25 Comments | leave a comment | RSS 2.0 for this post | trackback |
| Wednesday, May 22, 2013 |
|
- A Bird's Eye View
- A Motley Vision
- Adventures in Mormonism
- Blognitive Dissonance
- Book of Mormon Blog
- By Common Consent
- Ethesis
- Face of the Other
- Faith Promoting Rumor
- Feminist Mormon Housewives
- Flooding the Earth With the Book of Mormon
- Golden Road to Samarqand
- Head Life
- Just Sayin'
- Juvenile Instructor
- Messanger & Advocate
- Millennial Star
- Mormon Matters
- Mormon Mommy Wars
- New Cool Thang
- Nine Moons
- Old Testament Blog
- Our Mother's Keeper
- Proud Daughter of Eve
- Segullah
- Sunstone Blog
- Times & Seasons
- Wheat and Tares
- Zelophehad's Daughters
Tin foil dinners rule #1: boil the potatoes first. You’ll thank me for that one. Just about everything tastes better when camping. What you take depends on what type of camping you’ll be doing. Going on a backpacking trip? Take a bunch of dehydrated stuff that you just need to pour boiling water into. Car camping? Then you can get fancy. |
ARJ, being slightly lazy, I was trying to decide whether to bother adding potatoes (for exactly that reason) – but maybe I will go ahead with it. I was thinking steak or hamburger might be safer than chicken. |
For dessert, you can’t beat banana boats. They’re far superior to s’mores, and they go great with tinfoil stew. Take a banana and peel one side of it about halfway down. Scoop out some of the banana to form a hollow, and fill it with chocolate chips and marshmallows. Replace the banana peel and wrap in foil. Cook in the coals of your campfire for about 5 minutes (I don’t remember the exact time. It’s been a while.) or until the chocolate and marshmallows are melted and the banana is soft. Enjoy! |
oh yeah, chicken will get you sick if you don’t handle it properly. |
Keri, that banana boat idea sounds like an easy thing to do and I imagine it tastes great too. I might just have to give that a shot. |
I second the poiling the potatoes first – carrots and onions are ok crunchy. Also make sure you season them well. Worcester/ Worcestershire sauce works well with hamburger, especially if you put a pat of butter in. Another good dinner is sausages. Precooked kielbasa or polish or whatever – on a stick. You won’t get sick, if not fully cooked, they don’t need a ton of refrigeration, and easy. I also like noodle soups when it is cold. If you want to go fancy, our scoutmaster would often do a spit roast of beef, chicken, or cornish game hen. |
For breakfast, try this: Take a small paper bag. Cover the bottom with strips of bacon. Poke a stick through the top of the bag and hold it over the fire (carefully!) until the grease has saturated the bottom. Then crack one or two eggs into the bag and hold the bag over the fire until eggs and bacon are done. Er, I can’t say this ever worked for me but I think it’s because I put everything in at once and didn’t give the grease time to saturate the bag. For dinner, try fish! You can grill them easily or they work well in tin foil too. Just remember to bring lemon pepper or whatever seasonings you like. :) |
I never pre-cook the potatoes, and they are never crunchy. We like them so well that I sometimes make a foil packet of potatoes to throw on the grill when we are barbecuing. The secret is to steam them sufficiently, by ensuring a tight seal. I wrap them in a layer of foil, cover with a layer of newspaper and wrap them again in foil. It doesn’t have to be heavy-duty foil. Sometimes the newspaper is burned when we open it, but the inner layer is fine. But I am also a big fan of MREs when we are camping…it would be fun to do a MRE smorgasboard with the scouts, to let them sample different kinds and see what they like. |
One that is fun and easy is ground beef in an orange. Cut an end off an orange, remove most of the fruit, and stuff with ground beef. Put the cut end back on top of the orange, and place the orange in the coals. If you have a dutch oven, cobbler is fairly simple and much enjoyed. |
Please don’t take raw meat that you have to handle at the camp site–there is no way that you can keep plates, utensils, hands, etc. sanitary. If you have to have raw meat, seal up the packets _at home_ so you (or your fork or knife) doesn’t have to touch the raw meat while camping. An easy way to do this: go to the Reynold’s Wrap web site and you’ll find a billion ideas for packet cooking. |
My experience is that soap works as well outdoors as it does in. It’s also just as necessary and needs to be on hand. |
I like to cook a flank steak over the site grill, and cook some onions and peppers in foil packets. With some warmed tortillas, I make fajitas that way. Or, I do shishkabob. Those are the only two things I know how to cook while camping. Therefore, we fill in with instant oatmeal and sandwiches, and don’t go camping for longer than the weekend. |
