Dutch Oven / Campfire Cooking

[hmoosek]

Bacon, Onion & Beanee Weenie

[hmoosek]

This homemade stove burns hot. You have to let it burn for a bit before you try to cook over it. Of course if you’re sensible and only put a few twigs in, it’s no problem.

[hmoosek]

Another homemade twig burner. This is a stainless utensil holder from Walmart. It cost 3 dollars and change.

Best as I can remember, here I was just burning a home made match made from fatwood, jute string, a birthday candle and some gorilla tape.





Here’s my homemade fire starter thingy.

[hmoosek]

Bon,
I saw something called a super match on the internet, so I just took the materials I had and made one. I think you’re supposed to dip in wax, but it burned pretty good as it was.

[heavyhitterokra]

I love reading through the posts on this thread!

Thanks, Bon, George, and Moose, for posting all the photos and videos!

My wife makes fire starters for camping and hiking by stuffing dryer lint into paper egg cartons and drizzling paraffin wax over them. You can rip one of those egg carton sections off, stuff it in your coat pocket and use it to start a fire, even when the wood is wet with snow. They burn a hot, and tall, flame for about a minute. The hot flame will dry the wood out and light it despite poor conditions. They make great woodstove lighters too. Just place a section of that egg carton under your kindling, close the stove door, and wait to hear the flames roaring.  She goes to second hand stores and buys all the used candles and old tea candles she can find and melts them down to make her dryer lint fire starters, so we have to be careful not to use one of the scented ones to light our smoker for our Thankgiving turkey.

Speaking of roaring flames and jet stoves. When I was a kid on the farm, we used to build forts out of rocks and had a section of discarded stove pipe leaned up in one corner. It was only about 3' feet tall with a 90-degree elbow attached at the bottom. We would build a small fire right at the opening of the elbow, using dead, wild rose bushes as kindling.  After the fire got going, we'd stuff the opening with dead persimmon sticks.  The draw from that 3' foot section of stove pipe would make it roar to life, pulling the smoke off the fire and getting it above our heads. We later added another section of stove pipe to it, making it about 6' feet tall. At that height, it would cause an audible roar.  It was a wood-eating devil, but it warmed our fort really well. We didn't know it was a rocket stove. We never attempted to cook on the top of it, but after looking into rocket stove designs as an adult we saw that it was basically a rocket stove. We just used Grandpa's old discarded stovepipe rather than concrete blocks.

[hmoosek]

Townsends has several videos for building an oven. Here’s a couple of them.

[hmoosek]

This fellow has a pretty good twig/rocket stove.

[heavyhitterokra]

When 39 degrees feels like a warm day, you know it must have gotten cold last night! My son called me at about 9:00 pm last night. He had taken Friday off of work and was camping out in the woods on his 4 wheeler in the Fort Gibson area. He was commenting on how nice it was out there so many miles from anywhere. He lives 3 miles down at the end of a long dirt road, in the middle of nowhere, and had driven another mile and a half out into the woods from there to spend the night. It was 19 degrees on a cold, clear night when he called me.

I remember those days when I was much younger and often enjoyed doing the same things, but I sure was glad to be sitting in a warm house beside the heater last night, rather than sitting out in the cold beside a crackling campfire. When I was his age, a buddy of mine and I rode horseback for about 10 miles, to a remote site on some Corps of Engineers' land across the other side of Fort Gibson Lake. It was snowing that night and got down to 19 degrees. We had packed everything under the sun into our saddlebags. We had a can opener, a pair of Channel-lock pliers to lift hot chili cans out of the fire, pot holders, hot dogs, Tang breakfast drink, hot cocoa, coffee, a coffee pot, potatoes, carrots, onions, fresh meat, a cooking pot, various seasonings, a sharp knife, utensils of every kind, a newspaper to start a fire, candle wax to burn the kindling hotter in case of wind, a tent, sleeping bags, extra water, rope to stake out the horses, a tarp to cover the saddles at night, you name it.

Upon arriving at our campsite very near to dark, after a several hours long trek into the woods, we discovered that we had forgotten to pack any matches. Neither of us smoked, so we had no lighter either. We had nothing to start a fire with, save for two loose .22 shells that one of us had in our coat pocket.

Since it had been snowing, everything in the woods was soaking wet, but we managed to find some dry kindling under an old cedar tree and scrounged some dry twigs from under a blackjack oak. We arranged our starting papers and our kindling into a fire starting nest. We pulled the lead from the two .22 shells and poured the gunpowder into the nest. We firmly held the brass casing of the first .22 shell with the Channel-Lock pliers as near to the power as we could, then struck the primer with the handle of a pocket knife. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing so hard by then that it blew the spark away and nothing happened. So we set it back up with the second and last .22 shell, struck the primer with the knife handle, and the same thing happened. The wind took our spark!

