Dutch Oven / Campfire Cooking

[heavyhitterokra]

I'll confess I have at least 6 cast iron skillets of varying sizes, from 6" inch to 12" inch, and duplicates of both 8" inch and 10" inch. I also have two 10' inch Dutch Ovens, one with a domed lid, for frying chicken, one with a flat lid, for baking with coals on top.

Bon,

Is there a 2nd hand thrift store near you?

There is a Re-store in Tahlequah. I often find stainless steel teapots there, I also see stainless steel cookware there. I've picked up several plates, saucers, bowls, cake pans, etc. there over the years. I even found a really nice oversize butter dish there. What a difference that thing makes! My old one got knocked off the cabinet by the door to the microwave and it broke. The old one was so close to the size of a stick of butter that people would 'shave' the butter nearly every time they put the lid back on. I was constantly washing that thing, trying to keep the butter off of the bottom of the lid.

The new (old) one is wider, to prevent that from happening so often. I love that thing!

[hmoosek]

The first one arrived yesterday. It’s a 750ml and I’m more than happy with it. Weighs next to nothing and has both handles and a bail to hang over the fire. For 10.80, it’s a no brainer. The 1100ml should be here today. The 900ml had a 20% off coupon, so for 11 bucks and change, it’s hard to beat that price. I now have a set of three. Mind you, at REI and Amazon both, one 750ml Toaks Titanium pot is 35 bucks! I have held and looked over both and I just don’t see the justification for paying that high of a price. The Toaks doesn’t even come with a bail to hang over a fire. Or let me put it this way, the one I looked at didn’t. 

Let me clarify, Titanium isn’t the best cook pot. It’s light weight and strong. They are made for hikers wanting to carry less weight. If I’m wanting a great cook pot for camp, I’ll choose cast Iron just about every time. Unless it’s for something like Ron mentioned being acidic.


Here’s the 750ml

[chrysanthemum]

We don’t use cast iron at our house (except if it has been enameled). We used to until we discovered that at least one of our four children inherited two recessive genes for a condition called hereditary hemochromatosis, which is an iron overload disorder. He is really too young to have experienced an overload, and we are very thankful that in the Lord’s kind providence we found out about his tendency to store iron before he could. Now his doctors can test his iron periodically to make sure he doesn’t ever experience a problem. (Getting rid of iron is as simple as taking blood, but when people don’t know they have an overloading problem, serious, irreversible organ damage can occur. We are thankful to know about it to make sure that doesn’t happen.). Even though it is able to be managed, we still try to avoid eating iron fortified foods or cooking in cast iron (as sad as that is).

My mom cooked just about everything for us growing up in cast iron. I have very fond memories of cooking tortillas on a cast iron griddle on the wood stove in our living room. I think that piece did crack at one point, but she still uses her two skillets to this day.

I had never even heard of titanium cookware till this thread.

[Deleted]

Praise God for revealing that!

First time I heard of titanium at all was when they put it in my neck. I praise God for that too.

[heavyhitterokra]

Jan 16, 2022 1:42:11 GMT -6 @bon said:

Praise God for revealing that!

First time I heard of titanium at all was when they put it in my neck. I praise God for that too.

Bon,

I haven't thought of that in a long time.  I guess we have that in common, as I have three titanium plates in my head from the surgery I had back in '98.  Talk about forecasting the weather!  Those screws kill me every time the weather changes.

Chrysanthemum,

I remember Mom making us kids take Geritol liquid as as an iron supplement.  I hated that stuff.  Until today, I had never heard of Hereditary hemochromatosis.  Things like that make a person stop to count their blessings.  Glad to hear you guys caught it early, so as to avoid aggravating the condition.

[hmoosek]

Chrysanthemum,

I’m sure glad you found that out as it could have been very bad indeed.

Titanium cookware is primarily for back packing/Hiking due to its low weight. It will burn your food if not watched constantly. Hikers generally don’t cook like you would camping out. There main priority is boil water and pour in one of those tasteless bags of dehydrated food. So why did I want one? Shucks I dunno, I’ve been eyeballing them to put in my cook kit for woods walking. Make a cup of cocoa, tea, etc. plus, I don’t think my food will burn the way I cook. I don’t use a high heat type of stove. I tend to cook with esbit, alcohol, wood coals that have burned down. I also don’t walk away from the food pot. Shucks, I mean anyone has enough sense to know when there food is burning. Hahahaaaa!

