped put up and distribute posters in Hamilton for a community garden planting Oct. 22, organized in Victor by the group SLS (Sustainable Living Systems -- http://www.sustainablelivingsystems.org/).

The planting poster.

We plan to go and help plant the natives donated by a Hamilton business that I still need to visit -- Great Bear Restoration (http://www.great-bear.biz/). We'll also eat lunch at the Victor Community Garden and take our own kitchen tools to make salsa from their harvest.

And we haven't even begun to plow through the list of great restaurants and cafés in Missoula, provided to us by a new contact, our architect Angie Lipski. What an adventure!