Huckleberry Picking in Montana

A New Fruit

From mushroom hunting to huckleberry picking, the mountains of Montana have a lot of food to discover!

First, you might be saying, “Huckleberries??”

I had never heard of a huckleberry (other than Huckleberry Finn) until moving here. I first saw it as the name of the health food section and restaurant at a local grocery store. I remember thinking, “What a funny name.” But then I starting seeing it everywhere, most noticeably to me as a flavor of ice cream.

The huckleberries look very similar to a blueberry. They are pretty common around here and Idaho even has it named as their national fruit.

Slight Change of Plans

I say all this because we had another Montana first a few weekends back…huckleberry picking.

I had told Matt that I wanted to take the boys on a hike up in Hyalite at one of the waterfalls. He agreed but I’m sure his mind set to work at that moment. He doesn’t mind hiking if there is as reason. Seeing a pretty view or a waterfall is not reason enough for him.

A few hours later he says to me, “Do you really want to go to the waterfall? What if we hiked up in Hyalite and picked huckleberries?”

Sounded like a good compromise to me so we loaded the boys and Tippet in the car and headed up.

A Picking We Will Go

So we headed up to where we picked out our Christmas tree last year, following a wide path.

Of course the huckleberries weren’t just lining the path so we headed up into the woods.

I had never seen a huckleberry bush but I quickly was able to pick them out. The picking was easy except that I had Lake on my chest sleeping and every time I bent over he would start to wake up.

Liam and Tippet were in heaven running through the woods with no one to tell them to slow down or be quiet. The novelty of huckleberry picking didn’t last long for Liam, though, and his attention quickly turned to running and yelling.

That child does not know how to hush. On our way up, Matt introduced him to the Quiet Game. (How have I not played that with him before?!?!). After two glorious minutes, he decides he wants to play the Talking Game. The rules? The first person who stops talking loses!

So off through the woods Liam and Tippet ran.

After a while, we headed back up the path, hopped in the car and drove a little further to Hyalite Resevoir to grill out for dinner.

There’s no such luck in tiring out Liam so he headed for the Lake to do his most favorite water activity: throwing rocks.

And you know if my husband is in charge of food we were going to eat good…so grilled steak kabobs was on the menu!

Big Plans for the Huckleberries

We tossed around some ideas of what to make with the huckleberries and we settled on pie.

In true Matt fashion, I think he found the most complicated pie recipe of all time.

In total it ended up taking three days to make it. The pie is very good but for something that took three days, I would expect it to just blow my mind.

The difference between myself and Matt: When the recipe showed ingredients for five different sections of the pie, I would have kept right on scrolling. Who has time for that?! I like pie but all I need is a crust and some filling.

This recipe you have ingredients to cook the huckleberries, for the pastry cream, for the huckleberry pastry cream (what’s the difference?), for the chocolate mousse (yummm), for the chocolate mousse crust, and for the whipped cream topping and garnish.

And, should I have felt so bold as to complete this undertaking, there would have been a mistake (err, mistakes) made along the way.

But, my husband is not me, and he set forth on this endeavor (though he’ll admit he did not know it was quite the undertaking) and successfully made a very delicious pie.

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If you feel up for the challenge and have huckleberries at your disposal (of just want to see the crazy length and difficulty of the recipe), you can check it out here.

Even without the pie, it was another fun Montana adventure!