On our trips, I always include pictures of the food and places we eat. Instead of including them in each daily blog, I decided to create a separate entry. So check back each day and see what we may be eating.
The Blue Lion
160 N.Millward Street
Jackson, Wyoming
Celebrated my 70th birthday at The Blue Lion Restaurant.
"The Blue Lion was built as a residential home in the late 1930’s. There was a gentleman from Logan, Utah who dined with us in the summer of 2012 who said he was born and raised in the house. In 1974 Maury Holmes bought the house and turned it into a fondue restaurant called The Tourist Trap. Karen Scott bought it from Maury in 1976 and started The Blue Lion. Karen learned to cook at a school in France and this being her first job, she was sad and blue that she finally had to go to work and her birth sign was a Leo thus, The Blue Lion. The restaurant has been enlarged several times, the upstairs dining, the kitchen, the waiting area and the outdoor deck. In the winter The Blue Lion can accommodate 60 diners at one time. In the summer we open the deck enabling us to accommodate 80 diners. At times the upstairs is used for small private parties. The Blue Lion serves dinner year-round at 5:30 pm with outdoor dining in the summer and life acoustic guitar music most nights to compliment your dinner. The restaurant is now owned by the Blue Collar Restaurant Group which is a family run organization that always puts service first."
"The goal each day of the group is to improve people’s lives and create places where they feel appreciated. For our customers, that means we are attentive and friendly, while serving delicious food and drinks. If we see someone having a bad day, we do something to make it better. We treat people like welcomed guests while they are in our restaurants because everyone wants a place where they feel like they belong. We hope that by treating people kindly, those actions ripple into our communities. One plate at a time, we hope to make the places we live more welcoming and inclusive for all people."
We sat upstairs on the second floor.
We started the meal with 460 bread and a very fresh dinner salad topped with chopped candied pecans. Salad dressing choices were sesame vinaigrette, bleu cheese, basil peppercorn, and honey Dijon vinaigrette. Michael salad dressing was the sesame and I chose the basil.
Michael ordered the house specialty: roast rack of lamb. New Zealand lamb rubbed with Dijon mustard, rolled in seasoned bread crumbs and baked, served sliced with peppercorn rosemary cream sauce and jalapeño mint sauce. The chop was soft and tender.
I chose the buffalo tenderloin with huckleberries. It was a locally sourced buffalo tenderloin, wrapped in bacon and grilled to temperature, served with a local wild huckleberry Cabernet sauce. Now before you start saying yuck or no way, you should try it. If you were blindfolded and they put this dish in front of you, you would bet you were served beef tenderloin. Amazing meat and the sauce was superb! I would order this again.
Michael and I shared so we could try each one.
The starch was a very buttery potato au gratin. The vegetable tonight was broccolini cooked al dente.
Cheers to a perfect 70th birthday dinner.
Would we return and recommend? Most definitely!!!!! This place is a keeper on our list.
Persephone Westbank Bakery
3445 N. Pines Way
Wilson, Wyoming
This is their philosophy.
"We live as we bake and we bake as we live: With heart, hard work and creativity. Through Persephone, we have found like-minds in the mountains, kindred spirits who care about food and design, nature and art. On our deck, we delight in overhearing conversation topics as wide and wonderfully Jackson as new albums and bear encounters. Every day, we draw inspiration from the deep well of talent in the Tetons, our team of loyal local employees, and the creativity of those who helped us realize our vision."
This has become our favorite breakfast place when we stay at the Tetons.
Michael and I both had the kouign amann and the cinnamon brioche.
I had a pot of Bellocq breakfast tea.
Recipe for the kouign amann is courtesy of The Great British Baking Show.
Ingredients
300g (10½ oz) strong plain flour, plus extra for dusting
5g fast-action yeast
1 tsp salt
200ml (7 fl oz) warm water
25g (1 oz) unsalted butter, melted
250g (9 oz) cold unsalted butter, in a block
100g (3½ oz) caster sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
Directions
Put the flour into the bowl of a freestanding mixer fitted with a dough hook. Add the yeast to one side of the bowl and the salt to the other. Add the water and melted butter and mix on a slow speed for two minutes, then on a medium speed for six minutes.
Tip the dough onto a lightly floured work surface and shape into a ball. Put into a lightly oiled bowl. Cover with cling film and leave to rise for one hour.