We had no flint. We were in Limestone country and could not find a thing in the wet woods that we could strike a spark with. We ended up spending the 19-degree night in the snow with no fire. We had nothing to cook our meat, so we ate cold, nearly frozen hotdogs that night for our supper. We had a can of cold chili to go with it. We tried making a cup of Tang in our steel coffee cups, but the water froze into an orange slushy when we stirred it in. It was a miserable, cold night.

We pitched our tent, rolled out our sleeping bags, and laid there sleeplessly, just waiting for the sun to come back up so we could see to pack our things and ride back home.

About 3 hours after we packed up, we arrived back home, chilled to the bone and better off for the experience.

The first thing we did when we got back to the house ... before we even unsaddled the horses, was to lay up a kindling pile with some newspaper on the cold hearth and try to light it with a .22 shell. It took off in a blaze like no other on the first try!

Then, we took off back outside to unsaddle the horses, scooped them out an extra portion of sweet feed, curried them down, chopped the ice on the pond so they could drink, and turned them loose to pasture and fresh hay. After that, we went back to the house to huddle around the fire we had kindled in the fireplace and wrapped ourselves in heavy wool blankets; waiting for the house to warm back up. Soon, we were enjoying a really long, really good nap. It was nearly 4:00 pm before we woke back up to go feed the cows.

That wasn't my last camping trip in the snow on a cold Winter's night, but it was the last time I ever forgot to pack any matches.

[hmoosek]

Oh I love that story! We never forgot our matches, but did run off and leave our food box once. Luckily, we had a bag of Doritos in the cab of the truck. I didn’t hardly ever go more than a day without eating Doritos and Snicker bars. That is when I was a teen. I don’t eat them much anymore.

We camped out January 3, 4th, and 5th of 1986. That’s the coldest weekend I ever spent. The wind blew relentlessly and we were in the middle of a cow pasture with no trees! Kept our fire blazing. Turned the pickup along side the wind with a sheet of plywood to hunker behind. Made a big pot of chili and ate it with flour tortillas. We usually used our hammocks for camping, but with no trees, we just threw our sleeping bags down by the fire. It was so cold the cows came up to the fire to beller at us. They wanted something to eat no doubt or maybe they were just curious and what the two idiots were doing. Any sane individual would have went home. Not us though.

I’ve had some good times outside during inclement weather in my youth. These days I gripe when my pups beg to go outside. It was 19 this morning when my baby girl wanted to go outside. I was like “hurry up sweetie, I’m freezing!”

[heavyhitterokra]

I had a similar experience with the cows while camping in a tent once. It was the Winter of 1987.  It had snowed about a foot of powder and was dead quiet that night.  I didn't even have a sleeping bag at the time, but I had been working outside in Duluth, Minnesota the previous 4 months, so even though it was only 9 degrees in January, it didn't seem too awfully bad.

I did have a really good dome tent though, and two very heavy wool blankets from Wisconsin, and a heavy canvas welding blind. So, I took the tent, the two blankets, and the canvas blind out in the middle of the pasture to set up camp. It was already dark out, but there was plenty of light with the fresh snow, so I pitched my tent and crawled inside. I had already eaten supper before I left the house, so I didn't need to cook anything.

I spread out the canvas tarp on the floor of the tent and laid and the two wool blankets over it, then I rolled myself up like a burrito and went to sleep. At daybreak, I guess the cows probably thought my little dome tent was a round bale of hay. I woke up to see the top of my tent being nosed in by a herd of hungry cattle. I'm probably lucky I didn't get stepped on.

As I was running the cows off of my tent, three guys I had worked with in Texas came driving up and hollered out the truck window, "What are you doing!?"

Two of the guys lived around close, one of them was my Brother-in-Law, Chris, but the third guy was from Texas and had never seen snow before. His name was Tom. Tom was a wiry little guy who had a bad case of short man syndrome and was always acting tougher than he really was. To the point that it really was getting pretty annoying.

Those were the days when the Tulsa Toughman contest was in its heyday, so everyone had been hearing about it on the radio. That's the first thing that popped into my head, so I said in reply to their question, "I'm laying out the groundwork for the Annual Hulbert Toughman Contest. Lyndell Powell was just getting out of the truck, with Tom right on his heels when I said it, so I looked at Lyndell with a wink and said, "Lyndell! You remember last year, when you won it?"

