​Our favorite season at the Coffee Pot!  We are in full swing with our fall menu items.  Zucchini Parmesan and Butternut Squash Soup are on the menu as well as our Maple Meltaways and Pumpkin Spice cookies. 
 
The crisp mornings and warm afternoons are so welcome after such a hot summer, and the rains and snow of last week have finally put out the fires and settled the smoke in our valley.  My favorite thing to do this time of the year is to drive up to where there are elk bugling and listen to their eerie calls and watch them on the meadows before they drift up the hills to the safety of the trees.  We have driven out three times to watch them and twice have taken our children and grandchildren.  I have to say that their idea of a fun morning is not to get up at 5:45 and drive a chilly fifteen miles to the mountains, sitting with the windows open and the heater off so that you can hear the elk more clearly!  Our enthusiasm is contagious, but only such that they want to stay away so that they don't catch it!  They may not be morning people.
 
If you are taking a drive up the Canyon to see the beautiful fall colors, stop by the Coffee Pot and pick up a Pumpkin Spice Latte or some Caramel Apple Cider.  We will be open at 5:45 A.M., but you don't have to get up quite that early if you aren't a morning person!

​The relationships we develop at the Coffee Pot and Mountain Arts Pottery continue to be the best part of our business. It is amazing the friendships that form between us and our customers when we see each other only three or four times a year.  Some of our closest friends live in Bozeman half of the year and Washington half the year.  One couple started out as a customer and we ended up hiring her at our Kiosk for the Christmas season.  Their departure back to Washington was delayed because he broke his leg falling off the sidewalk at our Store!  That's one way to increase your friendship base!

David and I look forward to each season when we know that people will be traveling to Montana on vacation. This week we have a family wedding and out of town guests, so we are taking a week off. We are happy to take time off because it’s been a busy season, but we are somewhat reluctant to not be at the Store because we are likely to miss some of friends who only come in during the summer. 

In the past year we know of 9 customers/friends who have made the choice to move away from our community, and one friend who died in an accident. We are so thankful that we were informed of their departure, but always wonder if there are others who have elected to leave, have come in to let us know, but we missed them for one reason or another.  Please make sure that you ask for us if you come into the Store.  We are never too busy to speak to old friends. Or new ones, either!

​- Jennie Lockie

If there is one thing that is symbolic of Montana, it is summer Huckleberries.  I remember moving to Montana as a young girl and going hiking with one of my friends and her family and tasting, for the first time, a wild huckleberry.  It was an incredible experience and tasted like nothing I had ever had before.  To compare a huckleberry to a blueberry, as some tend to do, is equivalent to comparing an overcooked pea to one fresh out of the pod. 
 
Montanans who take huckleberries seriously are like fishermen who can't resist bragging about a wonderful fishing hole but will never divulge its location. There have been feuds involving firearms when one person encroaches on another's "private huckleberry patch".  Huckleberries are typically only available in the wild during a very short season and are found at very specific elevation levels with a specific soil type and drainage.  Part of the charm is that they are not easily foraged and it can take an hour to pick a few cups full, if there are even that many in a patch. One of the traditions we have established as a family is to go out together to pick huckleberries and then we have a big huckleberry pancake feast.  It takes all of us to get enough to make it a worthwhile feast!
 
There are individuals who take the few weeks of huckleberry season to pick the berries and sell them to food purveyors around the state.  We are the recipients of those individuals labors, and at the Coffee Pot Bakery Cafe, it is full on huckleberry season! Depending on quality of the season, Huckleberries go for $45-$65 per gallon, making them around $3.75 per cup.  During this season, we make huckleberry pies, scones, coffee cakes, cheesecakes, huckleberry lattes and huckleberry chocolate bars. Phew.  I'm beginning to sound like a character from "Forrest Gump"! 
 
There are many wonderful things about Montana, and huckleberries are among the best.  Come celebrate the huckleberry season!

