
Celebrate National Park Week with a national park meal made in your kitchen.
It's National Park Week, and while it'd be great to head out into the National Park System, that's not possible for all of us. But that doesn't mean we still can't savor the parks.
A couple years ago I had the wonderful opportunity to interview Linda Ly about her book, The National Parks Cookbook. It was a wonderful idea for a book, and Linda pulled it off grandly.
Travel extensively through the National Park System, and you’ll quickly come to realize that the parks' restaurants try to reflect the local culinary trends, or at least use local ingredients in crafting their menus. For instance, visit national parks in Alaska and you can pretty much count on salmon in the dinner offerings. Travel through the parks in the Rocky Mountains, and elk (and sometimes bison) will appear on the menus. Explore parks in the Southwest, and you can almost predict that cacti will show up in some form.
When you don't find yourself in a national park restaurant, you can turn to Linda's book to create some of the restaurant's ambience in your own kitchen. Here's where you can listen to my conversation with Linda. I think you'll enjoy it and hopefully be inspired by it.