Dutch Oven Pizza

Step 1: Before starting the fire to make the coals to go around the Dutch Oven, remove your cat from the top of your fire pit.

Step 2: After starting the fire, bring your dog out to enjoy the evening with you. Don't forget a pillow for her to lay on because the chair is cold.

Step 3: Spray the inside of the oven with cooking spray or rub with butter.  Spread out the pizza dough and smear with pizza sauce.

Step 4: Layer on the toppings.

Step 5: Bake.  Have plenty of coals or this takes a long time to get done. 

We were baking rolls in our other oven and could have used way more coals.  It took a good 50 minutes for this to get done and it was torture waiting that long.

Step 6: Slice and enjoy!

Dementia Awareness

Grandma Shirley lives in a memory care unit where they do a lot of really neat activities with the residents. Last week a group of kids came visiting and they had a painting day, kinda like those wine painting parties, but I think minus the wine. ;)  The pictures are going to be displayed at a local grocery store next week to promote dementia awareness. This is Grandma with her beautiful painting.  She was always artistic and I am so glad that she still has the opportunity to express that side of herself. When I saw her and said I wanted to take her picture with her picture she didn't remember painting it, but she did in the moment.  And that is where people with dementia live, in the moment. So thankful that where she lives they understand that.

Dessert Sushi

The 4-H camp counselors made these for evening snack at the bonfine to complment their Under the Sea theme.  The ingredents are: Rice Krispies, fruit roll ups, Swedish fish, gummy worms, marshmallows and butter.

Make a regular Rice Krispie bar recipe.  Smoosh it out flat on a big baking sheet.  Quickly, very quickly, while they are still warm, put on Swedish fish and gummy worms.  Roll the sushi up the long way to make a long roll.  Wrap the fruit roll ups on the outside of the roll, this helps to hold it together.  Put it in the freezer for about five minutes until hard enough to cut. Slice with a surrated knife.

Dutch Oven Maiden Meal

We have been scouring the thrift stores for a Dutch oven the last few months with no luck in finding one.  People must not part with them, or else it is going to go the other way and now that we finally bought one I will start seeing them for sale everywhere. We choose a traditional cast iron one with legs and the curved handle.  They make really fancy ones, but those come with quite the price tag so we went with one priced in the middle of the road.

First step in using the oven is seasoning it.  Just spray that baby all over with some Pam.  Bam, done!

For our first delicious delight, we threw in sausage, apples, a bag of cabbage and onion.  Dump it in, stir it up.

The coals to bake it need to be made before you put them on the oven.  To make them, burn logs in the fire and when they are black and charcoalish, lay them on the ground and then load some on the lid.

For the oven to bake the meal there needs to be heat from the bottom and the top.  Turn the oven every 15 minutes to avoid hot spots where your meal is burned on one side of the oven and raw on the other.  This goes for the lid as well, give that a little spin when you turn the pot.

When you are going to check how it's going in there, the suspense will be killing you, the cover needs to be completely cleaned off.  Remove all the embers and dust off the top or the meal will be adulterated with coals and ash. 

The end result was so worth the hour it took to cook this.

Dancer goes to camp

Things changed this year when Dancer was getting ready to go to camp. When she was younger I use to help her get ready, make sure she had everything she needed and brought her to camp. This year she planned out her entire session she's teaching by herself, got all the supplies together, packed her dufflebag and loaded up her car. Only thing we did was take her out to lunch before she left at McDonalds.

Then she got in her car and drove off. This is the last year she can be a counselor, if she wants to go again she has to wait a year until she's 21 years old to be a chaperone. Spark will be a first year counselor this year, he goes on Wednesday and we will be bringing him. Dad is going to be the camp nurse for two of the days so we will see Dancer and Spark during the week or I would really be sad at Dancer's new independence.

Vanilla Fire Starters

These fire starters are made with those cotton face cleaning pads instead of cotton balls. These stack really well and a lot would fit in a sandwich Ziploc bag and take up less room in your camping supplies.

Melt down a candle, they don't have to be vanilla like my title says.  Actually, they would be prettier with another colored candle, but vanilla is my favorite scent so that's what we had on hand.  

Our stove is broken so when I put the paper plate in to melt the wax in the "toaster" oven, surprisingly the plate started to "toast." Wasn't thinking there.  Anyway, once the wax melts, dip the cotton pad in the wax until it is completely saturated. Lay it on wax paper or some other nonporous surface so they don't stick what ever you put them on to harden.  

Try number two.  Make an aluminum foil bowl to melt the candle in.  "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" Thomas Edison  See, we are getting smarter and it only took us one fail.

 And now the test, did it work?  Sure did, and it only used one match. We proceeded to have to have perhaps the world's smallest bonfire.  It burned quite a while though, about five minutes so you would have plenty of time to get a fire going if you didn't have all the wood handy or your tinder was a bit wet.