Good Thing We Remembered Matches!

Another Sunday has come and gone. Sorry I neglected to mention that we would be camping on Sunday, with our cousins.

Out near La Pine where we were camping in the high desert of Eastern Oregon it gets very warm during the day before the mercury plummets with the sun. After spending the day swimming and exploring "lava casts", the tunnels left behind when lava flows around trees, hardens and the trees die and rot away, not to mention almost getting your ankle smashed by a loose boulder, I was hungry, everybody else was too.

The day before we left I asked myself what could feed our troop of hungry family. My answer, hobo packs!

Hobo packs are a boy scout classic in large thanks to they're relative simplicity. (The Boy Scouts don't offer a cooking badge ... as far as I know). The trick to hobo packs is chopping the ingredients the right size and then wrapping them in enough tinfoil that the flames don't break through and burn your food leaving a carbon taste in your mouth, same idea as making your marshmallows golden brown. Then you send it into the fire hoping your dinner doesn't go up in smoke. That's the theory anyways.

Once I had built a fire large enough it was a pell-mell rush (knife in hand) to chop all the garlic, (freshest garlic I've ever seen) butter, bell peppers, onions, pearl potatoes, and the excellent sausage from Otto's, I can smell it all cooking in the fire.

The hobo pack was quite good. The potatoes were wonderful and creamy and the sausages were delectable. The hardest part of this dinner was getting the food out of the fire. Both Dad and I roasted our fingers to medium rare before we got that thing out of the fire. But I suppose we got off lucky, after all, we did have matches.