[chrysanthemum]

heavyhitterokra, my mom made us take something like S.S.S. or S.S. Tonic for iron. It was awful! Yes, it was a great blessing to have found my son’s condition early.

hmoosek, I haven’t done much campfire cooking at all. We’ve recently enjoyed a couple of hikes as a family, one at Lost Maples in Vanderpool and one at Enchanted Rock. We went after Christmas to Lost Maples, and it was about 80 degrees. We had a picnic lunch but didn’t really bring enough water with us, so we had to ration it out. It was much cooler when we went to Enchanted Rock, and I’m thankful for that because it would have been brutal on top of that dome had it been sunny. We brought more water that day, but it was cool enough that my kids questioned why I had put ice in it.

It’s a shame for me that cedar pollen is so bad just at the time of year when the weather can be so nice for hiking. I was absolutely miserable for a couple of days after the Lost Maples hike because of so much exposure, so for the Enchanted Rock hike I wore a thin balaclava and motorcycle goggles to help reduce my exposure to cedar. I’m sure my kids were very glad that they saw no one that they knew.

[heavyhitterokra]

Chrysanthemum,

I feel for you.  Your balaclava and motorcycle goggles sound like me when I mow our lawn.  Allergies can be deadly serious.  It might be 95 degrees outside, but I'll still be wearing goggles and a double filtered painter's respirator because of whatever it is in freshly mown grass that I'm allergic to.

I take a shower and throw my clothes into the washing machine the moment I come back inside. If I forego the goggles, my eyes will almost swell shut for the rest of the day.  Even with all that protection, I still suffer for at least another day, just because of the lingering freshly mown grass that is in the air after mowing. That lasts for about two days.

I used to enjoy mowing lawns. I used to work on the NSU Grounds Crew and had my own 5 acres to push mow around the President's House and the Administration Building.  Mowing never bothered me until about 2013. Who knows what happened that brought it on, but allergies have put me in the ER on more than one occasion. They eventually led to acute asthma and a permanent loss of smell and taste.  I now take breathing treatments every 6 hours, 24 hours per day.  For that reason, I never get 8 hours of sleep in one shot.  The Albuterol gets my heart going so fast that I can't go back to sleep after taking it at midnight and again at 6:00 am. Because of that, my days are not very productive, due to lack of sleep.  I end up napping too much during the days to make up for lost sleep at night.

So in the long run, it's much better to be made fun of by the family for looking like Darth Vader on a mower than to actually be Darth Vader on a breathing machine.

(Keep up the balaclava and motorcycle goggles).  You'll thank yourself in the years to come.

[hmoosek]

I have allergies bad too. The older I get it seems to be getting worse.

[chrysanthemum]

One of my children is quite allergic to grass, and moving to this part of Texas seems to have helped him has less exposure to allergens. We mow grass a few times a year here as opposed to a few times a month from Spring through Fall back in Virginia. We’d have to mow more if we irrigated a lawn, I’m sure, but that is not something we do. I’ll use my precious water resources on my garden. You get so much rain up there in Green Country, heavyhitterokra, it must be very hard on you with frequent mowing.  

My worst outdoor allergy is definitely cedar.  Thankfully so far no one else in my family seems to feel the cedar as badly as I do. I was evidently presensitized to Mountain Cedar by Virginia Red Cedar (both of which are really junipers and are cousins of a sort). before I moved to Texas because my allergies showed up the first season I was here. I have been using my balaclava and goggles during my onion planting and watering. Thankfully it’s only in winter that my allergies are really bad. Summer tends to be the best.

[heavyhitterokra]

Of late, I'm allergic to a whole gamut of new things, cedar being one of them, fortunately, there are not many cedars around here. I don't know if I'd be able to make it down there in Texas?

I also have an allergy to oak.

While reading the results of my allergy test, my doctor said, "Well, since cedar isn't much of a problem where you live, looks like you'll be okay if you just stay away from the oak trees."

Oak trees probably comprise 99% of all the timber in our area. There are several hundred of them just on this one 5-acre plot. So, I asked my doctor, "How am I supposed to stay away from oak? I'm pretty sure that's why they call this place, "Oak-lahoma".

