MOTORHOME MODIFICATIONS *C* Camping Outdoor Cooking and Grilling Stuff

I am going to start off the new year with posting three of our motorhome modifications at a time. I will post repairs, modifications, or neato things we have found for RVing.  I have lots of pics in my files so I will do them in alphabetical order.

Underneath that stuff, I will post my regular daily stuff..... kinda sorta fun, eh?

So here it goes, we are up to the letter C now!

MOTORHOME MODIFICATIONS 

STARTING WITH THE LETTER C

Camping Outdoor Cooking and Grilling Stuff:

A big part of the camping experience is cooking outdoors. Food always seems to taste better when cooked outside, whether it is on an open fire or on a grill.  Steve is usually the outdoor cooking guy. I shop for the items, plan the meals, take out all the stuff to get ready to make the meal, do all the side things, and the extras, and set the table and bring it all to him.... so he can toss it on the fire or grill and say *I COOKED SUPPER*    hahahahahaha

Most of the campgrounds we go to have some kind of fire ring.  Many of the national forests and state parks have some type of grid or grill space for cooking on.  We make due with what is there, and often it resembles these: 

If there isn't any type of grate, Steve made up this device to use over the fire....  it is a single post that he pounds into the ground.  The grate is adjustable by sliding up and down the length of the post. The weight of the handle helps offset the weight of the food thus locking it into place.  Even a heavy cast iron pot of chili holds up to the device.

Best of all is using a tripod. I own a wonderful tripod welded by my ex husband for camping. I got custody of it in the divorce! LOL!  I do not like to haul it around in our motorhome, as it gets quite sooty and grubby.  So my sister and her husband haul it along in the back of their pickup truck for family camping weekends. 

The welded notches in one leg allow it to be raised and lowered 

 by a cable to different cooking heights. 

We even use it with pots or roasters on the grill surface.

When cooking ribs or chicken, we learned to cover the meal with tin foil 

and it traps the heat down by the meat

 and cooks more evenly, more like an oven!

One of our favorite cooking sauces is from O'Fallon Missouri called Andria's Steak Sauce.  Our friends Jim and Dee of http://tumbleweed-jimdee.blogspot.com/  introduced us to it when they came to visit. We stock up whenever we drive near St. Louis.  It can be ordered via Walmart or Amazon, but is much pricier.  You can order it directly from the company too: http://www.andrias.com/our-sauce.html    It is a brush on steak sauce to put on while things are cooking.  We put it on steaks, chicken, pork chops, ribs etc. I even add a dollop to stir fry!

One of our favorite things to cook over the campfire is roasted sweet corn.  Yummmm If you soak the corn in salt water the day before, or even for a few hours, then the husk is less apt to burn.  The added moisture steams the corn in the husk.  Then keep rotating it while it is cooking. Poking the grid with a stick is a fun past time while sitting around the fire to keep it moving. A new hint we have recently tried is after the corn is cooked, toss it in an old cooler to keep the husks hot until serving.  This is especially helpful when you are cooking a double batch for lots of hungry folks. 

My family also owns this HUGE cast iron fry pan to cook over the fire...

it is used for the summer for camping, 

then they take it to hunting camp in the fall. 

 we do breakfast sometimes called

 Heart Attack Breakfast (because of all the grease!) 

This is the smaller cast iron one we use too...

nothing can beat cooking on good old cast iron! 

We also have a big thick cast aluminum griddle to set on the tripod. this is good for pancakes, french toast or a pile of grill cheese sandwhichs.

 Now.. for the SERIOUS OUTDOOR COOKING

this is kept up at Hunting Camp...

its DA QUAD POD! 

(it is made from a swing set and has a boat winch to raise and lower the grill)

Aside from all the campfire cooking, we do cook on a propane grill most of the time. Steve has found this little red one from Coleman to be his favorite to take along.  We have tried a whole bunch of different kinds over the years.  For now, this is the one he keeps in the camper, and at home we have the famous Weber Baby Q.  Grilling is a man's social thing....  here he and fellow Safari owner John Clevenger from Texas brought up his BBQ wings and took over the cooking reins on Steve's little red grill. 

