Essentials for camp cooking

We are preparing for the second time in two weeks (thanks Hanna!) to go camping in the mountains this weekend. If you have been reading this blog regularly you know that usually by this time we have been camping several times, but this summer was full of summer school and freelancing, and home projects and so we are getting a late start.

Food is one of the most important things for a successful camping trip, and preparation is essential to good meals in the wild. I thought it might be a good idea for those of you who also enjoy camping, or would like to try to share some of what I have learned about cooking and camping, what equipment you need and some of our favorite dishes and ways to convert dishes to a campstove or campfire.

Let's start with equipment you need if you are planning to cook more than trail mix and freeze-dried meals or hot dogs on a stick (Which can be good too!)

1) Campstove- We use a propane stove by Coleman with two burners and electronic ignition that is now about 13 years old. It works well, is easy to carry and provides enough space to make a meal for a crowd. Some people, including some of our friends use liquid fuel stoves which do provide higher BTUs if you are a heavy duty camp chef, but I have never been fond of the idea of carrying liquid fuels and funnels with me in the car.

2) Cast iron griddle- Essential for making breakfasts of bacon and pancakes that are must for cool weather camping.

3) Camp percolator- No instant coffee for us- we love the real thing and it tastes twice as good in the wild. Ours is the old granite wear and about as old as our stove!

4) Silicon or other heat-proof oven mitts- These are essential when camping since often handles get hotter than they might on your home stove. Burned ands are no fun, especially in the wild.

5) Long-handled lighter- This is great for lighting your stove or the campfire.

6) Heavy pots and pans (without non-stick coating)- Some of our friends carry their Le Creuset, but I don't have any, so I have to settle for a large cast-iron skillet which is a great all-purpose pan for camp cooking, and a set of Eddie Bauer camp pans that nest together.

7) Cutting board- I love these new flat flexible ones that I bought for my kitchen and I carry one along.

Next Installment: Extras that make camp cooking (and eating) better

Really convenient convenience foods

Since I wrote about a Wall Street Journal article pointing out the myth of convenience foods, I was surprised to see a post over at Food Fetish stating essentially that I might frown on her buying and using bagged salad as a time-saver, based on my recent post about convenience foods and the fact that they really don't save enough time to make them worth the extra fat and calories that they usually include. Her post made me think about what the definition of convenience foods should be and which ones I couldn't live without.

When I started looking at it, almost everything we use today is a convenience food of sorts, if you define that as a food that is already premade or pre-prepared. Are all canned foods convenience foods? I certainly use my share of canned tomatoes, canned beans, and even pasta sauce on occasion. While I love homemade bread, I don't bake for everyday use. So, if you consider processed foods as convenience foods, I don't use that many, but if you count pre-prepared foods, they are staples in my pantry and freezer, and they are the building blocks I use to play with food.

What convenience foods could you not live without? I think that you may find drawing that line a little more difficult than you imagined.

Firehouse chili, and other cooking disasters

Part of the reason for this blog is to make playing with food accessible, and I realized that I might have given the impression that I know all about food and cooking. You might say- oh it's easy for her to experiment, she is an experienced cook, that will never work for me. First of all, I try to learn all the time - that is the main reason I started this blog. It helps me to share my ideas and experience... and allows me to benefit from the ideas and experience of all of you. While there are some natural cooks, most of us have to practice, practice, practice. And the results of those practice sessions are not pretty.

In my case, much of my earlier experimentation was done in my teens. I had a working mom and three younger brothers, and so I started by cooking dinners, looking through cookbooks and picking things to make that I thought they would eat but often my experiments did not always work out. During those years, I learned that combining a lot of biscuits into one large biscuit for hamburger stroganoff did not work (hard to believe, but I tried this), and that Pyrex could not be used to heat milk, even briefly, on top of the stove( I am lucky that I wasn't picking glass out of my face for a week).

