Camping Trip

As summer begins to wind down, I managed to squeeze in two short vacations over the past two weeks.

First I went to Missoula to visit my friend Ali, who moved from Chicago last year. (I'll blog about the second trip in a later post.) Every Saturday there are three farmer's markets, which we hit up to buy food for an overnight camping trip.

We got some onions, garlic, squash, carrots, chard, cheese, and potatoes to make a veggie stir fry over the campfire and what Ali calls a "tinfoil surprise" (put chopped up potatoes with whatever veggies you have in tinfoil, throw it into the fire for awhile, unwrap, and eat).

But our planned meals almost didn't happen.

We set out for a campground later that day, a spot a little over an hour away on the Bitterroot River.


We were car camping so we didn't bring a container or rope to sling the food up in a tree, but we did have some bear spray just in case.

But bears turned out to be the least of our problems.

We hadn't made a reservation and that campsite was full. So were the next 8 campsites that we tried.

We had driven around for about four hours and it was starting to get late when we pulled into Holland Lake. Apparently there are a lot of unmarked campsites in Montana where you just have to know where to go. Ali had been to the lodge at the lake before and knew there was camping. But from the road, we never would have known.

We pulled in, and there was one open site! So what if it was right next to the bathrooms with no view of the lake?

Then we realized that the site was reserved. It was also 7:30pm and would get dark in about an hour, so we decided to stay. The camp manager said that if the group came and kicked us out, we could set up our tent in the "day use" area.

We were hungry, so we took our chances and started to build a fire. Our wood was a little wet and moldy, so it didn't quite roar. We made our tinfoil surprises but since it was late, we decided to eat the veggie stir fry with eggs for breakfast the next day.

Even though it was practically dark, we held our breath every time a car went by on the road - hoping it wasn't the people who reserved our site.

By this point we were starving. Throwing in the surprises had just about killed the fire, but we kept them in the embers. One of them cooked a little more than the other, but they weren't bad with some added seasonings. And we didn't have to worry about putting out the fire, which took care of itself!

We tucked in the tent for some uninterrupted sleep (for me anyway, Ali thought she heard an animal in the middle of the night and couldn't fall back asleep).

The next morning, we walked down to the lake. It was spectacular!

We made our eggs and veggie stir fry (over her camp stove - no more fire), packed up, and headed home, thanking the Marsenichs on our way out for not showing up.

Making Do

I received some potentially grim news from my CSA over the weekend. The weather over the past year - the recent floods, a later-than-usual winter, and last summer's drought - had taken its toll. Home Grown Wisconsin decided not to deliver food boxes for the next two weeks and will add two weeks on at the end of the season.

The farmers simply needed time to catch up and let their food grow. Too much had either rotted or washed away, and they had to replant a lot of crops.

I knew this was a risk going into the CSA, but I consider myself very lucky to have access and the means to buy fresh and healthy food until it starts up again. I feel terrible for the farmers though. For their sakes, I hope they can overcome this setback and recover their losses. I don't know how devastating the weather has been to their bottom lines, but this gives me all the more reason to buy from them whenever I can.

So with no CSA box coming for awhile, I'm going to do the next best thing - shop at farmer's markets and grocery stores that sell locally grown food in the meantime.

Tonight I went to the Green Grocer, a new store in Chicago that sells food from Midwestern farmers. I bought a bunch of chard, a yellow squash, and a jar of tomatillo salsa from a farm near Madison, Wisconsin. I was going to make quesadillas but when I stopped by my Mexican grocery store, several boxes filled with corn tortillas beckoned me (so did the price - only 36 cents for a dozen!).

I made chard and squash soft tacos instead.

To create this dish, I chopped the squash and sauteed in garlic and olive oil, added the cut pieces of chard and covered for a few minutes. Meanwhile, I heated up a few tortillas, then added the veggie mixture, and spooned a bit of the tomatilla salsa on top followed by a sprinkle of grated parmesan.

The cooking part took very little time, and the taste of the corn tortillas brought back some great memories from my trip to Mexico - it was the shopping part that took awhile, mostly because the Green Grocer is nowhere near where I live. But I'm glad I made the extra effort.