Yellowstone National Park

On the Fourth of July, rather than barbeque hot dogs and light fireworks, our family took flight off on a national park centered vacation to Montana! After researching what was special food-wise in the area, huckleberry ice cream kept popping up in multiple places online. I’d never heard of huckleberry before and when Felicia first told me about it I had thought the flavor was inspired by Huckleberry Finn like how the Elvis sandwich (peanut butter, banana, and bacon) came to be.

Turns out a huckleberry is a rare mountain berry, but while at Yellowstone we had no difficulty finding huckleberry in the food there. In fact, we had a different huckleberry ice cream every day for the four days we were in the park. Furthermore, huckleberry vinegrette dressed my pear and walnut salad, while huckleberry barbeque sauce accompanied my grilled chicken. We even got huckleberry yogurt from one of their general stores! Although it wasn’t until we left Yellowstone on our way to Glacier National Park when we finally got to try fresh huckleberries (tasted kind of like sour blueberries, but smaller in size).

Even though we had something huckleberry nearly every day of our vacation, there were still many thing we didn’t get to try like their huckleberry jams, caramel, chocolates, honey, taffy, fudge, syrup, butter, salsa, wine… the list goes on! We wanted to bring an edible huckleberry thing back with us (they also had huckleberry candles, lotions, soaps…), but the smallest jam jars were 4 oz. Since that literally wasn’t gonna fly with the 3 oz carry-on fluid limit, we instead bought a huckleberry cheesecake scone mix. I’ve always wanted to make scones and with this mix the only additional ingredient needed was water (hey it even came with a baby whisk!).

I’ve gotta admit, I was a bit skeptical about this mix as scone recipes usually require a lot of butter. But it seems like the Yellowstone pantry sure knows what it’s doing (or at least how to dehydrate butter or some substitute) because these scones were cotton soft and just right on the sweetness scale. Huckleberries: a very small fruit to remember a berry fun vacation. ^_^