As a young wife I was anxious to demonstrate my domestic skills to my new husband. I was so excited to make my first bread, following the recipe and what I had seen my Grandmother McKinney (she was a great bread baker!) do. I mixed, I kneaded, I rested , I rose, I baked. The finished product smelled heavenly and yeasty. It was perfectly browned and looked just like a magazine picture. I could hardly wait to serve it. I sliced it, slathered it with butter, and...It was like a brick... and about as tasty!

Even after years of practice, there were still some interesting dishes. One of my favorites was when we lived at our house in Hilton Village. I made a new recipe for a Firehouse Chili, that you made in the oven. I was so excited, since the recipe sounded really great and as it started cooking the house smelled great... for awhile. Then we started to smell something that smelled like burning rubber. Smoke was coming out of the oven!! When I looked inside, the top heating element was arcing!! We called the fire station and told them what was happening, that it was contained (it was working its way around the entire element) but we thought we should let them know. We began to hear sirens getting closer and closer, and then two fire trucks pulled up and three firemen were in our kitchen. The most danger anyone was that they would bust a gut when I told them what I was cooking in the oven.

Just like in science, when you experiment with food, the result might not be what you had hoped. Such was the case when I made a recipe for Cauliflower soup that my sister-in-law had raved about. Truly, when we tasted it we wondered if this had been her idea of a joke. It was awful!

So don't be dejected if things don't always turn out the way you want. Cooking is like life that way. The best laid plans... And when those plans don't turn out, at least you can have a good laugh!

"Good David's" Pam warning

We have a good friend David (the kids call him good David, you'll hear about evil David in a future post!) and I swear he knows everything about everything. He knows all about plants, birds, wine, game, cooking, carpentry, camping.... you get the picture. Sometimes his wealth of knowledge is a bummer- like when he told my husband that having a fire in the fireplace sucked the heat you were paying for on your monthly gas bill right up the chimney. I don't think we have had a fire more than a handful of times since he enlightened us with that fact! He always knows about all the things we should be afraid of, and he's not afraid to tell us. However, this font of knowledge has also been a great asset. Let me give you one example:

Our family loves to go camping and we have a propane camp stove by Coleman (a lot like the one pictured here) that came with a really great griddle with a deep well for fat to drain. We used that year after year for breakfasts, cooking bacon, sausage, and eggs, mostly on our family camping trips to Crabtree Falls Campground in Tyro, VA (seen here to the right).

Last spring, I started noticing that my pancakes were sticking even though the griddle was Teflon and I had sprayed it generously with Pam spray. Our friend, "good David", was with us camping and he told us that Pam reacted with Teflon and deteriorated the coating so that it loses its non-stick nature, and eventually starts flaking off. Not being a big fan of Teflon anyway, we threw away the griddle, went to Ebay and found a cast iron griddle that would fit our campstove. It's a lot heavier than our original griddle but it has a flat surface on one side and a grill side on the other and it fits across the two burners of our gas range at home too. The moral of this story- don't use Pam on your non-stick pans. Over time the surface will actually get sticky and you will lose all the advantages that come with a Teflon pan.

I thought I'd share this since you may not have a "good David" that can keep you from messing up your Teflon pans. FYI, my understanding that it is something in the propellant in Pam that causes this reaction so butter, shortenings and oils are just fine for your Teflon pans. Keep your Pam for pans without non-stick coatings (say that three times fast!)

A shopping list saves time and money!

Shopping. It is a necessary part of playing with food, but is often the first stumbling block for aspiring cooks, whether they are just starting out or have been cooking for years. Shopping for food takes money and time - something many of us have way too little of. I can share some tips that might help make shopping for food less of a chore.

