Campfire Cooking, Part II

After sweating our way through a hot, wet week in Brooklyn, Matt and I engineered a quick emergency camping trip. Despite certain packing deficiencies (pillows next time, definitely), our time on the river was exactly what we needed to give us the will to continue with summer. Between watching the river go by, spotting snakes, bats, and oddly fearless deer, and driving along narrow winding roads, we put in plenty of time at the campfire.

Consider this the first of many updates to last summer's campfire cooking treatise. Our little coffeepot had already lost its handle in a stovetop fire, so it was perfectly engineered for campfire use.

Inspired by Nicki & Joe's expertise on the campfire, I was determined to make pancakes on our new griddle (a gift from Matt's friend Manlio after a recent visit--he determined that our house's only lack was enough pancake surface to match activities). 

The griddle performed like a champ, even multi-tasking as a blueberry deep-fryer. All uneven cooking can be chalked up to my impatience and unwillingness to let the fire die down properly. They were delicious.

I used a pancake recipe that has come to be my standard, from a book by Mitchell Davis called Kitchen Sense. For whatever reason, I rarely cook anything else in this book, but the recipes for both pancakes and waffles are stained and wrinkled. Here, slightly adapted, is Davis' recipe for buttermilk pancakes.


Buttermilk Pancakes
adapted from Kitchen Sense, by Mitchell Davis


(note: I usually double or triple this recipe, as it doesn't make that many pancakes)

Ingredients:

• 2 Tblsp unsalted butter
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 2 tsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt
• 1 large egg
• 3/4 cup buttermilk
• 1/4 cup milk (I often use a little more to thin out)

Method:
Melt the butter.

Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. In another bowl, beat together egg, buttermilk, and milk. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry, and stir until smooth. Just before the flour is gone, add the melted butter to the batter. Cook using your standard pancake method. (A note about cooking pancakes--I'm a recent convert to lower heat under the griddle--it almost never needs to be as hot as you think it should. But feel free to do as you please, it was only after years of burnt pancakes that I finally saw the light, and it took a yuppie stove to do it).

I often add a little more milk to the mixture to thin the pancakes out, as I find they don't always cook evenly at Davis' preferred thickness. I also sub in yogurt or sour cream for the buttermilk on a regular basis.

Heavenly Cake Bakers: Chocolate Cupcakes

Briefly, because this post is late. This is the second time I've made Rose's chocolate butter cupcakes (first was for a birthday in April), and I've found them to be moist, dense, and very reliable. I still prefer the Barts Chocolate Cake recipe because it is lighter and more durable (and full of coffee), but Rose's recipe shares convenience points with my favorite recipe by calling for only cocoa, which is in stock far more frequently than actual chocolate. Somehow the latter never lasts.

I did slip a few coffee grounds into this recipe, with no noticeable effects for good or ill. It was far too hot and humid in NYC to attempt a successful buttercream, so I frosted the cupcakes with leftover caramel ganache from my recent unsuccessful encounter with the Baked 'Sweet & Salty' cake. Then I packed the cupcakes up into a little tin, and took them camping, where they were great substitutes for the marshmallows that I'd forgotten to buy.

One recipe note: When Rose calls for cocoa in a batter, she usually instructs that the cocoa be mixed into boiling water, and then the mixture cooled to room temperature. I never feel inclined to do this extra step, and have had no trouble mixing the cocoa into slightly warm water and proceeding with the recipe. Any thoughts from anyone on what the logic here might be? Is it just to ensure that the cocoa is well and truly mixed, or does boiling water actually have some chemical effect on cocoa?

Campfire Cooking

Blueberry barrens, Maine

This summer, we did some wandering. We wandered all through New England and bits of upstate New York. Sometimes we stayed in houses, sometimes we stayed in a tiny tent, sometimes we travelled by car,and sometimes by canoe, but always we made fires, and we experimented with the art of campfire cooking.

Cooking over a campfire is both simpler and more complicated than cooking in a kitchen. There is no running water, temperature regulation, stocked pantry, or fancy appliances. These limitations, possibly frustrating in the long run, are just the incentive for good ideas in the short. I didn't miss the complications I usually love. We just made food.

This trip was one of the first times I've gone beyond just skewering food or boiling water over a campfire. Yes, we certainly had wonderfully skewered vegetables, even the ridiculously decadent bacon-wrapped steak, but we also tried our hand at dutch oven cuisine--more specifically, cornbread. Of course it burned, but it was a small revelation to me, a confirmation of the truth that I could live well with only a wood fire and one or two utensils, could live well and eat well outside for a long time.

I left this post unwritten for a long time, because our final camping trip of the season was this past weekend. In the end, we didn't cook anything particularly noteworthy, but just being out there burning wood reminded me of all the pleasures of cooking outside, the kind of pleasures a grill never quite duplicates--the gritty ash, the sweet burning smells, the communal attention to the pot and the skewer, the hungry dog blissfully licking the grill, and best of all, waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night in the light of the good fire.