Menu Ideas

One Lone Clone · Post by **One Lone Clone** » Mon Dec 08, 2008 11:29 am

Here is my 2c

Get a vacuum sealer. vacuum seal your favorite take out (fried rice, spicy basil chicken, pizza, mongolian beef, NO SEAFOOD). Then you can just throw it in the cooler, they wont leak, wont get dusty.
Eat this food for the first couple days, then move on to the dry/dehydrated foods. And bring a lot of jerky and energy bars.
OneLoneClone
aka Ethan

Boijoy · Post by **Boijoy** » Tue Dec 09, 2008 1:29 pm

Those sealers are great! I purchased one JUST for Burning Man. I sealed and froze everything !! Smoked fish, pre-cut & cooked veggies, carne asada for tacos, pre-cooked bacon & chicken, fire roasted peppers & onions, etc. & everything else came from a can or box,, waa la !!

diane o'thirst · Post by **diane o'thirst** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 1:16 am

I've cooked for camps numbering anywhere between 145 and 4. Two years, my art project involved cooking: I made an art oven on a trailer and baked bread, pizza, veggies, cookies, brownies and stickybuns as my interactivity. For some, cooking is Art.

It's basically down to how elaborate you want to get. You can make a life-sized sea horse with a brick oven inside his chest and do a 3-hour pizza party while the sushi camp in the village gets their act together, or you can throw a bunch of cans and jerky in a backpack and subsist on that, as some have suggested. Your campmates' eating habits will have a profound, and I mean PROFOUND effect on what comes out of your camp kitchen.

Be sure to ask your campmates what, if any, dietary restrictions they have. It's probably not unreasonable to expect at least one of them to be diabetic or vegetarian. A lot of people are. We had a clique of vegans in our camp one year who insisted that we identify, label and isolate all utensils, pots, pans and serving vessels that had been "contaminated" with animal products, which was pretty much everything. If you have one or more people like this in your camp, encourage them to bring their own camp kitchen and label them, including wash basins, if they swing that way.

Is anyone in your camp supposed to arrive midweek? Give them a budget of camp kitchen money and have them pick up fresh perishables. Nothing better than fresh peppers, fruit and meat several days in!

Couscous > rice > pasta > potatoes. You want something that will soak up the cooking liquid instead of just boiling in it. Pasta and potatoes create boatloads of starchy grey water that winds up in the evap pond with a rime of dust settled over it. Yuck. Couscous is faster than rice and you can do more with it. Mix in raisins, peanut butter, carrots and peas, top it with some grilled chicken done elsewhere, and there you have it. One-dish dinner.

Some tips:

We would do breakfast and dinner, and lunch was simply boxes of granola bars, crackers, dried fruit and suchlike set out for anyone to snag out of.

Pancakes go very well out there. Especially with the shake-and-pour bottles from Bisquick now. No washing necessary. You can top 'em with fresh fruit. Peaches and strawberries work well out there. In 2001 I brought a whole crate of peaches and we munched on 'em all week. Breakfast, lunch, snacks, dessert. We painted the pits gold and strung them up as necklaces to wear as trophies or gift out.

Other foods that work great: onions, apples, garlic, potatoes (even though they create grey water).

Don't buy tortillas!!!! They always dry out and flake-shatter and create hideous MOOP. Make them fresh daily. They're fast and pretty easy, and if you make them thick enough they can double as plates for meals (it's called a "trencher"), no clean-up. Since they have no yeast, and you can bake them in a frying pan, they can be done in a half-hour from ingredients-grab to digestion.

Oh yes, almost forgot...you don't have to settle for soy milk, Horizon makes organic milk in steri-paks. They are shelf-stable and require no refrigeration. There's also a yoghurt smoothie drink that's packed the same way: I fuckin' lived on those during the '06 Burn. One or two at each meal, a bunch in the Adventuring Pack when I went out at night (including some to gift), nothing better. I think they were called "Yo-to-Go Smoothies" (AntiM, can you verify? I know you and Your Larry had a couple cases of these).

Oh...almost forgot, Pt. II. If you do get a bug up your butt and decide to do bread out there...for some reason dough proofs and rises explosively. My formula would say "let rise for 45 minutes..." and the dough would shoggoth out of the proofing container and blow me a kiss within 15 minutes. Gather a pack and marvel at flour, water, salt and yeast bubbling and humping and puffing away right before your very eyes.

Post by **AntiM** » Fri Jan 09, 2009 7:44 am

I don't recall the name of the tube yogurt, but it is fine playa food while doing walk-abouts. Go-gurt?

We take crackers for carbs. nice think ones in sealed containers or the snack pack variety. A little moopy, but again, handy for walk-about. Heavy chips too, bagel chips, pita chips, pretzel chips, blue corn chips.