Lyndell kind of looked blank for a second, so I kept going, directing the conversation back toward Tom. "Lyndell here won it last year."

Lyndell picked right up on it when I said that.  I could see by then, that Tom was hooked. "Every winter when it snows like this, we all get together and hold a Toughman Contest.  We do one crazy thing after another until someone does something so crazy that no one else will try it. Then, that man wins the contest for a whole year. Last year, Lyndell here chopped two holes in the ice in that pond down there, stripped off naked, and swam under the ice from one hole to the other."

Tom cut me off short, "HELL, I CAN DO THAT!"

Then I said, "Not so fast Tom! First, you gotta qualify! You can't just jump right in the pond and take off like that!"

Tom was baited and raring to go now. So I said, "Every year, we drive the tractor up and down this hill and we pack the snow until it turns into ice." (Tom didn't know it only snowed that much about once every 10 years) so we had him at a disadvantage.

I continued, as I looked Tom right in the eye, pointing off down the big hill below the house. "After it gets dark at night, we all take turns sledding down that big hill butt-naked. That's what everyone has to do every year, just to qualify.  After that, it's just a free for all; whoever does the craziest thing after that is the winner for a full year."

"Anyone can do that!" Tom snapped back. "Well," I replied, "If you think you're man enough to give it a try, stick around here and help me feed the cows and we'll pack us some snow!"

I motioned to them all, "Come on fellas!"

Tom said, "I'm in!" Chris and Lyndell both said, "ME TOO!"

So since we had nothing better to do all day, I started the tractor and hooked a round bale of hay to go feed the cattle. My house was at the top of a hill that sloped downgrade for a little over 700 feet before it began to level out. It was a pretty steep hill. The only true part of my whole story was that when it actually did snow once every 10 years, we used that hill to roll hay out on because it was close to the barn.

After I hooked a bale of hay with the tractor and rolled it off down the hill, I took Tom with me for a ride on the back of the tractor and we made several passes alongside the cattle, packing the snow more and more tightly with each pass. By about 10:00 am, the sun came out and the powder snow began to form an icy crust on top. By about 10:30 am, it began to pack down pretty good. We even built a little ski jump down at the very end where it began to level off. By then, it was getting on toward noon, so we all jumped in Lyndell's Chevy Blazer and drove to town to get some lunch. After lunch, we hauled a little firewood up from the barn and milled around, tweaking the sled trail that we had built that morning. At dusk, we all went inside to have some hot coffee and talked Tom up some more about the contest that night when it got dark enough to get naked.

By 6:30 it was pitch black out, so I strung out two 100' foot extension cords along the hill and plugged in an incandescent stand-light, so we could see the trail better. The cords didn't even reach halfway, but it was just enough light to see where we were aiming to go. We told Tom, "Since this is your first year to join, we'll let you go first. All of us have already done it several years running, so it isn't much fun for us anymore. It's just what we have to do every year to get the contest started."

I don't know ..." said Tom.

"We could see by that remark, that his enthusiasm was beginning to wain, and I would probably have let him off at that point, as I was beginning to feel kind of sorry for him, but out of nowhere, my Brother-in-Law, Chris threw his hat down, started stripping off his coat and threw his gloves on the ground. He said, "I'm next!" He pointed to the sled and said, "If I'm up here freezing my butt off for one more minute, waiting for you to chicken out, then I'm taking your turn, and you're gone!"

Tom took the initiative, and began stripping his clothes off as fast as he could, trying to beat Chris to the punch!

Chris kept stripping off clothes, acting like he was going to take the sled away from Tom before he could even get on it ... Then, for a brief moment, we all kind of felt sympathy for Tom, being how it was only about 8 or 10 degrees outside, and the trail we had made was pocked with frozen cow tracks and jagged chunks of ice.  All we had was an old wooden ice sled with steel runners to ride on. We were thinking how cold that might be on his bare butt and said, "Hey, Tom, maybe you ought to lay your coveralls on top of the sled to ride on ... It's awfully cold!"

Tom quipped back at us. "You boys ain't about to trick me into gettin' my coveralls full of snow! I'm leavin' them right there! Don't nobody touch 'em while I'm gone!"

With that, Tom ran and piled onto the sled! You could hear his bare butt make a faint, screeching sound as his flesh slid across the polished slick wood of the little ice sled. Just as he made contact, Chris and Lyndell gave him a hearty, four-handed shove, right off down the steep slope!!!

"Whoo-hooo!" you could hear him yell, as he skittered out of sight.

