New cookbook benefits Creston Fire Department

There are 548 recipes in Louise Tidwell’s new cookbook and she’s made all of them except one — a recipe for homemade vinegar.

She has it on good authority, though, that the vinegar recipe is a good one. It takes six months from start to fermented finish.

“The Hungry Fork” is a compilation of recipes that run the gamut, from favorite family comfort food cooked on her 1907 woodstove to grilled dishes, Dutch oven masterpieces and wilderness fare.

Tidwell’s four children started nudging her years ago to make a collection of all of her recipes, and seven years later the cookbook emerged.

Many of the recipes are gleaned from years spent on the trail. She and her husband Bill were outfitters in the Bob Marshall Wilderness for 18 years, from the early 1980s to 1998.

“I cooked a lot on a wood cook-stove Bill built for me,” she recalled. “And I did a lot of Dutch oven cooking.”

Making meals in the outdoors for groups of 10 to 20 people became a way of life for Tidwell.

“When you don’t have ingredients, you improvise,” she said, remembering the time she was making Thanksgiving dinner in the wilderness and had no brown sugar or honey for the yams. Oranges and apples were substituted and made for a delicious dish.

Both Louise and Bill, who live on the 12 Miles Ranch near Creston, are longtime EMTs with the Creston Fire Department. She is donating the proceeds from the cookbook to the fire department for the medical equipment fund.

Tidwell grew up in Oregon, cooking alongside her mother and both grandmothers.

“One of my fondest memories was when I was helping my mom can fruits, vegetables and meats in the summertime,” she wrote in the introduction of her cookbook. “I felt an incredible sense of pride while admiring our hard work as the late afternoon sun was shining in on the counter where we had set our freshly canned jars.”

She remembers watching Julia Child’s cooking show on TV as a child. Somewhere along the way cooking became a way of life. She started keeping notes on various recipes, tucking them in a file box along with the recipes.

Tidwell’s cookbook is structured for user-friendliness. Recipes are named with the primary ingredient or flavor to making locating a recipe much easier. They’re also grouped alphabetically within each section and subsection.

Anecdotes and memories are sprinkled throughout “The Hungry Fork.” For example, in a recipe for Pineapple Upside Down Cake she notes how she was able to make whipped cream at a wilderness camp because her husband created a beater that fit into his Makita drill.

“You should have seen the hunters’ eyes when I pulled out the drill to make my whipping cream!” she says in the note.

Several of Tidwell’s recipes were developed to take with on the trail, such as gravy and pancake mixes. Wild game marinades and a rhubarb barbecue sauce are other recipes unique to her cookbook.

She also included practical concoctions — aphid sprays, flower preserver, plant food and silver polish.

And she explains in great detail how to make a camp fire for cooking.

“My husband would tell you his favorite recipe is for Road Kill Chicken,” she said with a laugh. It’s actually a recipe for Chicken Piccata, in which the chicken is pounded flat.

One of Tidwell’s favorites is prime rib. In the cookbook she methodically explains the process of wrapping the rib roast in cheesecloth to dry-age the meat, and tells exactly how to cook the meat.

If you need a pot roast recipe, “The Hungry Fork” has three different pot roast recipes.

“The Hungry Fork,” published by Morris Press Cookbooks, sells for $25 and can be purchased locally at Hooper’s Garden Center east of Kalispell and Roma’s Kitchen Store in Bigfork. It also can be ordered online at www.thehungryforkcookbook.com, for $25 plus shipping, or a holiday special of two for $40. Tidwell can be reached for inquiries by email at timbuck2@centurytel.net.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.