By: Blonde Two
Comment March 2021: Campfire cooking is (quite rightly) a popular occupation but it’s important to be aware of the environment before you decide to cook. There are certain areas of the UK (including most National Parks and Forestry Commission land) where we are asked not to have a campfire or cook on a barbecue because it risks long term damage to the surrounding nature. The good news is that there are plenty of official campsites that now encourage campfire cooking.
Camp cooking memories
When I was 11 a friend and I (even then I operated best as a two) went on an independent Guide camp. It probably wasn’t called that but we had to run the whole of our little camp ourselves including pitching the tent, making ‘gadgets’ from wood, collecting wood, starting a fire and keeping ourselves warm. It was a great opportunity and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
There are two things I remember clearly about this Guide camp. The first was that my Granny was one of the people coming round to inspect what we were all up to (I seem to remember she liked my gadget) and the second was that I burnt the sausages.
How to cook campfire sausages
Sausages, as it turns out, are not really the easiest thing to cook over a camp fire. They are far too prone to quick outside and slow inside cooking. Bacon is far friendlier.
Campfire meals
Mr B2 and I had a chance to relive some of my open fire cooking experiences a few weeks ago when we visited the most excellent National Trust Peppercombe Bothy in North Devon. Luckily I had remembered my most excellent Zebra billy can and a scourer to scrub it with afterwards!
We cooked steak and tomatoes (with whisky until we ran out – school girl error!)
We cooked noodles with foraged wild garlic (Bear Grylls would be jealous)
We cooked marshmallows (which takes more skill than you might imagine)
We cooked date and almond bannock bread (thanks to instruction from our son Six-Foot-Blonde aka Hammocker)
Baked potatoes on a campfire
And we cooked these (apparently potatoes don’t need the whole hour and a half in an open fire, even with tin foil!)
While you were going to independent Guide camp (Well, let’s say thirty years earlier, give or take) I was youth-hostelling, sometimes by bike, sometimes by thumb. A motherly woman showed me that laying a plate over a frying pan containing the sausages had a surprising effect: the flavour intensified while the brownness hardly occurred. And here I am in Hereford, the county of wonderful sausages (now cooked by VR and never covered by a plate) and your detail worked its memory magic. I suppose we read others’ stuff looking for mirror reflections of ourselves. Thanks for that.
The Malverns are excluded by cloud as I look northish from my study window.
Hi Robbie
I have never tried that sausage trick but love your memory. Youth hostels are still great places for getting chatting to other people but the cuisine appears to have changed. Last time B1 and I were in one we were cooking noodles and chicken but were shamed by the ‘baked spinach with eggs’ and ‘home made soup with fresh baked bread’ either side of us!
Your whisky cooking reminds me of two very young Wrens on the Isle of Wight for a camping trip; the site water supply was full of white slugs, so we cooked everything in cider for the weekend. We’d borrowed naval camping equipment so were given a task to complete. We had to visit the monastery and find out how to become a monk. We arrived there late afternoon just as the monks were gathering for prayer and the poor guy who answered our knock and had to explain how to become a monk was hopping from one foot to the other with impatience, desperate to get rid of these two scruffy females and get back to his proper duties.
Cooking in cider sounds perfect but I bet the cups of tea tasted a bit odd!