The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

My mother was a good cook. She loved to bake. Her specialties in baking were cookies and pies. Her crusts were to die for and her huckleberry or juneberry pies around the holidays were wonderful to say the least.

Every Sunday she would cook a roast or fry a chicken but mostly her fried chicken was cooked when we went picnicking to Glacier National Park or Beaver Creek Park. With the fried chicken she would always have deviled eggs, potato salad and her famous tuna or shrimp and pasta salad which all in her family cook to this day in honor of her.

One of my mother’s favorite dishes to cook and one which appeared on the table at least a couple of times a month was to fill hamburger patties with onion and cook them slowly in a sauce of cream of mushroom soup, sour cream and mayonnaise. That mess would be served over rice and was very good tasting.

Mother loved to make casseroles. She was always cooking a new casserole for her church pot lucks or getting a new recipe for a new casserole. I remember that mother’s famous Heavenly Hash and San Francisco beans were gotten from cooks in Van Orsdel Methodist Church in Havre. I have given those recipes out long enough for you to have seen them and cooked them but if you need them again, let me know.

I have written again and again that my first memory of food was in the kitchen of a house at 1015 Second Avenue in Havre that we were living in. I remember an old black cast iron frying pan just packed to the brim with chili. Was it ever good!

Mother was always up to roasting a turkey. She would cook a turkey at the drop of a hat, in the hot summer or fall or spring or anytime she got her hands on a good big bird.

She also loved to cook steaks on the grill but let my father cook them when he wanted to as he featured himself as the outdoor cook around the house.

Well, all that has made me so hungry, I think I had better get to the kitchen and cook up one of her famous recipes. It is a cold October day today. Wouldn’t a skillet of chili just hit the spot?