Sandwich the butter between two sheets of greaseproof paper and bash with a rolling pin, then roll out to a 14cm (5½ in) square. Place in the fridge to keep chilled.
On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough to a 20cm (8 in) square. Place the butter in the centre of the dough diagonally, so that each side of butter faces a corner of the dough. Fold the corners of the dough over the butter to enclose like an envelope.
Roll the dough into a 45x15cm (18x6 in) rectangle. Fold the bottom third of dough up over the middle, then fold the top third of the dough over. You will now have a sandwich of three layers of butter and three layers of dough. Wrap in cling film and place in the fridge for 30 minutes. This completes one turn.
Repeat this process twice more, so you have completed a total of three turns, chilling the dough for 30 minutes between turns.
Roll the dough into a rectangle as before. Sprinkle the dough with the caster sugar and fold into thirds again. Working quickly, roll the dough into a large 40x30cm (16x12 in) rectangle. Sprinkle the dough with caster sugar and cut the dough into 12 squares.
Grease a 12-cup muffin tin well with oil. Gather the dough squares up by their four corners and place in the muffin tins, pulling the four corners towards the centre of the muffin tin, so that it gathers up like a four-leaf clover. Sprinkle with caster sugar and leave to rise, covered with a clean tea towel, for 30 minutes until slightly puffed up.
Preheat oven to 220C/200C(fan)/425F/Gas 7. Bake the pastries for 30-40 minutes, or until golden-brown. Cover with foil halfway through if beginning to brown too much. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for a couple of minutes before turning out onto a wire rack. Be careful not to burn yourself on the caramelized sugar, but don’t leave them to cool for too long, or the caramelized sugar will harden and they will be stuck in the tin.
Serve warm or cold.
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
We were looking forward to a lobster roll from our favorite grocery store but they were bought by Whole Foods in February. So disappointed!!!!
We bought a combination of shrimp, scallops, calamari and mussels. We cooked them back in our room. We also had clam chowder and a delicious baguette.
Bäckerei Forscher German Bakery and Café
Orderville, Utah Population 577
"Chris Odekerken, owner & baker, was born and raised in the Netherlands in a baker’s family right on the German border.
To him, the Germans are the best bakers in the world. In 2004 at the age of 53, he sold his bakery business to chase his dream to have a far away ranch in his beloved Utah.
In 2013, he developed an idea that had been lingering in his mind for years. How to bring fully authentic German imported quality artisanal breads, rolls, and pastries to the USA at an affordable price.
The breads are produced in small batches with utmost care and in accordance with hundreds of years of old traditional recipes. These breads are his strongest passion and he states that we offer breads in truly different styles that no one offers in the USA in these volumes. He stresses the fact that we do not just use wheat flour breads but a variety of wheat flours and more importantly a number of rye flours baked in mixes from full wheat to full rye and with a number of sour dough mild to strong. Authentic hard crispy rolls that crack when you bite them and pastries from the best German bakers.
In fact we offer all the same products that you find in a German Bakery Cafe of today.
He bought land in Orderville, Utah in 2013 and built a brand new German Bakery and Restaurant in a special architectural style over the winter and opened on April 26, 2014. When he explains how he wants to run the place he uses words like passion, for people to see, an adventure for the customer, show, music, smiles, atmosphere and above all different, different, different.
In October 2019, Chris leased another location in Henderson (Nevada) to open another Forscher Bakery. Around February 2020, building permits are there and construction starts in the beginning of March 2020. The Coronavirus Pandemic hits in, and the planned opening date moves up a few times. Finally, the 22th of May, Forscher Henderson has it’s “soft” opening.
The success was instant and is growing fast. Let’s see how far he can bring us."
"Forscher Bakery USA imports all of its ingredients from our bakery in Germany. Not one ounce of the breads and pastries we have comes from the United States and this is the only way to produce Authentic German bakery products."
Michael and I both had the red currants butter crumble.
Did you notice they spelled "currants" incorrectly? Didn't matter. This was delicious!!
"Our bakery in Germany belongs to the quality elite of the food industry in Germany. In 2013, the bakery was awarded the Price of the Best for the 14th time. Once more this is proof that we continue to follow our philosophy of quality in the production of first class, handcrafted, top quality products that we bake so passionately every day.
