I am not sure where I first saw an artichoke. It might have been on a soap opera. My mother and I spent long afternoons watching TV, with the Wyoming wind blowing outside. We immersed ourselves in the 1980s world of shoulder pads, big hair and the glamorous lives in the soaps. I remember a scene of two ladies eating lunch, with crystal on a crisp white tablecloth, and between them was an artichoke. They ripped off leaves and dipped them in butter, all while drinking champagne and talking about high society in New York City. It seemed a world away from the High Plains.
I wanted to eat an artichoke.
In our house, we ate plenty of food that, for Wyoming, would be deemed exotic. Curry and rice were the norm for us, as at that time there wasn’t a single Indian restaurant in the whole state. My mother took me to the store, where I picked through some sad produce. The food there had traveled many miles; my mother would optimistically buy still-green mangoes that never ripened properly. But, to my surprise and delight, they had artichokes.
I used to study The Joy of Cooking, a book my mother bought when she moved to America. I read about how to make floating islands, pancakes, even how to boil an egg. After school, while still in my uniform, I followed the recipe for steaming an artichoke to a T, carefully making a mixture of butter and lemon juice in the microwave. I sat down to eat, removed a leaf and dipped it in the little pot of sunshine. And then I took a bite. It was hard, so I scraped the flesh off the leaf with my teeth. My disappointment was immense. This was it? The food of the glamorous elites? All that work for a little taste of boiled mush? My mother sat down, and we shared the rest of it. I mostly slurped the butter off the leaves.
“So, not what you thought?” she asked.
“I think I like food from here,” was my reply.
Food from here. What did that mean? What is food from the West? Beef? Lamb? Sugar beets? Corn? Beans? Rocky Mountain oysters? When I tell people I grew up in Wyoming, they inevitably ask me how I like my steak. One benefit of teaching at land-grant universities is that my husband and I get our meat there. In fact, anyone can buy meat raised and graded by students at the university; some of my students serve on the meat-judging team. I love going into the little shop on campus and seeing what meat they’ve been producing and hearing them talk about it.
When I was a child, my father helped a Quaker friend move his cows up into the mountains and down again every year. In return, the man gave us grass-fed beef that filled our freezer. We also ate a lot of fish. My father fished for trout on the North Platte, and my mother was famous for her fish-head curry, a dish that both delighted and appalled me. And we kept a modest garden full of tomatoes and chili peppers. The way I figured, it was all food from here.
IN THE HOT SUMMER months in the Mountain West, from July into late summer, the hard winters pay off. You can almost forget that spring is short, and the growing season is over so quickly. You can almost forget the sadness of tulips eaten by deer, lilacs killed in a wet spring snow and new shoots flattened by surprise hailstorms.
I am a poor gardener. But there is something about gardening at 7,200 feet that feels like the most optimistic endeavor. It’s a lesson in faith and patience. Every year, I keep my little tomato plants inside till the last possible second. Memorial Day weekend always feels a little too early to plant. And every fall, I nervously survey my small crop of tomatoes and hope the first snow will hold off till I can harvest them. Many times, I’ve picked them unripe, as a storm was coming in. I once made a green tomato pie.
The other food season to me is fair food. Some of the best food of the summer is found on the fairway. Every county has its county fair. When I was a kid, it meant entering the competitions with my 4-H projects. I sewed, made jelly, even submitted watercolor paintings. I once won a blue ribbon for crabapple jelly; I would have scored higher, but in the clear, jewel-toned jelly, I’d left a tiny speck of cinnamon.
But it was the food for purchase that really excited me: frybread, elephant ears, fresh-cut French fries, oversized turkey legs, corn dogs and funnel cakes — all things fried and sprinkled with salt and sugar. I loved the cotton candy that looked like clouds on sticks. None of it was homegrown, but it meant something exotic, something new, something only in season for a short time. To me, fair food was far more exotic than anything I ate at home.
Food from here. What did that mean? What is food from the West?
MY FIRST JOB when I was 16 was waitressing at a Chinese restaurant in Casper. The owners were a father-daughter duo, and he would fill my hands with almond cookies and soup after my shift was over. I would come home with the smell of fried wontons in my hair. As I took orders, I noticed that some people stuck to classics, but many customers would shyly ask questions. Was mapo tofu spicy? What was tofu like? They wanted to try things beyond sweet and sour chicken. It taught me something about desire — that many people want an artichoke experience. Most of us want to try something new.
It’s easy when you are from a rural place to think that small-town cuisine isn’t exciting. But I think being from spaces where options are limited makes you more adventurous. I have met so many people who claim they only like steak and potatoes, but then they eat my mom’s curries and are converted. Now my hometown has an Indian restaurant, along with pho, Thai and several Chinese restaurants. And sushi, something I didn’t eat till I was 25 — not for lack of wanting to, but there was nowhere to try it. Driving to Oregon last summer, I ate incredible ramen in Idaho. The foods of the West are changing.
But what hasn’t changed is our optimism and hope. Earlier this summer, we planted tomatoes and other vegetables that our girls like: Carrots, snap peas and lettuce. Juniper and Marigold also planted sunflowers.
“Will they grow, Mama?”
I could only tell them I hoped so. I hoped it wouldn’t snow or hail. And that the voles wouldn’t ruin the garden.
It’s easy when you are from a rural place to think that small-town cuisine isn’t exciting. But I think being from spaces where options are limited makes you more adventurous.
I MAY NOT have liked the artichoke, but maybe that wasn’t the point. The point was that I was trying something different. The point was that to live and make a home in the West, you adapt to new things. What is exotic to some is life as we know it for others. To Juniper and Marigold, growing food in our garden is as remarkable as an artichoke seemed to me.
“It’s from here!” they say excitedly when they bite into their tomatoes, the juice running down their faces.
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This article appeared in the July 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “’Tis the season.”
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