The Dakotas

North and South Dakota became part of the United States on the same day.  The foods associated with them are largely German in origin.   We couldn't find any official state foods affiliated with North Dakota, but there is a particular soup called Knoephla (I believe pronounced 'nifla') soup that is very popular.  A restaurant named Kroll's is mentioned frequently for it's knoephla soup, along with many grandmothers :-).

We combined a few recipes to make our soup.   It is basically a chicken-potato soup with dumplings (knoephla).   The knoephla are very easy to make - the dough is made from flour, salt, egg and water.   It is cut into small balls and either cooked in the soup broth or separately in salted water.   I can see how it could become a favorite soup if you grew up on it. However, we didn't.  We thought it was ok, but nothing remarkable.

Kuchen is the official state dessert of South Dakota.   The word kuchen means cake in German, and there are many, many varieties of it.   We found references to a South Dakota state recipe for apple kuchen.  However it wasn't on a state of South Dakota website, so I'm not sure how official it is.   It is the recipe that we made though.   The kuchen was basically shortbread cookie dough, with a thin layer of cheesecake mixture and then a top layer of apples sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.   I cut the recipe in half since it was huge, and I had to adjust the crust ingredients a bit (it was in serious need of more flour).  In the end it came out really well.

Washington State and Montana

Washington's state fruit is the apple, so that's easy.   And we couldn't forget the great coffee places originating there.  Sorry Starbuck's, but we're Peet's fans.  We had apple crisp (a la mode of course) made with actual Washington State Granny Smith apples and Peet's decaf Sumatra coffee for dessert.



So dinner had to be from Montana.   Montana is one of those states that doesn't have an obvious food affiliation.   After some digging, we came up with a good one though.   I'm not clear on the timeframe, but Cornish copper miners brought pasties to Butte, Montana.   A pasty is basically a turnover made with pie crust and filled with meat, potatoes and onions.   According to wikipedia, to be a real pasty, the filling must be raw when put into the dough.  

We made (half) the recipe found at http://hubpages.com/hub/Montana-Cuisine.  The crust needed more water than called for, and I commented when we were making them that the recipe didn't call for salt and/or pepper.  They definitely needed the seasoning, but when we added it at the table, the pasties were very tasty!

Wyoming and Idaho

Great states to have for Superbowl weekend!   Idaho's main food is obviously potatoes.   Since we wanted football watching foods, we didn't just want plain old baked potatoes though.   We went for baked potato skins.  Yum!  We used vegetarian bacon, and less cheese than the recipe called for, but the recipe was basically really good: http://allrecipes.com//Recipe/baked-potato-skins/Detail.aspx

Wyoming was a little hard to nail down.   Think cowboy cooking and meat.   We ended up making bison chili using my regular old chili recipe.   It used to be easy to find bison in grocery stores - there was a movement to try to sell it as a leaner version of beef.   I think the movement must have failed though because we couldn't find it in any of our regular stores.  We were able to get it at a butcher in town though.   It did taste pretty much like beef, and we enjoyed our chili and potato skins while watching the Super Bowl!