Date: Fri, 29 Jul 2005 17:33:57 -0700
Reply-To: "Katherine J. Maas" <kathmaas@TELUS.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: "Katherine J. Maas" <kathmaas@TELUS.NET>
Subject: Re: What do you cook when camping
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Our favorite camping dish when we are actually driving (rather than parked)
is chicken stew with all the trimmings. We start the stew in the morning in
our Chinese thermal pot, cook it for half an hour while eating breakfast,
then put the pot into its thermos shell, and let it continue to cook (it
works like a slow cooker) all day as we drive. When we arrive at our
campsite, dinner is ready, and we have leftovers for a couple more meals.
I take a few safety precautions when using this pot.
1. I built a hollow plywood stool into which the pot fits snugly, so itıs
stable during travel. This stool is triple purpose for us. It provides an
additional seat (the hinged cover is padded and upholstered) and it is also
a great stepstool for getting up into the pop top.
2. Even though the food is always super hot when we arrive, I always reboil
it before we eat it (only takes a few minutes because itıs already so hot).
Call me paranoid, but I donıt have a thermometer to check the actual
temperature, and I want to make sure we donıt eat meaty food that hasnıt
been kept at a high enough temperature all day. I figure on the off chance
it dropped down to an unsafe temperature, Iıd kill off anything that grew in
there by reboiling. Having said this, though, I will confess I think Iım a
little obsessive about food safety. The Chinese have really surpassed North
Americans in thermos technology, and use this kind of thing all the time
without obsessively reheating things.
3. One downside to cooking like this is that the van smells really yummy!
If we are camping in bear territory, we always sleep with the top down the
nights after weıve made stew.
You can make lots of other stuff in a thermal pot, of course the pots come
with recipe books. The pot we use we got 3-4 years ago from a wholesaler in
Vancouver, BC, after seaching for pots and vendors on the Internet. If you
do a google search on ³thermal cookware² you will see there are several
brands out there now.
We simply love this pot and wouldnıt camp without it.
Katherine & Vanita
--
Katherine J. Maas
³Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as sentimental,ı
impractical,ı or womanish,ı etc., by those whose fun, profit, or
convenience was at stake.² J. Gilbert
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