She told me just to cut back on exposure to it as much as I could.  So, I stopped burning wood to heat our house and started burning propane instead.  It was getting to where the smoke from burning oak had begun to cause me to break out in hives.  It took me quite a while to figure out what was making me itch so badly.  I had been told it was just dry skin.  But a friend of mine had the same problem in years past and said it went away when he stopped burning wood.  (I couldn't really fathom that, and took it with a grain of salt, but by experimentation, I found out that the hives went away shortly after I stopped heating with wood.  They would return whenever I started back up again.

It didn't use to be that way. I grew up with nothing but wood heat. I even worked in a sawmill from time to time and really enjoyed milling oak, but somewhere around 1991, I began having temporal lobe seizures. In an attempt to get the seizures under control, the doctors prescribed a plethora of different seizure medications, some of which were pretty powerful drugs. The seizure meds affected my liver to the point that brain surgery became the only option for controlling the seizures. So, I had a craniectomy in April of 1998, where they removed a large portion of my right temporal and right frontal lobes. The opening in my skull was 3" inches in diameter and took 3 plates, 6 screws, and 27 staples to repair. I hemorrhaged during the surgery, which caused me to suffer a stroke.

Somehow, between the seizures, the surgery, the stroke, and all the medication, my immune system began over responding to stimulation and attacking things that did not bother me much at all before all those things came together. Now, it seems I'm allergic to several things that didn't use to cause much commotion.  (Getting old sucks).

Personally, I think allergies are caused by a whole spectrum of different things that work together to overcome your immune system ... things that otherwise would only be minor irritants, but en masse, they pose what your body perceives as a threat.  In response to the 'perceived' threat, your body over-reacts, causing all sorts of bad things to happen.  I've ended up in the ER before with my oxygen saturation in the high 60% range.  By then, I couldn't feel my arms or my legs and was seeing dark spots.  I think that all stems back to the medicines they tried on me to control the seizures when they overloaded my filtration system.  That's my best guess anyway?

[hmoosek]

heavyhitterokra
Like you, I really didn’t put 2 and 2 together for quite awhile. I’ve always been allergic to rye grass as long as I can remember, but wasn’t sure what all I was allergic to. Y’all know I like to whittle and one day I was walking around the place here and saw a hackberry limb on the ground. We have hackberry, mesquite, locust, willow and cedar all over this area. Anyways, I took the small limb to the front porch, took out my pocket knife and started a little spoon. My my hands and eyes started itching, I began to sneeze. I figured the wind had blew in some pollen or something. I finished up the little ol’ spoon, put it on the shelf and pretty much forgot about it. A year later when I saw my doctor she did some testing and lo and behold, I’m allergic to just about every tree we have around here including hackberry which showed I was highly allergic.

[chrysanthemum]

heavyhitterokra, our land is covered with cedar and a few kinds of oak (mostly Escarpment Live Oak). My family has more problem with the oak than I do, but the allergies are manageable. I’ve heard of people being allergic to wood, but for us it seems to be pollen. We cut down cedar a lot outside of pollen season, and we mulch the garden with the chippings, and I’m fine with all that. Once the pollen starts showing on the trees, though, sneezing, runny nose, and horribly itchy eyes. It’s the eye symptoms that bother me the most, I think. Hence the motorcycle goggles. hmoosek, we’ve got a big hackberry in our backyard, too. It has produced volunteers all along our fence line that we cut out only to have them sprout again. I’ve never considered hackberry allergies.

[heavyhitterokra]

The following video has the coolest outdoor cooking idea that I've seen in a long, long, time. It shows how to make hiking stick, wood cookstove, from a gallon can and a closet rod. Though I'd be inclined to use EMT instead, because I'm an Electrician and have that kind of stuff laying around. EMT or closet rod could probably be purchased cheaply, from a second hand housing store like the one we have locally, called "The Restore"




Happy trails ...

[heavyhitterokra]

I had never heard of making and using fire rolls until today, so I thought I'd share them here. I watched a few more videos about friction fires later on and saw people rolling their cotton between two short pieces of 1x4 blocks to make a little safer way to do this than this guy rolling them under the handle of his knife.