The Western Kitchen: Seasonal Recipes from Montana’s Chico Hot Springs Resort

At Montana's Chico Hot Springs Resort, their mission is to turn guests into friends and friends into family. For more than a century visitors have soaked in their legendary waters and Chico has been hosting parties and entertaining guests from all over the world, whether they are cowhands or celebrities. The surrounding majesty of the mountains, the free flowing Yellowstone River and the vastness of the valley where it sits, nestled in the shadow of 11,000-foot Emigrant Peak, make this historic and rustic resort unique. And the food keeps the visitors coming back. From their famous brunch, featuring bread puddings, quiches, smoked duck, and coffee cakes, to the bison ravioli appetizers and flaming orange desserts that bookend their fantastic dinners, the dining room at Chico is legendary. The combination of culinary expertise, a chef's garden and greenhouse, regional ingredients and the subtle elegance of Chico Hot Springs' dining room brings people together to share in celebrations, festive gatherings, traditions and simple meals. Chico's chefs stay true to mountain cuisine, relying on the freshest ingredients to make very dish from scratch. They find the best meats and trout from local Montana farms and ranches, and their most important source for ingredients is in their backyard, where two geothermal greenhouses provide the freshest produce available for half the year. The specialty menus and one hundred recipes included in this cookbook will serve as a reminder of the good times, good company and good food in Montana.

Seabring Davis is a writer by profession and a cook by passion. She won the culinary High Plains Book Award in 2016 for the cookbook, A Taste of Montana, and is the author of several other books, including A Montana Table: Recipes from Chico Hot Springs Resort. She writes broadly about the things she loves: food, art and interesting people. She has spent a lifetime at the keyboard of a computer, as a magazine editor, newspaper obituary reporter, activist, essayist, food blogger, and feature writer. But when the screen powers down, she can’t wait to get is in the kitchen, where creativity and beauty and nature’s generosity come together in the best and most satisfying ways. She lives in Livingston, Montana with her husband and two daughters. Lynn Donaldson-Vermillion is a Livingston, Montana-based photojournalist whose appetite for adventure and thirst for travel have her roaming throughout the Rocky Mountains shooting and writing about Sugar Beet Festivals, Catholic Burgers, Wild Game Cook-Offs, and the absolutely best places to eat pie. Founder and Creative Director of the Montana food + travel blog TheLastBestPlates.com, you can find her stories and images in National Geographic Traveler, Saveur, TheFoodNetwork.com, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Sunset, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and many other national publications. Lynn is also a featured Instagrammer for NatGeoTravel and has chronicled mermaid bars in Central Montana, taimen fishing in Mongolia, and morel hunting in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. Her weekly newspaper column, The Last Best Plates, appears each Wednesday in the Billings Gazette, Missoulian, Montana Standard, Helena Independent Record, and Ravalli Republic. She shoots the Dining Out column, written by Seabring Davis, for Big Sky Journal. Donaldson-Vermillion has shot two additional cookbooks: Open Range: Steaks, Chops and More from Big Sky Country and New Frontier Cooking: Recipes from Montana’s Mustang Kitchen. She and her adventurer husband are raising three spirited children who love eating everything from Southern barbecue and Bahamian conch to Mongolian Khorkhog. When not scouring the globe in search of appetizing stories, the Vermillion family can be found on the trails & streams surrounding Livingston.