Oh yeah, I'd forgotten I mentioned the solar oven.
Hmm, actually, what we made in Girl Scouts was a box oven. It requires an extremely-heavy-duty cardboard box of a decent size, a boatload of aluminum foil, and duct tape. Wine boxes are good because you can wrap the dividers with aluminum foil, too, and put them inside the box as extra insulation. Then you put your food inside in the dutch oven, pile coals around and on top of it, and let it cook. (You get 40-ish degrees of heat per coal, as you probably already know.)
As Magickmaker said, it didn't work too terribly well. I was in charge of getting the wine boxes and I kinda messed up; the ones I got had walls that were too thin to insulate properly. Also, one of these requires a fair amount of time to make, and I think we'll be pretty busy. So, while I'd be willing to try making a box oven again, to see if I could get it right this time
, I'm recommending that we skip it this trip.
A solar oven differs in that the top is a sheet of glass or plexiglas, and instead of using charcoal as the heat source, you use the sun. I had a teeny-tiny one of these at one point, which I made nachos in once. I think I lost it in the last move....
Anyway: let's talk menus.
danlo's on deck for campfire chili. But we should talk about the other meals. Dunno how haute we want our cuisine to be.
The nice thing about that Campfire Cuisine book is that the recipes in it are a cut above, y'know, beans & wienies. But if you guys would prefer old-fashioned camp cookin', I'm okay with that.
I figure on doing the grocery shopping after I get to Denver.
I tend to stick to one-pot meals on the stove rather than digging a pit, etc., for the dutch oven.
