Meals Made with Focaccia

We love focaccia! It's flavored Italian bread -- flavored with olive oil and Italian spices or anything else you want to add.

We're building a "focaccia library" -- a listing of meals that you can make with focaccia bread. The goal is to find 100 meals that we can make with focaccia. That's a big project but that's okay; we have lots of focaccia recipes and ideas stashed in the archives.

Our favorite focaccia mixes to get you started:

• Italian Herb and Garlic Focaccia Bread Mix — our most popular
• Tuscany Tomato and Herb Focaccia Bread Mix
• Italian Herb and Cheese Focaccia Bread Mix
• Rosemary Focaccia Bread Mix

Why are we building a focaccia library? Three reasons:

• Focaccia is fun and there's so much for you to explore and build. We want to share what we've found.
• Focaccia is a great summertime bread and often lends itself to quick and easy meals.
• It's affordable. The mixes cost only a few dollars and include a spice packet. It's easy on the food budget.

But Merri Ann and I needed a break -- a respite from writing about bread. So we took a hike.

Medicine Lodge Creek, the Idaho Medicine Lodge Creek, is only an hour and a half from home. See the green mountain in the center -- there's a canyon between the green mountain and the red rock mountain behind it. That's where we went hiking on Saturday. Red Rock Mountain is part of the Continental Divide. We didn't get far -- the trail ran out, and bushwhacking is too hard.

A couple of weeks ago, when the snow was still clinging to the mountains, we drove up the Montana Medicine Lodge Creek. The Idaho Medicine Lodge Creek flows south, headed for the Pacific Ocean, but gets lost and disappears in the desert below.

The Montana Medicine Lodge Creek Drainage, May 2024

The Montana Medicine Lodge Creek flows north and east, then into the Missouri River and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. It's strange to have two streams back-to-back in two states, both named the same.

Bannock Pass connects the two, and if you have a four-wheel-drive, you can drive over the Continental Divide and down the drainage on the other side. But take the right Bannock Pass. There's another Bannock Pass up the road at Leadore. That one you can drive in a passenger car.

Strange geography -- two Bannock Passes and two Medicine Lodge Creeks.

Saturday, we drove out past Edie on the Idaho side. The Edie school is obviously abandoned.

Edie School House (Abandoned), June 2024

This is lonely country. There are only a few hundred people in a large county.

(Merri Ann's father was raised on a homestead one drainage to the east. When he went to school, he walked the railroad track 10 miles to Dubois.)

On Saturday, we exited at Edie and drove west over the ridge to Warm Spring Creek on the Idaho side. Merri Ann's uncle had a ranch on Warm Springs Creek.

The road going down the ridge to Warm Springs Creek was rough -- deep ruts and washouts. I wouldn't drive it without four-wheel drive.

We got home before dark. I still had time to work on the focaccia library.

Get your focaccia mix here.