As many of you know, our Montana Meals August challenge was to prepare and enjoy a meal made entirely from Montana food. The last two Montana Meals Six Nutritional Tenets are to Take Advantage of all the wonderful foods that are grown in Montana and Enjoy Your Food! The focus of the August Challenge definitely intended to draw focus on these two tenets.
This past weekend, your Wellness Team and families pooled their collective resources to create our Montana Meal and complete the challenge. This was one of our favorite challenges of the year to complete, and we wanted to share our results!
We decided to go with a fajita fiesta theme, which seems a bit funny for a Montana Meal, but it worked well. Here’s how we did it. First, we had a plethora of veggies that came from three different family gardens plus the MSU farm. We had a lot of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and garlic for the fajita veggie mix, which we sautèed. The meat was an skirt steak sourced from Big Timber, grilled and cut into fajita strips. We even made and rolled homemade flour tortillas with All-Purpose flour from Wheat Montana.
Finally we mixed a salsa with the following ingredients:
- Tomatillos (Several), blended
- Red tomatoes (Several), blended
- 1/4 onion, diced
- 1/2 red pepper, diced
- 1 jalapeño pepper, diced
- 1 chili pepper, diced
- 3 cloves garlic, minced
- Cilantro, minced
- Dash of cumin, chili powder, and fajita seasoning
Usually, making salsa is a trial and error process, carefully adding ingredients and/or spices until you achieve the perfect consistency, flavor, and spice. Incredibly, we got it right the first time. After everyone’s first taste it was unanimously declared that “The salsa is right!” Time to grab tortillas and build fajitas!
Mission accomplished! We hope you enjoyed this challenge as much as we did! You don’t even have to wait till next year to recreate a Montana Meal—do it anytime you want a nutritious, delicious meal that supports our local economy!
Happy Eating!
CS & NA
Montana Moves 