These days, we’re all foraging anglers, sometimes foraging after others who are not anglers have gotten there first. It’s an era of empty shelves and park closures during our health crisis, so I’m not titling this column “Cooking in Camp or the Backyard,” but “Cooking in Camp in the Backyard.”
We need to stay at home, but in stay-at-home mode, we can turn necessity into inspiration and enjoy both the process and the result as we shelter and await events. You can’t always get what you want, but as the song says, if you try sometimes, you just might find that you get what you need. And in so doing, you’ll develop habits that will serve you well when you again set up a fishing camp.
So here is a story of serendipitous, ad hoc foraging and dining. It begins with a tripod cooking triangle that I found in a home wares boutique while on a trip to fish the Metolius in Oregon. An artisan blacksmith had crafted the tripod, copying an original antique pioneer design. They were a mainstay of camp cooking all over the West. For my shelter at home backyard camp meal, I set the tripod over a patio flush-concrete fire pit.
Next, I phoned a friend who is a wine merchant to see if his business was open. It was — he had turned his wine bar into a drive-by operation overnight, serving his regular customers and generating cash flow. I placed my order, gave an ETA, and drove up to his entrance, opening the rear door of my SUV with the push of a button on my dashboard. I passed a credit card through my driver-side window with a pick-up-stick bought at Walgreen’s when I was recovering from a hip replacement and had limited range of movement, maintaining more than the minimal six feet required for social distancing.
Gloved and masked, my friend transferred two cases of a favorite everyday wine to the back of my truck, surface-disinfected his countertop, sanitized my credit card, and passed it back. I said I didn’t need a receipt. He backed off to a safer distance, and we chatted a bit. His business was booming.
Now, what to cook? My wife and I try to limit grocery store visits and go later in the day, when the crowds are minimal and more orderly, but the shelves are often gleaned by late afternoon. Days earlier, I had tried to find chicken, eggs, tortillas, paper goods, cleaning supplies, canned beans, canned tomatoes, and any type of bread or pasta. All were cleaned out. In this day’s quick forage, I found eggs, tortillas, cheese, whole organic chickens, Twinkies, and a bone-in leg of lamb that I dared to fantasize about. I had found fresh garlic a week earlier.
For protein, we enjoy eating red meat, but increasingly limit our intake, in part satiating our meat cravings with lower-calorie and lower-cholesterol domestic game such as venison, elk, rabbit, quail, pheasant, fish, and chicken. But that leg of lamb looked really, really good. I decided that we would use the tripod to suspend it on a chain, essentially a vertical rotating spit over the fire when used this way, slowly sip and enjoy the wine I found, and cook everything needed for our meal in one way or another over or in that fire pit, conserving fuel.
To begin, I blended olive oil, zinfandel, soy sauce, and fresh garlic cloves and put the result into a spray bottle (an implement worth purchasing as a camp kitchen tool). Used often and liberally while the roast was sizzling, the mixture would marry with the meat, baste it, and keep the lamb moist, as well as impart a wonderful flavor as the surface crusted and caramelized. I first made small slits in the lamb and rubbed the outside with vodka, then inserted slivers of garlic.
Once the lamb was sizzling, I occasionally threw sprigs of rosemary on the fire to add another layer of flavor.
We already had baked some russet potatoes. My wife cut the top thirds off horizontally, scooped out the potato interior, rubbed the skin with extra virgin olive oil, and lightly dusted it with truffle salt. To the scooped-out insides she added chives, minced dried mushrooms, sour cream, butter, finely chopped green onion tops, and generous amounts of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. She stuffed the mixture back into the potato shells and covered them with the potato lids. We made enough for a second night’s meal, wrapped them in heavy-duty aluminum foil, and refrigerated the lot until we placed them in the coals at the edge of the fire pit. The lamb and potatoes would give us delicious food for several days — the last bits carved off the leg bone would go into a curry.
In my foraging run, I had found a net bag full of fresh-looking Arizona Sweet onions and a last, ragged-looking bunch of cilantro. I wrapped sliced onions, cilantro sprigs, unsalted butter, a drizzle of white wine, and a liberal dash of freshly ground black pepper in more foil to be placed on the coals . . . an easy, healthy, and different-tasting vegetable dish that requires no pots or pans and is forgiving in its cooking time.
I’m a board member of a regional land trust in the Sierra foothills, and while musing more on my menu, I remembered a land trust site I’d visited the week before where early spring rains had produced a crop of fresh miner’s lettuce. I called the rancher and was gladly given permission to harvest enough for a special salad. He did ask that I pick some for him and his wife. For a gift, I brought him a bottle of the wine I had procured earlier. We would prepare a delicate vinaigrette for the miner’s lettuce with champagne vinegar, a buttery extra virgin olive oil, a small dollop of Dijon mustard, freshly ground black pepper, and a half inch of anchovy paste or oil-packed minced anchovy filets, whose hint of salt marries the flavors.
A special-occasion Santa Rita Hills pinot from Dragonette Cellars in Los Olivos, found hidden in the back of a wine storage cabinet, would complement the lamb as few wines can.
