Food & Fun

  • Montana's Small-Town Craft Breweries

    By Susie Wall
    Consider what a special place a brewery in a town with a population of less than 1,000 people holds in the community. Not only does it satisfy the palate of local beer lovers, it also serves as a gathering place for the community, a venue for local musicians and a much-needed source of employment and tourist dollars to quench the local economy.
  • A Brief and Tasty History of the Beef Pasty

    By Joseph Shelton
    But those first Cornish miners brought with them a delicacy that many Montanans still treasure, a simple hand-pie that continues to nourish and fuel hard-working folks today. 
  • Winter Hot Springs Roundup!

    Few things in life are more magical than visiting a Montana hot spring in the wintertime to soak in a steaming spring while surrounded by piles of fresh snow!  Montana boasts some of the finest hot springs in the west, and we’re pleased to present you with a selection of some of the best.
  • Geocaching in Montana

    By Bryan D. Spellman
    Do you enjoy scavenger hunts? Working with space-age technology? Getting out and exploring this wonderful place called Montana? If you answered yes to all three, you may be ready to start geocaching.
  • Native American Recipes

    As we know, there was a time when people of the Great Plains centered their lives around the buffalo, using the animal for food, clothing, tools, and musical instruments. The following recipes are adapted for modern materials and methods.
  • Soup Shop

    By Judy Blunt, professor and author of Breaking Clean
    As a child, I could always tell when we were having soup for supper. We lived on a ranch in a compilation of homestead shacks knocked together, typical of the day—insulated with newspapers and tarpaper, fitted with single pane windows, kept hot on one side, cold on the other by a blazing wood fire.
  • Steak and America: A Romance For the Ages

    By Sherman Cahill
    Now whenever I go to a restaurant with a price point north of McDonald's, my eyes scan the menu for steaks. Whether it's the $10 steak and eggs at a greasy spoon or the $47 ribeye at a real fancy place, or the even more dreaded "market price" cut only available to those in the know, I can't help myself.
  • Wooden Wild Horses: Montana's Seven Carousels

    By Bryan Spellman
    The National Carousel Association publishes an online Index of North American Carousels. That index lists seven carousels in Montana, including merry-go-rounds in Boulder, Butte, Columbia Falls, Helena, Missoula, Shelby and Somers.
  • Unimpressed: Montana’s One-Star Reviews

    By Ednor Therriault
    “The pictographs are so faded or destroyed that you have to use your imagination. The best example is in the sorry excuse of a visitor’s center. So, save your $6 state park fee (if you live outside of Montana)."
  • Wild West Words: Steak Terms

    By Chrysti the Wordsmith
    The word was folded into English at least by 1420, when an early cookbook instructed readers how to “make stekys of venysoun or Beef.” Throughout the centuries, the word was spelled styke, steke, and steyke, arriving at its modern spelling steak by the mid 1600s.
  • Big Sky Cooking - Select Recipes

    When you live in a remote place, you’re maybe even more drawn to company, and because meetings are less frequent, each becomes something of a celebration. Hospitality takes on a new meaning when someone drives 40 miles to have dinner at your house, never mind just to stop by and say hello.
  • Headframe Spirits is Inspired By the Past, But Looks Forward to the Future

    I've been to the Tasting Room many times before, and every time someone visits me in my adopted town of Butte, I always take them there. But somehow, I never paid much attention to the bar before now. It is a long, gorgeous hardwood number that looks as if a hundred years or so of cowboys and miners have rubbed it to a reflective polish. 
  • Yellowstone Brokers Presents: From UFC Fighter to Montana Hatter

    Although Montanans pride themselves on their rugged individualism, sometimes we need some help to achieve our dreams. Jackie Wickens and Trecie Wheat Hughes of Yellowstone Brokers are good at that; it’s what they do. They worked with him for a year before finding him the perfect spot.
  • Montana’s Special Scarecrow Festivals

    By Joe Shelton
    Ancient Egyptians used a variation of them to protect their crops along the Nile River Delta from pesky quails. But it was the Greeks, Romans, and Japanese who anthropomorphized them, dressing wood and straw up in old clothes and lending them clubs and scythes to enhance their capacity to intimidate birds.
  • The Old Broke Rancher on Becoming a Hobo at Nine

    By Gary Shelton
    One summer’s day after church, when I was in first or second grade, one of the big-hatted, blue-haired ladies of the St. Leo’s congregation asked me, within earshot of my father, what I wanted to be when I grew up. I answered, without a moment’s doubt, “I want to be a hobo!”
  • MT's Crawdad Cuisine

    By Dwayne Nelson
    There are some lakes, McGregor Lake (about midway between Kalispell and Libby on hwy 2) being one, where divers gather each summer to dive, catch crawdads, and have a big crawdad boil. 
I’m only familiar with the trapping method, and I don’t like to be underwater so that is the method we will address here.