dutch oven cooking

This goat has wheels

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You already know that goats like to camp in style, but last week I was super brave and not only tried out campervanning for the first time, but also did my first night of lone camping.

The advantage of a van is that you can lock the doors, so it gives an added feeling of security to camping on your own. Driving this van was actually quite easy and it’s not actually any bigger than a big-ish car. I tried it out in a couple of car parks as well as on country lanes and dual carriageways. It’s an NV200 and hired from Sussex Campervans… I’m very tempted to get my own one!

I tried sleeping in the top bunk the first night and the main bed the second night. Sleeping up top would take some getting used to, but down below I slept very comfortably. I stayed at Riverside Farm Campsite. It was a lovely location by the river, but I felt it was overpriced for what it was.

The first night I tried out a new recipe and cooked it in the van – mushroom risotto. Very tasty. For pudding I had one of those little individual pots of fruit salad. The photo is of the second night when I cooked Rowbury Lamb stew over the fire for dinner – also very tasty!

L

More cakes from a tin

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As well as using up out-of-date tins on our camping trips, I’ve been taking my out-of-date ‘rewards’ for helping at the food bank home each week and turning them into a snack for the food bank volunteers coffee break the following week.

I’ve made a Christmas-cake style fruit cake with out-of-date tinned pineapple, hungarian peach cake, low-fat brownies with out-of-date prunes, chocolate crispy cakes with out-of-date strawberry flavoured rice crispies! None of which would be particularly suited to cooking on a campsite.

One week however I was rewarded with a tin of out-of-date raspberries and I made one of my favourite fire recipes for them & made them guess the mystery ingredient! It was a raspberry & thyme cake.

This particular one was baked in my oven at home, but it works well on the fire. I invented the recipe myself, so I can share it with you here:

Raspberry & Thyme Cake

Mix together:

2 1/2 cups self-raising flour

1/3 cup dried milk powder

pinch of salt

Stir in:

Juice from a 300g tin of raspberries

1 egg

1/2 teaspoonful dried thyme

Gentle stir the raspberries through the batter.

Put into a lined, greased 1 lb loaf tin.

sprinkle the top with 1-2 tablespoonfuls of chopped mixed nuts.

Cook for about 40 mins or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. (If using a domestic oven, go for something like 170C. If you are using a dutch oven, use a trivet to raise the tin off the bottom of the oven, have fire just licking the bottom and have as much fire as you can on top of the oven.)

If you try it out, let me know how you get on!

And if you donate to your local foodbank, please make sure your donation is well in date, so it can help a hungry person!!

L

Goats have strong stomachs!

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I’ve started volunteering at my local Trussell Trust foodbank. A lot of the food they give out is tinned and the foodbank is always grateful for donations of cans of food. Although tinned food lasts a very long time, it does eventually go out of date. Sometimes people clear out the food item lurking at the back of their cupboards and give it to the foodbank even though it is out of date by the time it reaches us. The foodbank’s policy is not to distribute out of date food – but the volunteers are encouraged to make use of it, so as not to waste it.

Goats have strong stomachs, so I’ve been making good use of this!

On our last trip we used up out of date tinned tomatoes, pineapple, evaporated milk and stock cubes. But the piece de resistance was trying a new recipe for pudding out of Jack’s tin can recipe book. It worked super well as a recipe to cook over the fire with only 5 ingredients – out-of-date condensed milk, out-of-date tinned prunes, eggs, flour, baking powder. Jack bills it as a sticky toffee pudding…. it comes out quite different to a normal sticky toffee pudding, but it is delicious and easy to make.

Pudding cooking – spot the condensed milk tin at the front of the fire & the recipe book on the chair!

I’ll be making this recipe again – I assume it will come out just as well with in-date ingredients!

L

PS I can’t find this particular recipe on Jack’s blog – but she has lots of other bargain recipes available if you want to try them out.

The most important meal of the day #3

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Sometimes we think it would be nice to have something lighter for breakfast … but it’s generally only a thought. We pretty much always end up having a cooked breakfast when we are camping – usually a fry up.

Sometimes we pack breakfast cereal. This is a good option if some of your camping party are the type who wake up hungry and can’t wait for the fire to get going and food to cook! The downside is that you need to store the milk for it. Long life milk could be an option, but we’ve a super cool box (which is just as well as one of the goats is a bit of a milk snob and likes fresh milk!!). Even so, milk is bulky.

Porridge is a good option, especially on chilly mornings. Even better it can be made very successfully with powdered milk, which is a versatile camping staple. I use a cup of rolled oats, 2 tablespoonfuls dried milk powder, 2 cups of water and a pinch of salt, boiled up on the stove to serve 2.

And of course porridge can be jazzed up in numerous ways – adding raisins is one of our favourites, or a sprinkling brown sugar on the top. Alpen museli also makes a good sprinkle topping. Or how about a swirl of cinnamon? Or stir through berries or chocolate chips? I like that ginger you get in syrup finely chopped and stirred through, but the other goat would not approve of that!

