camping, a recap

So our first camping trip with the baby was a huge success. He enjoyed it immensely and we had a lot of fun. Here he is, overjoyed with the great outdoors:


We actually came away learning a bunch of cool stuff from this trip. For example, I felt bad about feeding Fenix cold cereal and cold fruit puree for breakfast. Well we had some peaches that we brought for a snack and I thought it would be smart to wrap the peach in foil and throw it in the fire to roast.

After the peach got really hot and mushy we took it out of the fire and scooped out the flesh and what do you have? Warm fruit puree (aka baby food)! You could do it with an apple or a plum or a banana... whatever you've got. So easy, so yummy.

Speaking of fruit in the fire, what got me down the road of roasting the peach was our dessert from the previous night. I had read a recipe for inside out caramel apples as a camp dessert so we whipped some up. You just core an apple and stuff several caramels down in the hole where the core was. Wrap the whole thing in foil and throw it in the fire. Cook until it's mushy and eat it up with a spoon. I can confirm that this was a delicious and easy recipe and it is now a permanent fixture on our camp menu.

A much more important discovery of this trip was this incredible invention called the "rocket". A rocket is a small pouch of biscuit that you roast over the campfire and fill with delicious things. Here's how it works:

First you have the rocket apparatus which is basically one short piece of a very wide dowel with a very long piece of narrow dowel attached to it.

You take a biscuit (from one of those cans of horribly processed premade biscuits) and you mush the uncooked dough evenly over the end of the rocket. After the dough is on their good you roast it over the fire, turning it slowly being sure to cook the part closest to you first and working your way down towards the 'butt' (the end of the rocket).
When the biscuit is cooked it should slide right off of the rocket apparatus leaving a deep pocket that is ready to accept the filling of your choice. In this case it was scrambled eggs with mushrooms and chorizo.

So on our way home from this trip I got to thinking how I could really expand on this and create an entire arsenal of rocket ideas. First of all, that processed biscuit dough is not the greatest but a homemade dough is often too short to work with in this application. I will need to experiment with some recipes to figure out what would work. And better still, what if instead of biscuit dough we used pizza dough and filled the pocket with cheese, tomato sauce and sausage or grilled veggies? You see where I'm going with this?? I am even having thoughts of dessert rockets filled with warm apple compote. The possibilities are endless.

So I bet you want to go camping now don't you?