Cooking with the Experts


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It was a fine spring day in Hal's plush, well landscaped front yard. He was lovingly raking the centerpiece of the landscape, the firepit, when his ears pricked up to the popping sound of a minivan hammering at the potholes in his long and unmaintained driveway. Errrt! The van lurched to a halt in front of him and out poured Girl Scouts! The invasion had begun.


Clockwise: Hannah, Rachel, Amy, Dierdre, Brianna, Lindsey and Melody. Brittany musta been on a fetch.

All morning the scene was repeated as van upon van disgorged their cargo. They came with their dutch ovens, their box ovens, their Campmor Camp Cookers, roll upon roll of aluminum foil, a vast cornucopia of vegetables, dough and foodstuffs. Poor Hal was overwhelmed.


Britany (in back) oversees the tong frenzy
The scouts commandeered the firepit, stacked a pile of kindling, complete with drier lint and candlewax firestarter, and soon had a small, efficient cooking fire going.

Before Hal could protest, the troop had a couple of pizzas ready in the dutch ovens. One of the girls explained that 15 coals under and 15 coals on top yields a nice even 350 degrees for baking. Hal was amazed at the nice pieces of coal coming out of the fire. Uniform little briquette size pieces. That was before he spied the bag of charcoal they had dumped into the flames.

The ears of corn were husked and wrapped in foil, for roasting over the fire. If still in the husks, the ears can be soaked in water for a while, then dropped in the coals.

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Amy checks on the corn.

Now that's pizza!
While the corn and the pizza were cooking, they made grilled cheese sandwiches in the camp cookers, a two-piece long-handled griddle which fits a sandwich nicely and goes in the flames. After, they also made turnovers by placing pie filling between the slices.

The aroma of woodsmoke, corn roasting and pizza baking was almost too much for poor Hal. No campsite had ever been blessed with such a variety of food. He remembered his first attempt at dutch oven baking, aptly, on the Baker River, when he immersed the poor dutch oven in a tremendous blaze. The apple crisp became a charcoal crisp. Years of experimenting had finally resulted in the ability to judge the right amount of heat. If only he had known about the charcoal briquettes....


The Box Oven

Hannah gets the cookies from the box oven

Pizza, grilled cheese, and corn. And all cooked over the campfire. The real reason, of course for the girl scouts to be here, cooking all this food was, besides being hungry, they were after a merit badge. To ge the badge, they had to cook a bunch of different ways. So they baked in the Dutch Oven, the Box Oven, they used the griddles, and roasted corn over the fire. Also, they used the propane stove to boil water for tea for the leaders.

Wait a minute! The box oven! They made a box oven out of well, a box. They made one side so it would hinge open, and wrapped the whole thing in foil. Then, 4 empty soad cans supported a refrigerator shelf. A pan of coals went under the shelf, and a baking sheet full of chocolate chip cookies went on top.


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