An alternative take on porridge is to make baked oats over the fire. This is oats (2 cups), sugar (3 tbsp), milk powder (3 tbp), baking powder (1 tsp) and a pinch of salt mixed up with an egg and some water (1 1/2 cups) and baked like a cake. Add some raisins and this also works well as a tasty snack for elevensies.

Being as you’re on holiday – how about treating yourself to pancakes?

Banana pancakes work well for breakfast: mash 2 bananas then stir in 4 heaped dessertspoonfuls of self-raising flour. Next stir in an egg, 2 dessertspoonfuls of sugar and 2 of milk powder. Thin the batter using 200 ml water and then cook spoonfuls in an oiled pan, turning to brown both sides. The end result looks like little scotch pancakes and taste delicious on their own as breakfast or with a little drizzle of maple syrup to make a dessert.

And who says you need to be camping to enjoy these breakfasts – I had banana pancakes this morning!

L

The most important meal of the day! #2

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I hope the post about fried breakfasts whetted your appetite?

A fry up isn’t the only way to do a cooked breakfast when you’re camping – here are a few more cooked breakfast options…

1) Shakshuka

This is a good vegetarian option – eggs poached in a tomato sauce with spinach or kale.

2) Omlette

This one is a mushroom omlette with tomatoes and spinach as a side. Mushroom is my favourite omlette and mushrooms also transport well for camping. I think the trick for making a good omlette is to cook it in butter. I cook whatever’s going in the omlette first and then add more butter to the pan. When the butter’s all melted I add the eggs which I’ve already beaten with a splash of water & salt and pepper.

3) Breakfast stew

We’ve been refining this over our last few camping trips. Basically it’s a fry up in a pot!! This is our best attempt so far – chipolatas, chorizo & mushrooms fried, then add baked beans, barbecue sauce and tinned cherry tomatoes, get it boiling and poach some eggs in the sauce.

Sorry if you’re now feeling hungry!

L

A family day out!

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My family of Dutch ovens emerged from their hybernation in the shed yesterday! Daddy pot, Mummy pot and Baby pot all got a sterilising bath of boiling water.

But it was more of a family day out than that!! COVID rules where I live allow us to have garden visitors, so my cousin came for lunch under the gazebo!

We had a simple lunch of sweet potato soup warmed over the fire and with the help of Paul Hollywood, we had freshly baked rolls to accompany it! Such a simple idea, not sure why I’ve never thought of finishing par-cooked rolls in the dutch oven before.

And of course food always tastes better outside!

L

Our knight in shining armour?

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Ok well sadly not.  We would be very happy if a knight in shining armour did turn up to help out with the washing up, but for now we’ll just have to make do with a piece of his chainmail!

Yes, that’s right, the latest addition to our campsite washing up system is a scourer made of chainmail.

chainmail scourer

Chainmail scourers are ideal for cleaning dirty dutch ovens.  They scrape, but don’t scratch and the food residue is easily cleaned out of the chain mail cloth.

They are easily available online ( for example here ).

We are very pleased with ours.  It has been well used over the last month or so we’ve had it.  The dutch ovens are now all washed and seasoned and tucked away in the shed… although we’re hopeful there might be more fire food yet, even if camping might be over for the season.

L & R

Fuel for the fire

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A good fire is very important.  Especially if cooking your dinner relies on a getting a good blaze going.  Dinner is also VERY important!

Usually when we go to a campsite we buy whatever wood they sell us.  Indeed some campsites insist that you burn their wood.  But as you’ll have seen on our campsite reviews not all the sites sell good wood.  Sometimes it smoulders and smokes rather than burning nicely, I guess because it hasn’t been seasoned long enough and isn’t properly dry.

We’ve tried various different other types of fire fuel – including ones made out of coffee grounds and made out of newspapers.  However, our favourites are these:

20200620_180138

According to the packet they are made from recycled sawdust and shavings, which are dried and then tightly packed together after being compressed at high temperatures.  No additives or chemicals – just compressed wood.

You buy them in B&Q.  Well, when they are in stock, which seemed to be pretty much never last year!! This year I saw them sitting there before lockdown and although I  had no plans for camping or fires I bought a couple of packs, just because I could!

They always burn nicely and are a good to suppliment any substandard wood you’re made to buy!  Not only are they very dry, meaning they light easily and aren’t too smokey, but they are designed with a hole through the middle, which lets the air through, getting a good blaze going.

Cooking on the fire in the garden

They are also a good size for putting on top of the dutch ovens for when I’m using them for baking.  Previously I used charcoal briquettes for this, as in the picture below, but that didn’t last long as I was forever losing the little lumps in the fire!

IMG_20150905_192609

Now I just stick burning wood on the top.  It can be a bit precarious and I need to swap them around as the logs on the top tend to go out. These regular sized, little logs with their holes to help them burn, work well for balancing on top.

L