Camp Oven Cooking
Nothing beats the feeling of satisfaction that you get when cooking bread over an open fire. This is a skill that over the 12 week trip I attempted with often chewy results!
If you know me then you'll know that I always love to experiment with cooking, so it should be no surprise that I wasn't content to follow the basic damper recipe from our Outback Way book. It goes something like this:
2 cups self raising flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk
On the first attempt at damper my children said to me
Add two spoons of sugar and and a partridge in a pear tree!!
Well it certainly seemed like the saga from the 12 days of Christmas at times!! I tried to make the first damper sweet by adding cinnamon, raisins and sugar. It came out very stodgy and dry, with a black base, but everyone was desperate and ate it anyway!!
The second damper had even more stuff in it like coconut, seeds, fruit and nuts. It pretty much suffered from the same diagnosis as the first, overweight, dry and flaky with an unhealthily black bottom! But eager to please the kids did their best to eat it (with a litre of water each) and kept smiling!
Finally my moment of glory arrived!! I made a savoury damper, and followed the recipe almost to the letter, just adding some dried rosemary and a squeeze of garlic paste. It was amazing!! We cooked it on the tripod over the fire and the bottom was golden brown. It was so good we even took pictures...
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| Lentil soup and the best damper! |
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| It was nearly all gone before we remembered to take a photo! |
