My 9 year old loves cooking and was delighted when I was given the new Cool Camping Cookbook to review. He’s dyslexic and cookery books are great for him as he’s so interested in them that he reads loads without thinking about it.
He leafed through the book and decided we were going to build a firepit in the garden. I’ve camped a lot but have no experience of firepits, so had a look at the book to see how to do it. It involves digging a big pit, lining it with stones, building a fire in said pit, letting it burn for 3 hours before putting the food on to cook, wrapping the food in foil, then wet newspaper or straw, then chicken wire, lowering the food packages onto the fire then refilling the pit with earth and LEAVING FOR 10 HOURS.
I managed to distract him from that idea by asking him to choose a pudding for us to make instead. He considered banana flakes, but settled on orange-baked muffins. This recipe uses hollowed out oranges as cooking containers for muffins. We used a supermarket chocolate muffin mix as we didn’t know how the recipe would turn out, but it worked well. We poured the muffin mix into the hollow oranges, put the ‘lids’ of the oranges on, wrapped in foil and cooked in the oven. When they were cooked we ate them straight from the oranges with spoons.
For me the book is difficult to find my way around as the Table of Contents is very brief. But it has some good, innovative recipes and we’ll definitely use it for inspiration for camping and barbecues.
Food pit, otherwise known as a hungi by the Maoris in New Zealand. They ‘lay’ a hungi and it’s only for very special ocassions tell him!
It would need to be special to go to all that effort. I’d get stuck at stage one, digging the pit.