CapSmashy · Post by **CapSmashy** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 9:34 am

Don't buy tortillas? I've had excellent results with tortillas the past two years. They lasted 10 of the 12 days we were out there. They were a little crunchy by week's end, but still quite serviceable for breakfast tacos. I kept them double ziplocked and in the cooler though which probably helped.

I have also decided that this year, I'm cooking. I'll still have the stash of canned and instant food for quick meals, but we decided last year that our food selection, although actually diverse in terms of roast beef, chicken, tuna and salmon in various canned and foil packaged arrays mixed with precooked rice containers, instant mashed potatoes or added to real ramen noodle bowls just did not cut it for us and all started tasting the same by weeks end.

So for this year meals will include precooked, frozen entrees to reheat boil in bag style and grilling up chicken, salmon, tuna and steaks (and maybe a few racks of ribs early in the week) with happy yummy sides of veggies, etc.

I've already resigned myself to the fact that its impossible to see everything, so an extra hour a day in camp for cooking seems well worth it.

Sail Man · Post by **Sail Man** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 10:36 am

What Cap, no Spam?

[youtube][/youtube]

theCryptofishist · Post by **theCryptofishist** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 5:31 pm

http://www.flickr.com/photos/65332673@N00/2293899178/
http://asliceofcherrypie.blogspot.com/2 ... ry-up.html

I swear that that sketch is secretly inspired by the Full English Breakfast.

The great British fry up has regional variances across the country; in Ireland you may find white pudding or soda bread, in Scotland haggis or potato scones are often included and in Wales lava bread may feature. But regardless of where you are in the UK, at the heart of this fantastic breakfast you'll pretty much always find bacon, eggs and sausages. Being from England, I've cooked the Full English Breakfast for my entry. After the bacon, eggs and sausages, generally any combination of mushrooms, eggs, tomatoes, hash browns, baked beans, fried bread and black pudding are added, sometimes with toast on the side for the very hungry. Eggs are sometimes scrambled, but more commonly fried and served runny, and you can't beat the delight of that first burst of the egg as you dip in a piece of sausage or toast into that gloriously yellow yolk. In my research for this entry I've found that black pudding is something of a contentious issue. Many people insist that a full English breakfast must include it but quite a few people really dislike it and many don't even get as far as trying it, being repulsed by the idea of a sausage made from blood. I have to say I don't usually include it in my breakfast, but as I continued my research and spoke to various people it soon became very apparent that I would be committing blasphemy of the gravest kind if I didn't include it for this post. So I made an exception and there it is, right next to the bacon, tomatoes and beans!

CapSmashy · Post by **CapSmashy** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 6:28 pm

I wouldn't feed Spam to my neighbor's annoying shit factory dog.

Ugly Dougly · Post by **Ugly Dougly** » Sun Jan 11, 2009 7:24 pm

CapSmashy wrote:I wouldn't feed Spam to my neighbor's annoying shit factory dog.

I know, save it for yourself.

sattelite5812 · Post by **sattelite5812** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:08 pm

I think I'd rather eat "black pudding" than spam

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:34 pm

IIRC Spam is the most widely eaten meat product in the world...........

How could it be bad with such a great skit and song written about it?

other than a lot of salt, what's wrong with it?

Post by **Elderberry** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:35 pm

It's terrible right out of the can, but it's not bad if it's sliced thin and fried till crisp.

JK

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:37 pm

jkisha wrote:It's terrible right out of the can, but it's not bad if it's sliced thin and fried till crisp.

JK

yes, I agree............but then again, the same can be said for bacon, or brains, can it not?

Post by **Elderberry** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:41 pm

ygmir wrote:
jkisha wrote:It's terrible right out of the can, but it's not bad if it's sliced thin and fried till crisp.

JK
yes, I agree............but then again, the same can be said for bacon, or brains, can it not?

LMFAO!! that made me laugh out-loud. I guess I just didn't think of spam in the same way. Like eating tuna or white meat chicken out of a can--it's pre-cooked and tastes good cold right out of the can or mixed with mayo.

So, I guess I just figured some people that didn't like it maybe were thinking of it the same way and might not have thought to cook it.

JK

ygmir · Post by **ygmir** » Mon Jan 12, 2009 8:48 pm

jkisha wrote:
ygmir wrote:
jkisha wrote:It's terrible right out of the can, but it's not bad if it's sliced thin and fried till crisp.

JK
yes, I agree............but then again, the same can be said for bacon, or brains, can it not?
LMFAO!! that made me laugh out-loud. I guess I just didn't think of spam in the same way. Like eating tuna or white meat chicken out of a can--it's pre-cooked and tastes good cold right out of the can or mixed with mayo.

