Traveling Feast

I might have grown up in Montana on meat and potatoes, but often when I come back to visit my aunt and uncle we go a bit more exotic for at least one dinner: Thai food.  Steven Lympus taught my aunt to cook Thai, and she passed on the cookbook Steven shared with her: Simply Thai by Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu.

For both of us, the cookbook functions as our Thai cooking bible and last night we went for a dinner of three of our favorite dishes in the volume.

Phad Thai.

Cold Spring Rolls

And Cucumber Salad.

St. Regis Travel Center Edition: Western Montana travel kitsch seems to lean heavily on huckleberries and outhouses for the local items, but a number of more generic items also caught my eye in the food-related kitsch category.  Weigh in with which of the items you think should take top honors.

Entry #1: “Chili Makins” that claim to not to contribute to global warm or ozone depletion.

Entry #2: Silicone bakeware with a conscience.  “Let them eat cake” takes on new meaning.

Entry #3: Ice cube nostagia for the early video game addict.

Entry #4: Possibly the strangest of the items in the expansive local huckleberry line-up.

Entry #5: For the butter challenged who appreciate single season, single action gadgets, comes the Butter Boy.  I believe it runs on ethanol.

Entry #6: When just a state-branded shot glass won’t do, go for the one with the miniature bear camped inside.

Entry #7: The Celene Dion soundtrack is optional.

And our final St. Regis Travel Center entry, #8: The moose-chugger bottle holder.

Your votes please.

I tend to be a bit incredulous on my way to the bathroom at most travel centers.  Why?  It is the nick-nacks offered for sale.

Yesterday though I decided to take a more studied approach to travel center commerce.  On the way from Spokane over to my parents home on Flathead Lake, I determined to try find the MOST OUTRAGEOUS food-related item offered for sale wherever we stopped to visit the loo.  I did just this, took pictures, and intend to let you vote on what you think should be #1.  Yet just the idea of looking for the most outrageous item on display gave me a new clinical distance that offered up general observations as well as some real kitsch contenders.

Observations First: Travel kitsch tends to fall into categories.  There are all the locally-branded items from tee-shirts to mugs and shot glasses.  My favorite in this category yesterday was the Montana mug trying to impersonate a tree trunk.

Most of this seems to be made in China, but is intended to evoke a sense of place far far from Shanghai.  Second there are all the vanity items embossed with your name.  My son Peter’s name is always available on key chains, pens, pipe bombs and the like.  Daughter Megan’s name is equally popular.  It is only our third child, Brendan, who is left out.  Apparently there are enough Brandons in the world to justify a print run, but the Brendans are out of luck.

The third category is the humor category: items intended to make you laugh enough to forget you have no place to put said sign or item when you get home.  For some reason a high percentage of the travel kitsch in the humor category seems to skew toward the crude.

Fourth comes the cheap home decor category with a line up of items destined to gather dust on mantle pieces (much of it with a country/folk/old fashioned feel).

Fifth are the toys guaranteed not to break only until at least the next exit on the Interstate.

Sixth: jewelery.

Seventh: unique local items… often food like hot sauce, jams, candy, and a pancake mix supposedly made by Aunt Alice.  In the case of western Montana, apparently the critical ingredient is a huckleberry.  Maybe in Minnesota it is a walleye trout.

What I’m curious about at the moment is what categories I might have missed.  The specific kitsch from St. Regis should show up for comment soon, but right now let  me know what classic travel kitsch categories I’m missing.

By the time I reach St. Regis (Exit 33 coming down off of Lookout Pass in Montana) I’m usually hungry.  The Travel Center promises fudge, ice cream, slot machines, a full-service restaurant with the word “huckleberry” in the title, and a massive trout tank in the shape of a moat that you can actually crawl inside.  It also offers almost as much travel kitsch as the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar a few miles back up the road.

It is true that the St. Regis Travel Center can’t match the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar in the area of medieval swords and black ops knives.  Yet unless you want a replica of Excalibur in the trunk or a Chinese knock-off of a Navy Seal blade under your car seat, I recommend stopping in St. Regis.

Particularly if your destination is the Flathead, actually leaving the freeway at Exit 33 feels like real progress rather than just caving into the tourist trap pressure of a bar surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of silver dollars with a life-sized carving of an Indian chief guarding the door.

St. Regis is the place to stop, but where to eat has never been settled to my satisfaction.  The seasonal trailer hocking fresh Montana cherries at highway robbery prices is an viable option.  The Travel Center restaurant isn’t.

I still haven’t mustered the courage to go into the restaurant in the center.  The word “berry” in the title combined with a cave-like entrance is part of it.  Bad experiences at similar places next to other exits in other states is also a factor.  Then there is the urgency to keep moving.  Junk food from the racks near the register might not be heart-healthy or wholesome, but it can be eaten in the car.

Yet there is something more that has kept me out of the restaurant all these years.  For absolutely no rational reason I can identify, the place feels sinister.  I may be missing the best buffalo meatloaf on the planet cooked by some rising truck-stop star who will win Top Chef. But if I am, you’ll have to tell me because the place makes me nervous.

This has presented a problem in the hunger-for-hot-food department until now.

Now another option at Exit 33 takes credit cards.  Frosty’s Drive In isn’t new, but for years they’ve been a cash only spot.

No longer.  They take credit, and offer at least the pretense of fast food with their drive-up window.  Realistically you probably want to park and walk in.  Frosty’s isn’t the place for your burger in a minute or two.  Try six.  Or ten.