The ‘Bundesehrenpreis’ (National prize) is the highest award for companies in the German bakery products sector. The prize is awarded by the Federal ministry of Food Agriculture and Consumer Protection. Our bakery has already had the honor of picking up this prestige award 6 times. The most important quality of our breads and rolls are its crusts that are simply amazing and unique. As an example our most popular XXL wheat roll with a shiny caramelized crust and airy interior with our mild wheat based pre-dough and slow baked to perfection. Our rye crust breads are baked with almost 100% rye flour and 4-stage stronger rye based sour dough into a thick tasty rye crust and aromatic crumb. All our breads are distinctively different in contrast with American craft bakers that only use wheat flour and have almost no distinctive flavor apart from things they add like rosemary, cheese and so on which is of course easy to do.
We use century old traditional recipes and more importantly methods and have the authentic craft bakers to do it. We use no less than 3 types of wheat flour and 6 types of rye flour most of which are not even available in the US. We go from breads made of 100% wheat flour to 100% rye flour and every combination of these two in between which we can call a true choice.
The many pastries that we offer are also 100% German and prepared in Germany. In fact when you step into a German Bakery and Café today you will find the exact same breads, rolls and pastries that we offer in the United States.
About our Breads
Rye Breads The darker heavier rye breads do even when harder or dryer stay very palatable for up to a week or more due to the rye, our sourdoughs and craftsmanship. White Breads The white breads stale faster depending on how much wheat they contain. A very simple solution is to then slice and TOAST the bread. Try it and you will see! You can also cut off part of the bread that you do not wish to eat within two days bag it, FREEZE it and thaw and bake just until hot inside 400 degrees. Slicing The heavier the bread the thinner the slice or you have a problem chewing it down. Use a sharp quality bread knife and slice with a slow sawing motion instead of pushing and crushing it. Quality not Quantity is the key Don’t pile our quality breads with layers of meats and cheese; butter it and use a few slices of high quality meat , cheese, jam or whatever else you prefer! About our rolls
All of our rolls stale fairly fast. The best advice is to eat them within a couple of hours to enjoy the full glory of the crisp cracking sound and flavor of these unique rolls. Alternatives after a day put them in the oven for five minutes bake at 400 degrees. You can also freeze right away and do the same finish bake from frozen."
The rolls tasted just like the rolls we used to have when we lived in Munich, Germany. The rolls were still warm. Yummy!
Maybe on the way home, we will stop for lunch.
Would we return and recommend? Oh, yes!!! Alles hat gut geschmeckt!
Page, Arizona
Big John's Texas BBQ
"Big John was born and raised in around the Dallas Fort Worth Texas area. He learned to bar-b-que in his high school years. Around 1975, John’s father owned a furniture store right across the street from the world famous Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, TX. John would often hang out at Louie Mueller’s observing how they carefully cooked their award winning BBQ. John was invited to be a BBQ sauce judge at the Taylor International BBQ cook-off. He really enjoyed being in the BBQ cook-off arena and started to really hone in on his BBQ cooking skills. Brisket and ribs were his specialty. He learned that with BBQ, slow and low is the key to great, tender mouthwatering meat. A simple rub and cooking with love are also an important ingredient to great BBQ.
Big John’s Texas BBQ was started in Arizona in 2006 because in Arizona you could not find authentic Texas BBQ. Big John started out going to events with a pop-up tent and a Big John’s Texas BBQ banner. Everywhere he went, he would sell out. He finally decided to invest in a custom BBQ trailer. The BBQ trailer has allowed Big John to travel all over Arizona and California for BBQ events and cook offs. Big John now has an old gas station turned BBQ restaurant in Page, AZ. His customers constantly comment on how they think his BBQ is wonderful and how it is so awesome to get real Texas BBQ (even homemade sweet tea!) in Arizona."
“Big John’s Texas BBQ, a little taste of Texas in Arizona”.
It was a beautiful 74 degrees, so we decided to sit outside.
Michael and I both had The Sampler: chopped beef brisket, pulled pork, spicy link sausage and 2 baby back pork ribs with cowboy beans. Michael had the potato salad and I had the coleslaw. I am fussy about coleslaw but this was very tasty.
There was a spicy and a mild sauce to put over the meat. I combined the two. Perfect!
Michael also ordered the corn bread. Delicious!
I had an Arnold Palmer and Michael tried the Grand Canyon Brewing Company's Sunset Amber Ale.
Next time, I want to try the old fashioned mug root beer float. Michael might have to try the fresh baked fruit cobbler with ice cream.
Would we return and recommend? Yes, definitely!
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