So, I guess I just figured some people that didn't like it maybe were thinking of it the same way and might not have thought to cook it.

JK

one of the great assets of humanity:

so many ways to look at things.........and, the sharing of same..........

Ugly Dougly · Post by **Ugly Dougly** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 10:01 am

ONLY Kosher or Halal meat, cooked up in the same pot.

DragginLady · Post by **DragginLady** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 10:25 am

Last year my nephew included Spam in our provisions, and I ate some. It is good fried up and in a sandwich or with eggs. Granted, Spam is probably pretty hideous, but I don't think it deserves as bad a rap as it gets. Lots of other foods we happily consume are worse. I would not touch a store made spinach or guacamole dip, for instance; and those various flavored chips and cheetos.... chemical city.
not to mention the umpteen varieties of power-balance-granola-cereal bars. How much better than a Snickers are they?
I can sense I have opened a flood-gate of opinion here...
Bring it on!!!!!!!

Sail Man · Post by **Sail Man** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 11:18 am

Mmmm Spam. Can thousands of Boy Scouts be wrong?

It was "our" bacon. I just think it best not to know what its made of. Reminds me of Soylent Green

Boijoy · Post by **Boijoy** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 12:15 pm

I don't know about Spam. But corned beef hash in a can ain't half bad. Fry it all up in some butter with eggs and hot sauce.. wrap it up in a flour tortilla.. yummy!

Ugly Dougly · Post by **Ugly Dougly** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 4:05 pm

How about an Andrew Zimmern memorial Squick-out?

Mmm... Witchety grubs, my favorite!

betrdanevr · Post by **betrdanevr** » Tue Jan 13, 2009 8:25 pm

ygmir wrote:
jkisha wrote:
ygmir wrote: yes, I agree............but then again, the same can be said for bacon, or brains, can it not?
LMFAO!! that made me laugh out-loud. I guess I just didn't think of spam in the same way. Like eating tuna or white meat chicken out of a can--it's pre-cooked and tastes good cold right out of the can or mixed with mayo.

So, I guess I just figured some people that didn't like it maybe were thinking of it the same way and might not have thought to cook it.

JK

one of the great assets of humanity:

so many ways to look at things.........and, the sharing of same..........

Gotta agree with you on the fried Spam.

I never would have tried it except a girlfriend made it for lunch at her house, and I had to be polite of course. LOL She fried it and put it on toast with mayonnaise and sliced tomatoes. I was astonished!

I couldn't do that when the ex made brains & eggs for breakfast, but it really left more for him. hahahaha

Shaman-n-KK · Post by **Shaman-n-KK** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 4:54 pm

bump

This is what I was going for in Playa-friendly recipe exchange...Thanks guys!

Shaman-n-KK · Post by **Shaman-n-KK** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 5:06 pm

This year, I'm making jerky and dried fruit for our packs at home ahead of time. No added sugar or salt or whatever else you can't pronounce!

One of my fave dishes is a camp request and almost everything is prepped ahead of time:

[u]White Chicken Chili[/u]
*4-6 chicken breasts, diced (boiled or poached so no tough brown colored spots)
*up to 1 med white onion to taste, diced + minced garlic to taste
*salt & pepper, ground cumin
*dash of olive or veg oil
*1-2 cans each Navy Beans, White Kidney Beans, rinsed a little
*1 med. sized bag of frozen white corn
*large can diced green chilis (add canned diced jalapenos if you like more spice)
*Fresh cilantro & sour cream for garnish
-->In a large stock pot or dutch oven, heat oil and sweat onions & garlic until soft. Add cooked diced chix, season well with S&P, and cumin to taste. Add semi-drained beans, corn, and green chili (opt. jalapeno for heat) and simmer until heated thru. Reseason with S&P, adding a little more ground cumin to taste. Garnish with cilantro & sour cream if desired. This feeds a crowd but can be adapted to taste...less beans, more chix, etc. Great with crusty bread! Hearty, filling, and gives you the healthy protein, carbs, and fiber to get you thru the night with energy! Enjoy...KK

DragginLady · Post by **DragginLady** » Tue Jun 16, 2009 8:03 pm

here's a yummy, filling recipe from our backpacking days:

Buy a box of couscous, some freeze dried vegetables(peas, carrots and corn from REI), and a can of chicken.

Soak the vegetables for a bit in the water you will cook couscous in; heat up the water and add the couscous and the can of chicken. add the flavor pack from the couscous, or herb it up however you like. let it sit while you enjoy a coctail. serve it up.
very easy and amazingly good. clean up is a snap; one pot meal.nothing needs refrigeration.