Learning to cook over fire
To know one’s surprise, I have never been camping before. In any fashion. But John loves camping and has missed doing it during trips, so for his birthday, we came up to the Catskills and stayed in a decked out Airstream via Autocamp Catskills. Relationships are about meeting each other where you are, right?
While our accommodations were beyond comfortable and convenient with a full size bathroom and actual bed, there’s no stovetop or oven. The only way you can cook is over the fire with the cast iron skillet they provide (unless you bring your own supplies).
Of course I took this as a challenge I needed to face. We started brainstorming what meals made the most sense being cooked over fire and in a skillet — we netted out with a simple steak dinner to start: Brussels sprouts, smashed potatoes, butter basted skirt steak with garlic and thyme.
Vinnie’s Farm Market and Smoke House of the Catskills had everything we needed and it was a true treat shopping at local spots instead of a regular store.
Build your fire, get comfortable with losing control
Thankfully, I didn’t have to build the fire because John took that on. But even so, cooking over fire is not easy. You can’t control the temperature like you can on a stove, which is obvious, but hard to manage live.
What we learned
The intense heat sucks out any fat in the pan pretty immediately, so you end up needing a lot more than you normally would — or you can try to manage the heat.
One trick that helped as we got comfortable was removing the pan and setting it on the gravel to manage the heat a bit. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped.
Also, it’s a lot tougher to make multiple items as part of one meal that aren’t cooked together. Fire-cooking would be great for one-pan meals.
On the second night, we cooked bratwursts over the open flame in lieu of using a skillet and that was SO easy and tasty. If you’re in less of a mood to cook, I’d suggest something like this.
