Carole Sullivan - New Frontier Cooking: Recipes from Montana’s Mustang Kitchen

Copyright 2016 by Carole Sullivan Photography copyright 2016 by Lynn Donaldson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018. Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or .

Skyhorse and Skyhorse Publishing are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., a Delaware corporation. Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file. Cover photo credit: Lynn Donaldson Photography by Gib Meyers for pages: .
All other photography by Lynn Donaldson. Cover design by Engine 8 Sweetgrass Books edition edited by Seabring Davis Food styling by Carole Sullivan Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-0181-6 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0185-4 Printed in China A CKNOWLEDGMENTS Dorothy and Gerald Glaser; Val Jacobson and Jena Finley; At Home on the Range; Gourmet Cellar; Montana Fish Company; Livingston Kite Company; Natural Resources Defense Council; World Wildlife Fund; American Prairie Reserve; Costco; MARS, Inc.; Damico Catering; Depuy Spring Creek; Dale and Margaret Vermillion; Jen, Pat, Josie and Isla Vermillion; Sweetwater Travel; Les Berthy; Eric Paramore; Henry Harrison; Clyde Aspevig and Carol Guzman; Jim and Linda Harrison; Michael Keaton; Colin, Isabel and Simone Davis; Dan, Charlie, Ben and Chase Vermillion; Evie Cranston; Carl and Elizabeth Webb; Meredith Brokaw; Russell Chatham; Gem and Mark George; The Mary Grace Family; The Boreham Family; Malou Flato and John Taliaferro; Susan and Jeff Bridges; Diane Stillman and Elaine Uehlin; Lee Kinsey and Secluded Waters Outfitters; Gib and Susan Myers; the Hudson Family; Tumblewood Teas. And a special acknowledgement to Montana Party Rentals.

Thank you to all of the supporters of our Kickstarter.com campaign, including Colin K. Davis, Deb Endres and Jean Heishman Grant. 406-222-8884 ~ www.MustangCatering.com C ONTENTS By Russell Chatham By Jeff Bridges By Carole Sullivan F OREWORD When Mike Art bought Chico Hot Springs in Montana, in the early 1970s, it was a derelict liability threatening to collapse. Not much was noticeably done to correct that until 1977. Realizing you could not expect to have a successful hotel, from the second story of which you could clearly see the exact geographic middle of nowhere, without a restaurant, he proceeded to build one. A rustic dining room was constructed to suit the locale, but the menu was anything but rustic.

I first set foot in it one evening on the way back from a fishing trip to Yellowstone Park with John Bailey. Fresh oysters? Duck? What the hell was going down here? It turned out the chef, a seemingly callow youth named Larry Edwards, had been recruited up from Jackson Hole. Frankly, I dont recall that whole original menu, but baked brie and sole en croute were most assuredly not items one encountered at that time on menus anywhere west of Chicago or east of San Francisco. A few years later, Edwards moved on, and while Chico was and remains a good place to eat years later, the brilliance he initially brought to the venue went with him. As the eighties became the nineties, many, including myself, literally begged him to open his own restaurant in Livingston, but for reasons known only to him it never happened. Finally, by 1994, it was clear no one was going to step up to bat, and I began lying awake nights thinking about how I might do it.

The only real estate that made sense was the Livingston Bar and Grille, which had been purchased by Mike Art, and over which Edwards presided for a few years. But then it was sold to people who had no business owning a restaurant and under whose tenure it degenerated into a filthy, mouse-infested ptomaine emporium. Naturally, they put it up for sale, but at a price so absurd no one could buy it, as they would be hopelessly buried in debt from day one. In early 1995, I sat down with my friend and realtor Ernie Meador and tried to figure out the lowest offer the desperate owners would accept. All the serious buyers had come and gone, and no one had looked at it in two years. When we made our offer, they accepted it instantly like a trout inhaling a mayfly.

It took more than a few minutes for me to adjust to the fact I was now a restaurant owner. I had no culinary training. But what I did have was an abiding interest in fine cuisine aided and abetted by having eaten hundreds and hundreds of times in most of the best restaurants in America and quite a few in Europe as well. And I had watched and paid attention to how and why certain independently owned establishments flourished while others failed. A year before the restaurant opened, I hand-selected the whole waitstaff from among the best servers I knew from various places in the region. My good friend Peter Lewis, then owner of Campagne, the best restaurant in Seattle, offered to come and formally train them in American Bistro service, which he did.

But the kitchen remained a blank page. I placed ads in the various papers, asking for resums. The first one I got was from a girl named Carole Glaser in Minneapolis. It seemed her aunt who lived up on the Musselshell had seen the ad and forwarded it to her. She worked for the DAmico Brothers, with whom I was familiar because of personal business meetings in the Twin Cities. I liked Caroles credentials.

She wanted to work and live in Montana after having visited Chico Hot Springs a few years earlier. So I popped three one hundred dollar bills into an envelope and asked her to head West. As she tells it today, her friends warned her something must be fishy. Who sends someone they dont even know three hundred dollars in cash? Youd better be careful. Years later, Carole could reply, Russell Chatham, thats who. Then, there she was.

As I recall, I hired her about five minutes into the interview. Clearly, she was beautiful, smart, vivacious and competent. Any unprofessional notions I may have otherwise had toward her were completely kept at bay by the fact that I was bulletproof in love with someone who had me on a short leash, which kept my eyes focused straight ahead. The early years of the Bar and Grille, with respect to the kitchen, tended to be somewhat unpredictable. I was earning a Ph.D. in what-can-go-wrong-in-the-restaurant-business, but Carole was unflappable.