​Our daughter sent us a picture last week from her corner of the world near Phoenix, Arizona of their thermometer registering 122 degrees. We might wonder why anyone would put up with those temperatures. Just a few short weeks before that, however, I had sent them a photo of ten inches of snow on our deck. They wondered, I'm sure, why people put up with snowstorms in May and June.  There are no perfect places to live. Hurricanes, floods, blizzards, heat waves; every place has some negative aspect to it, or so it seems. 
 
Bozeman certainly has its difficult months, but we put up with the tough winter months to get to this particular time of the year when our the area is nearly perfect. Beautiful 80 degree, sunny days blend into cool nights, perfect sleeping weather. The flowers in the mountains are spectacular and the rivers are calm enough for floating without risking your life. Most mornings, year around, I wake up and thank God for letting me live where I live. I love Montana!   
 
Everyone doesn't get to live in the place where they love to be, but I'm so glad to have a home and a business in our beautiful valley. Hope you'll come visit us soon!

We are blessed to have two terrific daughter's in law and they both have April birthdays which we were able to celebrate together with most of the family in attendance. Kathy wanted a Fruit Pizza on our Coffee Pot sugar cookie dough, and it was a great, delicious success.
 
Jenny doesn't love sweets and her birthday dessert choice was Cinnamon Walnut Scones which we used to make at the Coffee Pot.  Unfortunately, we no longer make them so they would have been a special order and I didn't want to have our kitchen have to make a special order of scones for such a small batch.
 
Not to worry.  After all, didn't I start the Coffee Pot Bakery Cafe?  Didn't I win lots of ribbons at the Montana Winter Fair for my baked goods?  Didn't I know how to make scones?  I would make them myself, and privately (or not so privately, my husband reminded me) I was fairly certain that I could make better scones than our bakers.  
 
Next to my pride, my second mistake was to get an unfamiliar recipe off of the internet for scones.  It was touted as the "best scone recipe ever!" and had a 4.5 star review.  In my search, I might have even found a better scone recipe for us to use at the bakery!  
 
The day of the birthday arrives and I pull out butter (lots of it!), cream (lots of it, too!) flour, etc and begin to make the scones.  The recipe called for a baking temperature of 450° which should have been a red flag, but no,  I pressed doggedly on.  Halfway through the process, my daughter in law asked if I might use partial whole wheat flour.  Hmmm.  Should have been another red flag, but I decided to just add to what I had started and make a triple batch instead of a double batch as I had planned. By now, there were enough red flags to make a Tibetan prayer flag, but I ignored them all.
 
I cram the very wet, sticky scone dough into the oven at 450° and soon there is smoke boiling out of the oven and the distinct fragrance of burning sugar.  I rotated the three pans of scones several times so that they wouldn't all be black on the bottom, but that idea was simply not working, and they all were equally scorched.  On the bottom only, unfortunately.  The top two thirds was mushy.  The family was coming and it was time for dessert.  One would have thought that using nearly a pound of butter would have made them easy to get off of the pan, but no, they all stuck.  That was actually not a bad thing, because some of the very burned bottom third of the scones stayed on the pan. 
 
I have a gracious family.  They each ate a scone and said, "they aren't that bad".  No one had seconds. Surprise.
 
Pride does indeed go before the fail and I humbly asked for the recipe our bakery uses and made another batch of scones.  These I baked at 275°, made them without whole wheat flour, didn’t make a triple batch, and was properly chagrined about my previous attitude.  They came out fine.  Not even close to as good as those at the Coffee Pot, but good enough, and I learned another life lesson about pride.

-Jennie Lockie

When we first opened Mountain Arts Pottery, we didn't anticipate that it would evolve into co-existing with a restaurant.  We had been creating pottery for 23 years and pottery was what we knew.  After about six months of doing business in our new space near Four Corners, we started talking about adding coffee to our business.  We had plenty of space back then and thought that it might be a good "add on business". David thought that it would be good to give our customers a cup of coffee to enjoy while they were looking at the pottery.  I thought that we should make a really good cup of coffee, make cinnamon rolls and other treats and sell them to our customers.  In the end, my persuasiveness prevailed and we began to make coffee. I love to make pastries, so I made half a dozen cinnamon and caramel rolls each day, and maybe a dozen cookies (our customer base was pretty miniscule!).  When word got out that we had treats, we began to increase our selection and the number of items we were making.  Eventually I hired someone to help me, and the Coffee Pot Bakery Cafe was launched.
 
