An attention whore

Cooking has been the thread through both sides of our family and I seem to have passed that love on to my daughter which make me quite happy. I do it for the praise; I'm an attention whore and love the adulation. The challenge is important, too but praise is what I live on so I cook, and feed, and cook some more. This sometimes, for me, can be a problem.

The Teardrop Gathering at Lake Perris was great this year and since I'd won a outdoor dutch oven in the raffle last year I participated in Friday's DO potluck. Got lots of great ideas for managing my outdoor cooking and we ate some pretty good food, too. Some pretty ordinary food as well which is the reason for the post.

Outdoor Dutch Oven cooking is not for the faint of heart nor feeble of muscle. Visit our food blog, Peanut Butter Etouffee and see. You are cooking with hot coals, no way other than guess work to regulate, and sometimes, an unfriendly environment. I've seen the enemy, and it is WIND. Did I mention the weight? My 12 inch weighs all of 25 pounds. So why would you just use it to heat up something canned when you've got a camp stove?

The DO is a cast iron beautiful bit of engineering. Heavy pot on three, perfectly balanced legs leaving room underneath for the coals. The lid, heavy with a lip that allows coals on top without getting them into your food. This lid fits tightly on the pot but can be turned easy so there are no "hot" spots while cooking. My darling made me a lid lifter and pretty much anything I ask for. Nice to know someone who welds. Ok, so why not use it to its limit? I love cooking tools but only use the correct tool for the job. Jeeze, I'm a snob.

Once I made a large pot of chili verde while camping and with it was serving beans. Since you can stack one pot upon the other and take advantage of the heat from the bottom, I had beans in the smaller pot on top of the chili verde. I was only really heating the beans so the camp stove would have worked better. The DO is no easy critter to handle and clean up. Empty, it requires hot coals to boil water while you scrub out the pot, rinse and repeat until clean. Never, ever put soap in a DO it ruins the seasoning. The last thing I want to do is heat something in it.

Oh, but if you want a real treat, like biscuits, lovely fluffy biscuits when you are camping by all means get yourself started. I warn you, it's addicting.