Within seconds, Tom was out past the end of the light, then just a tiny dot as he disappeared over the crest of the hill. By then we could no longer see him, nor his sled. All we could do was listen for the cold, thin, steel runners, chitt, chitt, chittering along, just hitting the high spots as he sped lightning fast down the long, long, icy hillside.

We waited for quite a while before the chittering of the ice on cold steel runners stopped making a sound. Then, after what seemed like a good half a minute, we saw the figure of a short, naked man, hunkered low, running back up the hill as fast as his bare feet could carry him! It was then that Chris yelled out to him, "Don't leave the sled down there dummy!"

Tom turned sharply in his tracks and ran all the way back down the hill to retrieve the sled from a snowdrift where he had left it after hitting the ski jump.

When he got back up to us, he swung the sled around sharply at Chris' feet, hollering, "Here!" and pointing off down the steep hillside behind him.

Chris, shaking his head from side to side, gathering up his coat and putting his hat back on, said, "I guess you won buddy! Ain't nobody here stupid enough to get on that thing naked!"

About that time, we saw my Dad come driving up the hill in his Jeep, hollering, "What the heck are you boys doing up here!?"

Chris, Lyndell, and Tom, all three jumped in their Blazer and took off. Tom was the Hulbert Toughman for a whole year.

That was 35 years ago and he still holds the title to this day.
(I'm sure glad I'm not that tough).

[hmoosek]

You had me rolling in laughter! That’s one of the funniest stories I’ve ever heard!

[macmex]

LOL! Ron, I remember that snow. Jerreth and I were not far off when it hit. We just completed our first semester of Spanish language training that December. We drove through here, spending the night near Fayetteville, Arkansas. That snow hit while we were in the area. We were driving a brand new 1988 diesel Suburban and had loaded up about 7 Latin American students from where we had studied (South Texas). On the same campus as the language school was a Spanish speaking Bible Institute and these students wanted to attend the missions conference in Urbana, Illinois. Since we were about to start our ministry in Mexico we were taking the Holiday season to visit Jerreth's parents and a couple supporting churches before heading south of the border.

We were staying with some friends and our Latin American friends were euphoric about the snow. They spent the whole day, practically, sledding on the hill behind our hosts' home. Me, well, I might have taken a few passes on the sled but soon retired to the side of the wood stove! We were amazed with our Latin American friends. They showed a whole lot of cold tolerance, for people who came from so far South. It wasn't until we moved there, that we realized that in their home environments they were usually at high altitude, where it did get cold, and had no such thing as central heat. In Central Mexico, at 7,000' altitude, it often dropped to 28 F in January (briefly) and never got above 45 F for days on end. The houses there were unheated. In fact, the locals thought that heating a house was bad for ones health.

[hmoosek]

I’ve been wanting some titanium pans to try. I know they aren’t superior for cooking and really only have a couple of pluses. One being light weight and one they aren’t supposed to react with food like aluminum does. Well, I finally had an offer I couldn’t refuse. Haha. I was able to get a 750ml and an 1100ml for less than what 1 pan usually sells for. I have no idea what the quality will be, but at the price, I took a gamble so to speak.

[heavyhitterokra]

Moose, let us know how the titanium pans turn out. I made a big pot of goulash today. It was a nice, sunny day outside and I wanted to cook in the backyard on the Dutch Oven, but I can't leave any leftovers in that thing if they are tomato-based, because of the reactiveness of cast iron and acidic foods, so I had to re-pot the surplus to a stainless steel pot to be re-hashed as the days go by.

We tried making sauerkraut and pork in a Dutch Oven on the campfire once ... Wooo-no! We will never try that again! The whole dish tasted like rusty cast iron! We were camping, so we had to eat it anyway, but never again! I love my cast iron, I love cooking outside, but you really have to be careful what you prepare when using certain types of metal.

Well, now I did it ... I flung a craving on myself for another bowl of goulash, right at bedtime.  (Maybe, just a small one). 

Every time I look at that fried sardine post of yours, I wanna give it a try!

[Deleted]

Moose, would love updates on that as you see fit.

I kid you not, this is where I'm at right now. I'm on the lookout for a stainless steel tea pot and a non reactive sauce pan.

We searched yesterday in old fashioned style by burning up fuel in Tulsa where we visited the foody international store, a home furnishing store and also a restaurant supply store. We picked up a little six inch cast iron pot, not sure what it really is but I notice my impulse to collect out of fondness. While standing in the store I wondered if any of you had the proclivity to collect and squirrel away cast iron cookware. Lol

I wish my phone would allow me to post photos.