I will never forget a gentleman who came in and commented on our baked goods and the quality of them.  He asserted with confidence that we would make our own treats for a year or so, then we would become like every other little business and start buying them in bulk from Costco.  Now there is nothing wrong with Costco pastries, in fact I could be addicted to their chocolatey muffins if I permitted myself the indulgence, but our goal was to make all of our food from scratch, on site.  I told him that that would never happen, and, thankfully, it has not.  Although the only cinnamon rolls I personally make these days are made out of our home, we have seven outstanding bakers who continue the tradition of making everything from scratch right here in the Coffee Pot kitchen.  They use some of the same recipes I started with 13 years ago, but they have each added some of their own recipes and ideas which only serves to add to the dimension and quality of what we serve. 
 
There have been many, many changes over the years with both the Coffee Pot and Mountain Arts Pottery, but the one thing that hasn't changed is our goal to make the quality products that our customers expect and appreciate.

​When you've lost a business, or gone broke, both positive things and negative things will result from those experiences. Such has been the case for David and me after going broke in the late 1970s when we owned Lockie Excavating. We learned about variable rate interest loans when our interest went from 9% to 21%. Should we have anticipated that?  Well, yes, but that's part of education. From that experience 37 years ago, David and I have become very conservative in how we spend money.
 
I always told our kids and anyone else who would listen (not that our kids always listened), that just as a coin has two sides, our personalities and circumstances can have two sides as well. Typically, one is good and one is not so good. Being conservative has helped David and me to avoid a lot of money problems and debt; the good side. It has also caused us to toggle things together instead of getting them fixed, and to "make do" when we probably could have afforded to do something new and saved ourselves the hassle of "making do". Like the numerous times we've remodeled or moved the office when we should have made it a reasonable size to begin with. Hindsight is a tricky thing, however, because we really don't remember what the circumstances were when we made some of the decisions that we are now shaking our heads about.
 
As I see the 2017 blogs, Facebook, and Dave Ramsey posts on how to make your money stretch, I am grateful for the things that we've learned on both the positive and negative sides of the coin. It gives us grace to deal with the mistakes we've made and helps us to be grateful for the wise decisions we've made, not because we are wise, but because we have asked God over and over for wisdom in our business and our lives. It helps us to extend that grace and commendation to others as well, knowing that most of life is education, and we will all spend much of our time trying to figure out what to do next.
 
As we begin a new year, we wish the very best for you who read this blog and who have made our success possible by your encouragement, interest, and investment in our business and our lives. 
 
James 1:5  "If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you."
 
Happy New Year!

I know I have said this before but I am continually reminded that we have one of the best teams around to work with.  Our Team in the Coffee Pot Bakery side of our business consists of a group of people that I get to interact with nearly every day. They are very willing to serve our customers, to serve David and me and to encourage one another. There is a lot of laughter as they do their work, and I love hearing that during the day. When one of our Team members became engaged last week, we were all thrilled and look forward to helping with the wedding. When another found out that she was pregnant, we all gathered around to cheer as she cut the "Reveal Cake" and the blue slice was served.

The jobs are broken down between the Back of the House and the Front of the House. The Back of the House is primarily in charge of creating the food that we serve. This includes 3-5 gallon batches of soup, lasagnas, cookies, pies, cinnamon rolls and everything in between. They often come in at 4:30am but have the joy of getting off earlier. Then there is the Front of the House. This part of our team takes the prepared food, heats it to serving temperature, puts together all of the different sides and then runs the food out to the customer.

This part of the crew also includes our cashiers. The cashier is one of the most strategic people on the Team. The cashier is generally the first person to greet our customers and is first in line to make suggestions when someone is trying to make a decision and is unfamiliar with our menu and procedures. Probably the most important aspect of the cashier's job is to help ease over a rough spot when an order is missed or made incorrectly. 

