Sunday, July 20, 2008

Camp Food

I just got back from Girls' Camp with my stake. We were up at the Heber Valley Camp, which is seriously amazing. The church is really doing an amazing thing making all these camps for Young Women. It was an awesome setup.

I'd heard such praise about the food the girls eat at camp. One of my neighbors is the camp cook, and has been for years and years. She has other callings, but insists on keeping this calling as well, which isn't easy. She is crazy-organized.

A huge part of why the food is good is because she can bake. She does use Dutch ovens for some stuff, but she uses these box ovens that she's made. On the ground is a piece of foil with a raised rack and hot coals surrounding the rack. Then she puts this foil-covered box over top and she can make anything.



When I first arrived at camp there were fresh from-scratch chocolate chip cookies to munch on. It was kinda funny, as people from other wards would walk by our campsite and be like 'How did you make those?' and people from the stake and from the campground were always hanging out watching Susan bake. As part of the girls' service project they made some box ovens to give to the couple-missionaries who live at the camp.

It's pretty cool because if you have an 'oven' you can make just about anything while you're camping. Really opens up your outdoor meal options.



That night she baked hams and parker house rolls (from scratch), made a yummy cheesy potato dutch oven dish (it had sprite in it!), (salad), and fried up donuts. Her spudnuts are a huge tradition at camp.



Pretty decent food when she cooked - but some of our meals were by the stake all together in the pavilion. My second night we had Hawaiian Haystacks by the stake. I tried to explain (just to those sitting by me) that that dish is not Hawaiian. It's such a 'Mormon' dish and I've never had it anywhere but Utah. People were shocked. It's standard Utah fare.

This particular batch of 'haystacks' was not so tasty.

2 comments:

Eva / Sycamore Street Press said...

i've never seen anything like this! crazy! but cool. we had good food when i was at girl's camp, too, because my bishop worked for snelgroves, and at least once during the week, he would drive up with a big pot of snelgroves' soup, bags of bread or rolls, and a huge tub of their ice cream. cheating? maybe.but who cares? not me.

kirsten said...

hey, snelgroves sounds great. my first two years of camp (CA) had good food - in MD it was awful. Things like 'pasta + italian dressing in a baggie and shake it up and call it pasta salad', and the breakfast bag thing (eggs + bacon in a paper bag and cook it in the coals) which all burned quickly and we were hungry.

so this was all completely new and cool for me!