When camping, my SUV also functions as my sleeping chamber. You can see the foot of my 8-inch mattress in the bed of the Jeep...my type of "roughing" it!
On what may have been the last camping trip of the season, my nephew, Jeff, and I were sitting around our toasty campfire roasting marshmallows on our first night in camp.
I was telling him of our hardy and stalwart pioneer ancestors and how on their long treks west - some to Ohio, some to Pennsylvania, others, to Utah - they cooked over campfires as they didn't have the modern convenience of a camp stove, such as we do.
They cooked on a grate over the fire, a kettle suspended above the fire on an iron tripod, and a dutch over placed in the coals. They used skills I'd never tried to replicate. After all, I had a camp stove!
Everything from soup to bread was done on their nightly campfires, which when banked with ashes before retiring to their blankets, could be easily reignited the next morning for cooking breakfast. Lunch was usually bread, biscuits, cheese, or cold, cooked meat from the evening or breakfast meal.
Well, as luck and synchronicity would have it, the next morning when I went to light my 40+-year old camp stove, it wouldn't ignite. I could hear the propane hissing but it wouldn't take the flame from the match.
Hmmm....gas/air mixture issues? A buildup of propane film from many trips over many years? I tried swapping out propane canisters (I always bring at least two spares).
Nothing.
It was a chilly September morning and we wanted our tea! What to do, oh, what to do.
We sat without tea for about 20 minutes in front of our (banked and relit) morning fire. I thought about cutting the trip short. I contemplated eating our food raw - except for those items that must be cooked - raw weenies didn't sound too appetizing...nor did tuna melts without the "melt".
Perhaps shrimp scampi minus the shrimp? I could boil water for pasta on the campfire grate...
No French toast either, just cold bread!!!
Perhaps, driving off the mountain back into town and buying another camp stove was an option? Well, that would have obliterated one whole day of our trip.
Finally, it occurred to me to at least pour water into a small pan and heat it over the fire for tea and instant coffee.
With hot beverages finally in our tummies we were better able to shake off the morning cobwebs and really think over our plight.
With that small success of hot drinks, we stuck some pre-cooked sausages on the ends of our marshmallow forks and browned them over the open flames. They were even better cooked that way than browned in a skillet. Things were starting to look up.
We snacked for lunch, but come dinner our menu was to have featured shrimp scampi in a garlic, butter, lemon sauce over orecchiette (little ears) pasta, mopping up any remaining sauce with rustic sourdough. Trying to light the stove many times over was a repeated failure.
Well, maybe I needed to hark back to my hardy and stalwart pioneer DNA and just get cooking!
While Jeff tended the pasta simmering in a wok on the campfire, I prepped the shrimp, squeezed the lemon, and got the butter and garlic out of the ice chest.
Jeff tends the pasta simmering in a small wok, the only camp pan big enough to hold water and pasta
Pasta in a wok, cooked over the campfire coals.
When the pasta was cooked, I drained it on a tree stump in a footed colander I'd brought for the purpose. Then, re-using the wok, I melted butter, added minced garlic, and the prepped shrimp, and simmered it over fire and coals for a few minutes until the shrimp turned pink and opaque. I added the lemon juice and a bit of sea salt, then returned the pasta to the wok and heated everything through.
The sauce wasn't as thickened as I'd planned, but it was delicious with a sprinkle of Parmesan, and sopped up with torn, rustic sourdough bread.
Yum-a-licious!
I ended up cooking the best French toast I'd ever made, with a side of a few more sausages for a meal the next day...over the campfire.
We decided that our tuna melts on rustic sourdough were so good that henceforth, we'd always cook them over the campfire in the cast iron skillet.
Of course, hot dogs are always tastiest when the wieners are roasted on marshmallow sticks over the hot coals until they blister! And so we did!
Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and more foods, were cooked over the campfire each day of our trip.
A lesson presented itself in the days following our camping trip as I reflected back on our unplanned cookouts.
I learned that when faced with a dilemma, a challenge, a hardship, or some other event or condition beyond our usual milieu, we have at least two choices.
The first is to retreat into apathy and spend time trying to resurrect what once worked but is no longer relevant...
Or, we can face the issue head on, give it a think, and adapt, make do, get creative, or reach deep into our DNA and resurrect the hardy and stalwart spirits of those who've gone before!
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