We went on our “survival” campout last weekend and pulled up some early wild onions and roasted them on a hot rock next to the fire – that was dinner. We also boiled some for variety… nothing like hot onion broth! The boys built shelters and at 3am it started pouring and dropped down to the mid 30′s. Us two adults slept fine in our warm sleeping bags and tent. As for the potatoes, I agree with the boiling first. Kielbasa, onions and peppers along with some red pepper flakes are the way to go… |
Mix the dry ingredients for biscuit dough, including powdered milk, and cut in the shortening at home. Store in ziplock bags. At the campsite, add water and mix slightly (good biscuits aren’t kneaded, even in the kitchen — add water to the bag and squish it a few times in your hands, then pull out the dough), wrap around a stick and toast over the fire. Bisquik dough is too soft. Take two minutes and mix the ingredients for scratch biscuits. |
I’ve found that cooking the food of people who traditionally cook over a fire is an easy way to go. The best things I’ve ever had in the mountains have been flatbread, fried potatoes and onions, kebabs, and rice pilaf. You can take a large wok to do all of these things. You can cook enough rice pilaf for 20 in a large pot, and you can use the same wok to fry potatoes and onions. Then you can flip the wok over and use it as a sajj to cook khubz sajj on. Nothing is quite as good as hot flatbread straight off the fire, and I’ve had a lot of good flatbread. While your rice is cooking or your potatoes are frying, you can cook your kebabs. |
What you cook depends on how you’re camping. Are you hiking in or camping out of the back of a car? |
If you are car camping, then you could bring a Dutch oven, and that would open up lots more possibilities and certainly invite more recipes from DO fanatics like meself. |
We fry pork chops in a dutch oven and add barbecue sauce. They are really yummy. Also fattening. |
Julie is right about handling meat at the campsight. If you’re going to do tinfoil dinners, the best way to make them to assemble them during the weekly YM activity on the Tuesday before the campout, and put them in the freezer in the church kitchen. It is best to use beef, because it’s very easy to tell whether it’s cooked, even when it’s dark. You can do it on the cheep with ground beef if you bring catsup on the campout. Or you can spend a little more and use sirloin tips, and not worry about bringing condiments. The only seasoning that’s really important is salt, but pepper doesn’t hurt. As arj points out ,you should boil the potatoes if you keep them whole. You can also cut them into 1 1/2 inch squares — they’ll cook that way, too. If I recall correctly, carrots take longer to cook, so it’s best to leave them out of the mix. |
I like ham in a tinfoil dinner, and pineapple, onion and canned potatoes. They just have to warm up and blend a bit, and the onion soften. Gourmet cooking is for home. Hamburger grease tastes awful indoors or out. Try eating it cold. Eating a food cold is also a good test of its healthfulness. |
If you are going somewhere with a decent water supply, a live lobster in a semi-inflated plastic bag (with a little water in it) and a pot tied to a pack actually travel pretty well. Boil some water, drop the sucker in, and pull it out when it is nice and red. And bring a little butter to melt. Delicious, and the scouts will never forget it. |
Well, I’m back. It turned out I didn’t have as much time for prep as I thought I would have – so I kept it pretty darn simple. I ended up doing a tin-foil dinner with steak, onions and BBQ sauce + salt and pepper. It tasted great. It was double-wrapped in foil and I still managed to rip it open as I was trying to take it out of the fire. The meal was not lost, very fortunately. And it tasted very good. Next time I try to drag a tin-foil dinner out of the coals, I’ll have something other than sticks to work with. I’m still wanting very much to do a banana boat. I also learned something very simple that I had never thought of trying before. The Scouts told me that I could boil an egg in a paper cup. That seemed crazy but it actually works. You just put the egg in a paper cup with water and stick the cup right into the coals. The top part of the cup, that isn’t touched by water, just burns away. But the water keeps the rest of the cup from burning and still comes to a boil. It worked great. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I’ll be re-visiting this thread and trying stuff. I had forgotten how fun it is to go camping – even if you live in New York City. |
Dan M, that idea of bringing and cooking a live lobster – that is awesome. What an amazing and crazy idea for camping. |
Use “new red potatoes” and slice them, and place in a single layer in the foil pack, and they’ll cook just fine from scratch. I often cook foil packs in my oven at home in cold weather. I always double layer them. Favorite is chicken leg quarters. 45-50 minutes for a single chicken leg quarter, or 65-70 minutes if two are in the foil pack. I cook them at 425 to 450 degrees. |
I was searching for this kind of info! Great post. I’ve just added you to my Google News Reader. |