Neither is it the spot for a culinary revelation.  You can, with confidence, skip the banana shake.  The handmade sign made me hope for actual banana.  Instead, the syrup they use produces a color not found in nature and a taste to match. But the Mushroom Burger was a surprise in the other direction.

It has personality.  The beef appears to be food service standard, but the bun is fresh, grilled slightly, and comes with a smear of special sauce.  They include a cheese product without advertising it on the menu and the cook takes the time to slap the canned mushrooms on the grill.  She is also generous with the hand-torn lettuce.

Frosty’s isn’t In-N-Out, Fatburger, or Shake Shack, but it does give me a place to stop when I’m hungry in St. Regis and not in the mood for kitsch and travel center sinister.  I count this as progress.

One of my strong childhood memories is of driving in from Hughes Bay with grandpa for a glass of milk and a powdered sugar donut at the Lakeside Mercantile.  Then while he finished the paper and his cup of coffee at the counter, I would wander the aisles looking at cans of food or fishing tackle or, more often than not, reading comic books from a revolving rack by the front windows.

Nearly 35 years later the Mercantile is long gone. Now the building houses a real estate office and a maze of other offices for who knows what.

So today, instead of a trip into Lakeside for a donut, I went in with my father to see the upscale brewery and pub several hundred yards down the strip of Highway 93 that defines the town.  The Tamarack Brewing Company has been serving up beers brewed on site and pub food for several years now, but I had not managed to make it in yet.  Maybe I was still pouting about the Mercantile closing twenty-five years earlier and cutting off yet another link to my past.

The other reason for my delay is that I’m also just learning to bother with beer.  It took a passionate group of home brewers in Washington State to get me interested in allotting any of what I consider to be precious calories to anything other than food and an occasional bottle of wine.

But today milk and donuts weren’t in the cards.  Beer and fish were.

The Dock Days Hefewizen was a good call with Tamarack’s Alehouse Fish and Chips. I settled on the fish and chips because the menu announced that the kitchen used fresh line-caught Whitefish from Flathead Lake.  I know better than to think that one of the neighborhood boys caught my fish at the dock on the other side of the highway, but I was excited anyway that they featured a local fish rather than something flown or shipped or trucked from thousands of miles away.  I  support local food, and if that food is battered and deep-fried, all the better.

Throw in some house-made tartar and the fire in the fireplace next to our table and it was a lunch almost good enough to make me stop moaning about change.

Somers never has felt like a complete town to me.  Even as a kid riding up to Sliter’s Lumber with grandpa, I had the sense that a complete town needed more than a hardware store and two bars.  In the current configuration of this intersection of several streets at the northwest end of Flathead Lake, there is a solid little cafe.  In a previous incarnation, the spot next to Sliter’s housed a bank.  I suspect the business is better now that they offer biscuits and gravy rather than free checking.

The Somers Bay Cafe, established in 1997, is popular not for newfangled Yippie breakfast items packed with tofu and wheat germ, but for the simple farm breakfast options offered at thousands of similar cafes across the country: omeletes and scrambles, French toast and pancakes, biscuits and gravy, as well as the prerequisite bowl of oatmeal.  They do make their own multigrain bread (mine was a bit dry) and the chorizo sausage in several Mexican-leaning platters is made in house.

I’d call it a decent breakfast spot, but hardly one to survive for over a decade on comfort food alone.  I think at least part of the reason it is packed so often is that it makes Somers feel a bit more like a real town rather than just a little spur off of Highway 93 with a few old buildings.

Cherries play a role of some note in my food-obsessed imagination.  I grew in Montana’s Flathead Valley – the last stop each summer on the migrant pickers path arcing through the Northwest.

We had a single cherry tree in our backyard, next to the alley fence, and I remember I measured the progress of summer in part by the cherries on that tree.  I would watch them ripen as June slipped by, impatient for the sweetness I knew would come.  Then there were the orchard families in the Pentecostal church my father served as pastor.  A Sunday would arrive when one or more would mention to my dad that they had a box of Bings or Lamberts or Lapins out in the trunk for our family.  25 lbs of fruit that we would take with us for a week or two of vacation at my grandparents house on the north end of the lake.

The taste of a ripe chilled cherry belongs in a category all its own, but that isn’t the end of the joy.  With a cherry, after every last bit of flesh is teased off the pit, you get to spit.  Spit that pit as far as you can.  My sister and I along with my cousins would line up at the railing on the deck at the lake house and eat and spit until we were sick.  We’d do this day after day with our 25 lbs until we’d had our fill or the box was empty.

Summer without cherries is something less than summer, and grocery store specials don’t qualify.  Cherries need to be local, grown by someone you know or at least someone that someone you know knows.

The problem was that this year I missed cherry season in Montana.  Despite my best intentions to come ‘home’ early in July when every orchard has a roadside stand out along the highway, it wasn’t until the last week in August that I crested Lookout Pass on my way to the bay where our family still has land and beds for as many kids as want to return.  Yet as I left the interstate at St. Regis I saw a trailer parked in a vacant lot across from the gas station, and a sign leaning against the trailer proclaiming in handwritten letters: FRESH CHERRIES.  LAST OF THE SEASON.  I had to stop.

Lapins.  $5.99 for a pound and a half.  A little soft, but still sweet and with enough bite that there is now a trail of pits from the stop sign in St. Regis all the way to the junction of 35 and Highway 200.  If you can’t spit pits off the deck with your sister and cousins, spitting them out the car window at 60 miles an hour is an acceptable second.