Follow That Sign to Shake-up an Adventure

While I’m not much for adventures that involve crowds, loud noise, or frenetic activity, I enjoy out of the ordinary explorations. We unexpectedly hit the magic button on our latest road trip and found ourselves looking through several families’ no longer needed treasures and eating Indian tacos. Even better, a Shoshone grandmother prepared our food under blue Wyoming skies. While we ate, we enjoyed visiting with her husband, a tribal artist whose work hangs in offices and homes around the world. 

The key to our unplanned side trip was a garage sale sign stuck along the ditch of a road through a reservation. Once we spied the invite, we said, “Let’s see what they’ve got.” The irony in that comment is that both of us are over sixty and have plenty our own loot we could sell and not miss. Despite knowing we have dust collectors decorating our home, we can’t help but inspect what other people have spent a lifetime acquiring. Heck, who knows when you’ll find a petrified dinosaur tooth or a Made in Occupied Germany teacup?

While we didn’t find dinosaur dental work or rare porcelain, we did find aged buffalo horns, an antique hunting knife, a heavy chef’s skillet, local literature, and homemade Indian tacos made by a professional.

Over decades, I’ve learned garage sales are perfect places to sample local foods. In Northwest Kansas, I’ve bought German bierocks, hertzen, spitzbuben, and Bohemian kolaches. You know when you see the “homemade” sign, you’re in for a treat. There’s something about a woman serving her family recipes that makes her put her best work into what ends up as food for gods.

The lesson learned on this journey was that women everywhere share this  tradition. The silver-haired elder shaping a dough ball before frying it in hot oil was every bit as proud of her traditional food as women in Ellis, Rooks, Rush, Russell, and Trego Counties who tempt taste buds with mouthwatering fare. As she swiftly formed  an oval, the cook explained she could never make her recipe in batches that served less than 80 people. With that kind of practice, it’s no wonder forming those discs looked so easy.

I like making fry bread myself, but this woman’s was better than mine. As I listened to the bread sizzle on the camp stove, I told her how I mixed my simple ingredients. In a flash, she identified two ways to improve my recipe. Ironically, one of those was the addition of butter flavored Crisco to the flour mixture until it crumbled like pie dough before adding liquid. She also let me know my use of milk  darkened and hardened my product. After seeing her golden results, she’s right.

We ate under mid-August rays, savoring chili, lettuce, tomato, and cheese –topped fry bread and discussing Indian art, native colleges, and garage sale bargains. By the end of our meal, we knew one another’s names as well as our preferences for serving this traditional staple. 

Following our instincts and turning into that garage sale was the best part of our expedition. We may not have found an ancient fossil, but every time I make fry bread I’ll smile and recall this chance encounter where I learned to cook from an expert.

Simple Food--Great Memories

Simple Food—Great Memories

While living out of a suitcase has definite drawbacks, one of the bonuses of visiting new places is trying local foods. Because my family both moved and traveled a great deal as I grew up, I learned early the joy of sampling regional delights every time I hit the road.

Around central Kansas, I love taste-testing bierocks, green bean dumpling soup, galuskies, and kolaches in different communities. If I’m lucky, a community feast also offers fried noodles as a side dish to accompany these delights.

In Rocky Mountain mining country, I look for eateries that dish up traditional pasties. This choice food of the men who work deep underground every day has a flaky crust that reminds me of pie. The filling of chopped roast beef, potatoes, turnips, and onions simmered in brown gravy is like visiting Grandma’s for lunch after church on Sunday.

These miner specialties worked as bierocks did in our region. On their way out the door to work in the morning, men tucked the warm meal in their pockets to keep fingers toasty. At lunch, the former hand warmers served as belly fillers, providing energy to finish a day’s hard labor.

In Texas and New Mexico, I venture from restaurant to restaurant searching for the perfect chile relleno. Nothing beats a hand-dipped and cheese stuffed poblano pepper fried in sizzling oil. The savory topping adds even more kick to a taste-bud exploding meal.

Every one of the regional specialties I’ve mentioned is memorable, but my all-time favorite is Indian fry bread. I love it hot from a grease bath and slathered with honey. At Twin Rocks Trading Post in Bluff, Utah, I ate it in the form of a sheepherder’s sandwich. The cook used two pieces of fry bread to create a roast beef, cheese, and onion hot sandwich. When I make it at home, we eat it smothered with hot chili and topped with cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes in a Navajo taco. I coat leftovers with cinnamon and sugar. It’s even delicious plain. I don’t think I’ve eaten freshly made fry bread I didn’t like.

A sad aside about this food favorite is that it came into existence when native tribes were forced to give up nomadic  lives to enroll at Indian Agencies to receive government subsidies. People who  hunted, gathered, and sometimes grew their own crops successfully for centuries had to depend on federally issued bacon and weevil y white flour to fill their stomachs. Using these unfamiliar ingredients, they learned bacon rendered fat, and flour and water created dough.

With a bit of ground wheat, leavening agent, salt, water or milk, and a pan of bubbling grease, cooks created a food that enabled them to nourish masses of people. This reminds me of Jesus feeding the multitudes. From another perspective, Native American author Sherman Alexie fondly remembers great fry bread cooks of his youth on the Spokane Reservation in his novels.

While each of my regional favorites has a unique flavor, they share a common factor. Bierocks, galuskies, green bean dumpling soup, kolaches, pasties, chile rellenos, and fry bread use easy-to-find ingredients, and they aren’t hard to make.

Hitting the road isn’t only about seeing new sights. It’s also about sampling new foods and picking up new recipes.  I never know when I’ll find a fresh favorite.