Day 87: Food trends (Eat what you want Day)

At first glance, you might think having a restaurant, deciding on the theme, picking deco, and making a menu plan is a one time thing. Let me tell you, it’s not!

In the past thirty years, we’ve tried our best to find tasteful solutions for our guests that were on some special diet, be it South Beach, low carb, high protein, vegan, lactose intolerant, gluten free, allergic to celery or nuts, and more! 

We have fielded some interesting questions as well along the way.  Are there nuts in your Pecan pie? What is rhubarb? Are there cowboys in your Cowboy Buffalo Stew?  Could you take the seed off my strawberries?

Thankfully most guests are in the game with us, looking for solutions that keep the flavor and banish the issues. We are always grateful when we get a recipe or substitution suggestion that really works.  Guess the good news is that since we make most all our food from scratch, we can often eliminate or replace troublesome items in our recipes. In doing so, we have systems in place to prevent cross-contamination as we best can.   In spite of our efforts, we are not a gluten free kitchen or strict certified Kosher kitchen as we do not have the space required for these strictest of culinary practices.

We do our very best to train and educate our entire staff as to our menu items and their makeup. As guests check in for our B&B we strive to always check for dietary restrictions. For several years we’ve had a dietary cheat sheet for our Dining Room Staff to us and give to dining guests who ask us about ingredients. We especially loved the ‘business card” idea a guest brought last year to alert us of her daughter’s challenges, just having that on the table throughout the meal was a super reminder to give extra consideration.  That idea spurred us to create our own table tent sign for these special guests.

So when you dine with us, as you have questions or concerns, we invite your inquiry of our ingredient details.  We truly want you to eat what you want every day!  

Written by Lois Smith 

Day 81: Cinco De Mayo (National Salad Month)

When you are known for your Soup & Salad Buffet, ya gotta talk about Salad and doubly so on Cinco de “Mayo” day!  

No “mayo” in this specialty salad, but one of our most requested salads is our Jicama Two Step with just the right southwest flavor kicks and unusual ingredients that our guests love. I always get a laugh hearing those not as familiar with jicama, trying to describe it to fellow diners or just pronounce it!  

I even had one sweet older lady, who thought it was our butter and suggested that we let it warm up more so that it would be easier to spread on her bread. (Jicama, sometimes known as the Mexican potato, is typically crunchy hard like a raw potato or radish, not really a spreadable option.)

One of our Texas cooks, Cori, brought the Jicama recipe to our attention, and although it is a bit timing consuming to prepare, it is worth the effort to enjoy this delicious and hearty salad. You can enjoy this salad at home as well, as it is included in our Collections of Baldpate cookbook!

Along with our fresh greens and bunches of toppings, perhaps you haven’t noticed the plan but we try with our specialty salads to feature a fruit salad, a vegetable salad and a sweet gelatin based salad. So we always looking for a new ingredient idea or flavor to incorporate. One of the newest is our Watermelon feta salad, wonderfully refreshing and delightfully simple to make!  

Not so easy, but one of the staff favorites is our Peachy Keen sweet salad.  Our refreshing peachy keen juice is a beverage enjoyed by our B&B guests during snack time each evening and so one of our creative staff members decided we needed to bring that flavor to the salad buffet.  A tricky combo of peaches, pudding and the famous keen mix, if you love the peachy goodness of this salad, you have “Doc Jeff” to thank!

Come enjoy our salad bar with a variety of specialty salads, or create your own delicious concoction! 

Written by Lois Smith

Day 69: New Recipes

Having an award-winning restaurant doesn’t mean you can just relax with your menu offerings. There are always new ideas being suggested either by guests, or food trends, or a popular new ingredient.

As the primary chef, I’ve tried hard to be unique and original. Being known as the “best of” is always fun, but it is especially nice to be “one of a kind” as well.  So when developing our menu items I’ve tried to not copy other places, especially in Estes Park, but to have our own branded items.

We have to admit as well, our menu gets a little too familiar to our staff by the end of the season (especially since we eat it twice a day every day).  We do get a laugh at the concoctions that diners and staff come up with, adding this to that from the Salad Bar or mixing soups or whatever!

Fall seems to be our most experimental season for new recipes.  We’ve had some huge winners, think Banana Butterscotch Muffins, and some long forgotten sincere losers, like Baseball Park Muffin with pickle relish and hot dogs.

You know how things sometimes just stick in your mind, well that pickle relish did, and so be on the lookout for our new 2017 Dill Pickle soup….. working on a name, but so far, family reviews are positive!

Wish I’d kept a diary of our new menu items as they were created! We started with just Beef Stew and Red Chili as our hearty soups, then my sister-in-law, Loretta, gave me the idea for our White Chili recipe. I must admit I hesitated trying it, but when we added it to our menu in 1991, customers greeted it with lots of odd looks and ridiculously silly comments, along with some rave reviews.

Being located in the mountains we often received requests for “wild game” so our Cowboy Buffalo Stew became our answer in 2005. The “wild west trail drive” flavors (simple ingredients you might find along the trail), made this an instant favorite.  Its name has a special double meaning too, as the year we perfected this recipe, several of our cooks were “Cowboys” students from Oklahoma State University.

Then there is our beloved Pumpkin Curry Soup, recipe yet unpublished, which is based on one that Jen sent me. She discovered it during her time stationed in Germany in the US military.  Several years after we added the recipe, as I was telling guests the recipe was originally from Germany, she told me the full story. The recipe wasn’t from one of our favorite little German pubs as I had thought, but she had actually found the idea on the side of a canned product she had purchased in the US Army commissary!  So much for my proud story of its German culinary ties. 

Although the “German” pumpkin one isn’t there, you can find many of our classic recipes in our famed cookbook, Collections of Baldpate. 

What have been your most favorite Baldpate recipes? Anything you’d like to see us add?

Written by Lois Smith