We spent a really great Memorial Day weekend camping with our friends. We all took turns preparing the meals, between the 5 or so families, each family was responsible for one meal. Ours was Monday breakfast.
Inspiration:
The challenge was to make something everyone would like (including little kids), that would keep in a cooler for a day and a half, and was easy to prepare on a camp stove and over a fire pit. JR had the brilliant idea of preparing ingredients ahead of time and par-cooking some of the items that might take longer to cook. We decided to do a nice hash with scrambled eggs on the side. JR also made some delicious paleo-friendly muffins ahead of time.
Ingredients for 11 adults and 8 small kids:
- 2 large sweet potatoes (I mean mutant sweet potato large)
- 1 large red onion
- 1 bag of parsnips (about 6 good sized parsnips)
- 8 mini sweet peppers
- 1 pound of bacon
- 1 bag of young broccoli
- 16 eggs
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tbsp pepper
- 1-2 tbsp olive oil
Play by Play:
- The day before we went camping, JR:
- Skinned and cubed the sweet potatoes and parsnips then roasted them in the oven until they were starting to get a little soft
- Chopped the large onion into pieces approximately the size of your pinky nail (or one half size of a pinky nail if you have those fancy, long ‘do-me‘ nails)
- Chopped the broccoli into small pieces and roasted them on a pan with a little olive oil, salt and pepper – something we are becoming pretty familiar with
- Packed all the ingredients into separate zip-lock bags
- In hindsight, one more thing we could have done is chop the bacon at home – instead we did this at the campsite, which wasn’t a big deal but I just thought to myself as I was doing it “I wished I had my nice sharp kitchen knife at home” and then I thought “why didn’t I do this at home and pack it into a zip-lock like JR did”…because I’m not JR, that’s why…
- Chop the bacon into half inch pieces while the campfire goes from flames and smoke to nice hot coals
- Using a huge cast-iron grill, I cooked the bacon until it was just barely beginning to crisp up, still pretty chewy looking though
This is about what the bacon looked like just before I started to add the veggies
- Add the onions, you can actually see in the photo above, that I just added the onions – I let this go until the onions started to turn translucent
- Throw in the par-cooked sweet potatoes and parsnips – I want those to cook longer than the sweet peppers and the broccoli – I love it when the root veggies in a hash gets its crisp on!
- At the same time, JR is slow cooking the eggs on the more controllable heat of the camp stove
JR slow cooks the scrambled eggs over the camp stove and makes it look easy
- Now we add the peppers and broccoli, it’s probably OK to leave it on for a while or take it off at this point – since people were ready to eat, we called it good and served it up
Hash-tastic!
- JR finished the eggs right on cue
Eggs – light and fluffy as our air mattress
- And to top it all off, JR produced delicious paleo-friendly muffins from where they’d been stowed for the last day or so, to everyone’s delight
Paleo-friendly blueberry, pumpkin and fruit nutty goodness
Reflections:
Either everyone was just plain starved and would eat bark off a tree, or it was actually pretty tasty. I believe the latter because we have the great fortune of camping with a group of wonderful cooks and I don’t think anyone went hungry. It’s actually a little nerve wracking with all these awesome cooks around. We did make an extra little batch of the hash without the broccoli because of a special request for one of the little campers (our only mistake there was not setting aside enough – after two servings the little guy wanted more…a very good sign).
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