Besides all of the rough and rugged manly foods, we also cook healthy foods too.  Here is a wire grid we found in a grilling dept. of a hardware store. It is perfect for big slabs of Salmon!  We brush on a bit of Andria's sauce and shake on some spices.  Yummmmmm  and keeps the fishy smell out of the motorhome to cook it outside on the grill. We can flip it right over so the little bit of fat falls off into the grill and the meat is virtually fat free and healthy. 

We have little circular grill from Coleman called a Party Grill.  

It is a good backup grill and very lightweight.  

It collapses down a circle of about 4 inches thick. 

Good to take to a beach or a picnic. Runs on propane.

• The Pro is that is also has a burner surface that you can boil a pot of water or soup on.
• The Con is that there isn't a lid like a regular grill so you have to use tinfoil to help with some cooking tasks. 

Now... we do not just GRILL our foods when camping. Sometimes we take along a turkey fryer!  Wheee that is a big family thing. This is my brotherinlaw Fuzz doing the honors. He has it down to a science and makes the best juicy perfect turkeys.

We use the base of our own turkey fryer for other things.. mostly steaming SNOW CRAB LEGS! Yummmm that is my favorite most of all!   It keeps the mess and stink out of the motorhome.  And we use it at home for cooking them outdoors too.

We have also used the base (I kid you not) for canning... while camping!  Because my sister and I like to do canning, but we live 180 miles apart.  We bring all of our supplies and set them up and use the bases from our turkey fryers for our canning kettles and brine pot. We do pickles, or tomatoes, or  blueberry jam, or whatever happens to be in season.

 We do get a lot of funny looks in the campgrounds, I must admit. 

Mom even pitches in when she camps with us. 

The next blog post will be on the indoor cooking utensils and equipment that we found to be most useful when camping.   I will not bore you with recipes, because you can google for just about anything to cook outside.  But I think some of the stuff we use to do the cooking is interesting.

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Today was totally an iced up frozen rainy glare ice on top of snow day!  We got about 5 or 6 inches last night and everything was pretty this morning when we got up.  It was soft and quiet.  Schools were cancelled or delayed. We stayed in bed and I got up long enough to make coffee and we snuggled back in bed for a while with the dogs. 

But then the temps raised and the snow started to change over to rain. Steve decided to get out about 9 am and try to snowblow some of it before it froze solid.  The plow had gone through and piled up 2 feet thick of slushy chunks in the driveway. If he didn't keep on moving it, soon it would freeze into one solid hump.  We would have to drive over it with the Tracker for the rest of the winter!  The car or motorhome could never clear over that frozen lump.  So he decided he better get at it. The snowblower struggled with it, and threw gobs of slop around, but just enough to clean it up. 

He saw our neighbor two doors down trying to shovel hers out by hand. He walked his blower unit on down over to her place and blew it out too. She was sooo thankful!  He cleared it two more times during the day to keep the layers of slush at bay.   It rained most of the rest of the day, and everything now is glare ice.

Now by evening, it is freezing up.  Car accidents all over, highways are closed to clear the scenes, and people in the ditch.  We are home, safe and warm.  The power has held on, but with the high winds kicking up we might have a power outage with all the ice on the wires and trees that could come down.  We are prepared with a gas log fireplace to keep the house warm if the power goes out.  We have the oil lamps, flashlights and candles handy too.  We do have the generator in the motorhome if need be, but we do not want to even go out in this weather if we do not have to. 

We were going to grill out some steaks for supper, but it is too windy to even cook on the grill in the open garage. So we tossed them in the broiler on the oven in the house instead.  Not the same as cooking outside, but in a storm, I guess ya gotta sacrifice, eh? 

Winter in Wisconsin, dontcha love it?