For an easy desert . . . no, I did not resort to those Twinkies. I had left them on the supermarket shelf. I recalled campfires at the lake . . . marshmallows and s’mores . . . but there were no graham crackers in our pantry. I did find one banana, so I alternated marshmallows and banana slices and drizzled them with a hastily made chocolate chip sauce as they came out of the fire.
Lamb cooked this way takes time, but for our tastes should be medium rare. Test with a meat thermometer until it reaches 125 degrees Fahrenheit, then remove it from the fire. Cover it with foil and let it rest for 20 minutes while the internal temperature rises 10 degrees or so. A cut like this has crusty outer layers and variations in doneness. This time, everybody gets what they want. A cook’s prerogative is to slice off bits as it cooks and share.
Foraging and improvising meals in these difficult times can actually be fun, and cooking outdoors at home can light the darkness in ways both literal and metaphorical. In a sense, we’re all camping out, distanced from a world that’s changing. You may not have an iron tripod or know where to harvest miner’s lettuce, but whatever you do have, you can use your imagination to put together an interesting meal. Cooking in camp in the backyard is one good way to cope and to make life better, and it’s excellent practice for when for you’re again setting up camp in the field.
Pantry Soup
The Artist walked into the kitchen the other night, sniffing the air. “You’re trying to outdo me,” she said, cocking an accusatory eyebrow. “Hey, I replied, “the soup you made last night was so good I wanted to see if I could do as well!” I really did like her soup, and I especially liked her approach to making it. She’s a master at combining staples from the pantry and creating something tasty, and this got me thinking. If I had a fishing cabin, how would I stock the pantry so that I could create a satisfying, warming soup — a soup so hearty that it would be a meal in itself — without having to interrupt my time on the water with a trip to the market?
Actually, devising a satisfying supper of this sort is extremely easy. First, you need items that you won’t mind leaving in an empty cabin for days or weeks on end. I suggest stocking the pantry with canned beans (black beans, white beans, whatever you like), canned diced tomatoes, canned chicken stock, dry pasta of any type, rice, maybe even canned mushrooms, plus olive oil, cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, pepper, and whatever dried herbs, such as bay leaves, thyme, or tarragon, that might go well with soup. In the freezer compartment of your refrigerator, stock sausages and frozen veggies such as corn, carrots, spinach, onions, and bell pepper strips. If you’re visiting your cabin every few weeks, you can store fresh onions, garlic, and winter squash in your pantry. Also, consider stocking a bottle or two of white and red wine of drinkable quality. You know, a little for the pot, a little for the cook . . . .
So here’s the drill. Before you head off to fish, move the sausages from the freezer to the fridge, where they’ll defrost. After you return from fishing, heat a bit of olive oil in a soup pot on the stove, then cut up the sausages and brown them. Toss in the frozen onions and other veggies that need softening, such as carrots, and cook, stirring, until they are indeed soft. Add the spices, let them bloom a few seconds in the hot oil, then add a glug or two of wine. Once the wine is reduced to almost nothing, add a can of diced tomatoes. Stir and cook for a few minutes, then toss in a handful of rice, a handful of pasta that’s been broken into small pieces, and add your dried herb(s), a can of beans, and the frozen veggies that don’t need long to cook, such as corn and spinach. Pour in the stock, stir, bring to a boil, then drop to an active simmer and cover for maybe 20 minutes to half an hour. Stir occasionally and correct the seasonings if necessary. What you’ll end up with is comfort food at its simplest and quite possibly its best.
— Richard Anderson
Beans in the Pantry
A few paragraphs earlier, I recommended stocking your pantry with canned beans for use in soups. They are a wonderful ingredient, adding body and flavor, and provide protein, too. But if you’re hanging out at your cabin for a while, consider shelving a few bags of dried beans. Although dried beans require a bit of forethought to prepare, their taste will be notably superior to that of the canned varieties.
The approach I use for cooking most types of dried beans comes from Heirloom Beans, by Steve Sando and Vanessa Barrington. It is a book full of wonderful recipes and advice, and will certainly lead you to look at dried beans with more interest. So here’s the basic, easy Sando and Barrington approach to cooking a pound of beans. Before you go to bed, pour the beans onto a plate and pick out any debris or weird looking stuff. Rinse the beans well with cold water, then place them into a pot or bowl. Fill the vessel with enough cold water to cover the beans by an inch. Let them soak, which could take six hours. Longer won’t hurt them.
When the beans have expanded, pour them and their liquid into a large cooking pot and place it on a burner. Add water to a one-inch height over the beans. Raise the heat to medium-high and boil for 5 minutes (longer at elevation), then drop the heat to a very slow simmer, partially covering the pot if needed to maintain it.
The cooking time should take from one to four hours, depending upon the age and variety of the bean. Add water as needed. Toward the end, when the beans are becoming tender, add a teaspoon of salt, then cook until they are finished to your preferred toothiness. That’s it!
— Richard Anderson