My first bit of advice is to sit down each week and decide what you want to cook for your main meals. I know this sounds like a drag, but it saves stress and money. First, take stock of what you have in your fridge and freezer that you should use in the coming week. Look in your pantry to see what staples you might be running low on. This will help shape what you make in the coming week and identify what you need on your shopping list. Believe me, this will save time and money later. Now for the fun part. I usually sit down with cooking magazines, my favorite cookbooks, and my computer and decide roughly what I want for dinner for the next week. When I say roughly, I mean I decide on whether I am having flank steak, chicken thighs, ground beef, fish fillets, whatever I have in my freezer or intend to get. I don't usually make something new every night -that takes exploring with food and makes it more of a chore. Since I work a full time job and have six children (only 3 are still home), it is nice to come home and make some of the old standards, but try to set aside at least one night a week when you try something new.
It keeps you from getting into a rut (Monday-hamburgers, Tuesday-chicken pot pie, Wednesday-Vegetable soup....).

I know this seems like a pain to do all this work before shopping but remember we are saving time and money in the week ahead. There is nothing worse for someone who has worked all day than to come home and have to decide, "What's for dinner?" If your family is anything like mine-in this situation they only know what they don't want, which is whatever I suggest. It takes time when you would really rather decompress at the end of the day. Then once you decide on something, do you have everything you need. An even worse, you will have to get back in your car and go get something...now it's 7 o'clock before you even get started with dinner! That is what having a menu and a shopping list does for you. It removes some of that stress. And if you get home and decide you don't want the chili that you planned for this evening, you have a week's worth of meals to choose from... and if you used your shopping list, you already have all the ingredients!

Since you are obviously computer-savvy, there are lots of computer programs that help with meal planning and then generate a shopping list for you. MasterCook, http://www.valusoft.com/products/mastercook.html is one that I have used that has its own electronic cookbook, allows you to save your own recipes, allows you to change the proportions of your recipes to suit your family size and generates a shopping list from your menus. There are also a number of grocery stores that provide a shopping list option. Harris Teeter http://www.harristeeter.com/ and Kroger http://www.kroger.com/homepage/index.htm, also allow you to create a shopping list.

So take inventory, grab your cookbooks and make a list. A little time spent now will definitely save time and stress during your work week.

A mom encouraging you to play with food!

I am starting this blog because I see that, in general, people are afraid of food. Food is seen as bad- it makes you fat, it has carcinogens, it makes you break out, it clogs your arteries, it gives you gas. Good food is expensive, it is hard to cook, cooking causes anxiety, recipes are rigid, it takes too much time... All of these things are just not true!

This blog is dedicated to encouraging the young, the old, the experienced cook and the novice, even those who rely on Pizza Hut and Hamburger Helper to make it through the week to get out of their comfort zone. Don't be afraid. Stretch your culinary muscles, even if you don't think you have any. Playing with food is fun and it should be fun for not only those who eat it but those who cook it.

Don't believe me? Close your eyes. Think back. So many of your best memories are associated with food. The smell of a Thanksgiving turkey, your first candy apple, the taste of a bowl of chili on a winter evening. For me, it is the memory of my grandmother's applesauce cake baking in big heavy cast-iron bundt pans. Food is a way to make memories, to bond with friends or people you want to be friends with. As a nation we have gotten away from the family table and the fun that it brings. Cooking a meal is a chore, not an adventure. It's time for a change, and that is what I hope to do.

I will start by pointing to two of the most useful places for anyone who wants to explore food, Epicurious at http://www.epicurious.com/ , and Food Network at http://www.foodnetwork.com/. Epicurious has an incredible searchable recipe file that you can search by name, by ingredient, or other keywords. Recipes there are rated by forks with 1 the lowest and 4 the highest. But the best thing for cooks that want to have fun with food is that there is a place at the end of each recipe for comments. You can hear from people who have made the dish if it is good, if it is difficult and time-consuming, and even what substitutions can be made. I use this site all the time. Can't think of another thing to do with chicken? Search by ingredient and you will get a wealth of ideas to choose from. It is a great resource for novice or experienced cooks. Food Network also has a recipe index searchable by the cooking show, or by title or ingredient. These recipes are also rated, but there are no comments and reviews.
Check them out and you will take the first step to really having fun with food.