Unfortunately, that will happen. If you take all of the different items we make and the number of different sides that can be chosen and then add a dessert assortment, there are a lot of areas that can create a glitch. Fortunately, in addition to a great service team, we have a great customer base and most issues are resolved to everyone's satisfaction, which is our primary goal.

Along with the front and back of the house people are the all important dishwashers, cleaning crew and office personnel. Because all of these jobs were originally ours when we opened the Coffee Pot, we are extremely thankful for each person who helps carry the load.

I think that the proof that our crew does their job well is that the Coffee Pot Bakery Cafe has, for the past three years, consistently earned a 4.5 star rating on Trip Adviser, Yelp, and Google. This rating is based on service and quality of food. I love my job and love walking through the kitchen and interacting with all of the staff on a daily basis, but my favorite activity is to gather those who want to participate and pray and to ask for God's direction and guidance for the day.

Some days in a Bakery/Cafe are more difficult than others.  We had one of those difficult days the latter part of July. It reminded me of the children's book I used to read to our kids, "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day". The problem with employing young women is that they typically decide to get married.  Not that we are against marriage at the Coffee Pot, because we laud that institution. Those who get married during one of our busiest seasons, however, are not on our most favored list!  Two of our bakers chose the same Saturday in July to get married. They have lots of friends who work at the cafe, so that took even more people out of our work force.   No worries, one of gals who recently left to start her own business committed to coming back to help us during "Wedding Day". Unfortunately, she ended up getting shingles in her eye! Our Bakery Manager and her sister, who also works for us, were at a wedding in Tennessee.  The Front of the House Manager was the coordinator for one of the weddings. "Skeleton Crew" might have described that Saturday's work force. This was the beginning of the trauma of the Coffee Pot's "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day".
 
That day, along with the weddings, David and I were going to a funeral. We left right before the Saturday lunch rush but at 11:30 I got a text that the electricity had gone out at the Store.  That makes for a very traumatic event, when our cash registers, POS and most of the kitchen equipment runs on electricity! There was a 30 minute frantic search for the breaker that caused the problem, but it was finally identified and eventually the electricity came back on. Unfortunately the espresso machine would not work so we couldn't make coffees, and we didn't figure out until Monday morning that it had come unplugged in the chaos!  Through all of this, our Director of Operations, Colette, was as calm as could be, helping everyone else to be as calm as they could be under the circumstances. The little handful of people who were at work told us that she was the one who kept everyone from panicking. Afterward, she told me that that was the most stressful day she has ever had at the Coffee Pot!
 
In "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day", the book ends with Alexander's mother's assurance that everybody has bad days. If you have a business, indeed, if you're alive, you will have bad days but fortunately they won't last forever. At the Coffee Pot, enough time has gone by that we can actually laugh at our horrible day and look back as comrades who prevailed.

When we started our trip we weren't planning to go quite so far. The wedding of a dear friend in Pennsylvania precipitated going to the east, and we decided to visit Jennie Blair, another dear friend and the potter who worked with us for ten years before moving back to her family home in New Hampshire. After I looked at a map and saw how far northeast New Hampshire actually is, we decided that we might as well keep going and see Prince Edward Island, the place that inspired the writing of the "Anne of Green Gables" books, one of our daughter Becky's favorite series. 

Becky, David and I travel well together, each with our own duties to perform when we fill up with gas, pack and go into our lodging for the night. We were gone for two weeks and saw some beautiful country, visited several close friends and appreciated even more the beautiful, diverse country we live in. Altogether, we were in 2 countries, 4 provinces, 16 states, and drove 6704 miles. Most of those miles, we weren't lost, but a few we were. GPS doesn't work extremely well in unpopulated areas, and that's usually the most interesting, pretty country. 

We searched for a place like the Coffee Pot on our journey, and were disappointed that there just aren't that many places which offer fresh baked goods and homemade everything, from soups to lasagnas. It made us appreciate what our team has created at the Coffee Pot and Mountain Arts, and why so many people feel like they're coming home when they visit us again and again. The prettiest sight on our trip was at the end of our driveway. "Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home..."