You all seemed to enjoy the last time we did this. So, we’re going to share the evolution of our “camp food” from our garden in the fall. As you can see, we’re a long ways from where we were in the spring, with ribeye salad, featuring home grown lettuce and radish!
When we go out camping, or sometimes stay in public use cabins, we make it a point to eat as much out of the garden as is possible. Our meals are usually simple in the spring, evolving to what might as well be a hearty, home cooked meal in the fall! This go around, we had a lovely beet salad with our albino beets, plus a side of roasted red and white potatoes. For our protein, we had a nice steak filet for our protein done up in butter, onions, garlic and shallots out of the garden.
We know a lot of people think of “camp food” as hot dogs cooked on a fire. But, you can do so much more out there in the bush with just a simple camp stove (or fire grate) and some cast iron. In a lot of ways, it’s almost easier for us to cook like we’re at home, just being mindful of the dish count. We eat pretty darn well, given that we’re at least 60 miles from civilization here!
We’ll share our pro cooler tip as well, since some might still be learning the ropes of how to use them properly. A quality built cooler is well worth the investment. Something like a Yeti, but ours is a much lesser known “bear proof” brand from Lone Mountain out of Bozeman, Montana. To cool it, we use frozen one quart soda bottles (e.g. tonic water) and can easily get 5+ days of quality cooling this way. Putting ice directly in your cooler is fun for a tailgate party, but it’s not the way if you’re trying to survive out of it for several days!
In other news, we developed a new skill with our garden cart on this run out to the depths of the Alaskan wilderness! We didn’t exactly expect to learn the skill of fording a wagon in this lifetime! Our camp was about a mile in from the trailhead and little did we know, the trail featured 12 rather large and unavoidable “trail lakes” along it. So, we are probably in a very small minority of people that have legit forded a Gorilla cart.
Unfortunately, we did take our fording pictures on our return trip from camp and the water levels had dropped significantly over the few days we were out there. Plus, at the time, we were sort of figuring things out and not thinking “Hey, this is a cool thing to do with a garden cart.” It was more frustrating and somewhat dangerous at the time, but in hindsight, we can now laugh about it.
We had a great few days out in the Alaskan wilderness, recharging from all the intensive garden work that we’ve been up to. It’s always tough for us to do this at this time of year, but we have to prioritize it when we can!
