cooking with fire

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Crispy Campfire

As much as I’ve been spending time fine-tuning my campfire cooking skills, I’ve been thinking about all the small ways that effort has translated into a bit of backyard humour, too.

Having a teenage daughter helps. She often and candidly points out all my shortcomings. Free of charge. “I’m embarrassed for you, dad.”

Or more recently, “The ribs are burnt, dad. I can’t eat this.”

They we’re not burnt. They were crispy.

So it goes that in episode two of Gaige and Crick I tried to do what I always do when I write up a script for a new comic: take a dash of real life and salt it heavily with a bit of exaggeration.

Perhaps you too have spent some time cooking over a hot flame recently. Watching the professionals barbecue juicy meats over sizzling coals looks like knowledge that should be baked into our genes, locked into the primal ancient skillset possessed by every human on the planet. If I need to grill a hunk of flesh over a fire, darn it, that is my legacy as a participant in the human race. Right?

The hot grease that dripped from my slow-cooked ribs was hardly the ignition source for a mushroom cloud, but it sure felt that way when my meticulously prepared coals and carefully laid plans turned into a small inferno a few seconds into the grilling process.

Gaige is in over his head, it often seems. He so desperately wants to be a professional. He so eagerly wants to build himself up as a something he is not. Luckily Crick’s head is a little closer to the ground.

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Backyard Canadian Tacos

What do you get if you cross a campfire cooking enthusiast with a suburban Canadian stuck at home during a pandemic craving some southern-spiced fare?

Maybe …you get an experimental campfire taco recipe.

After grilling up the vegetable platter that would become a fire-roasted homemade salsa, I kept the fire stoked for some marinated flank steak that served for some makeshift pseudo-barbacoa filling for my Saturday supper plans.

The Marinade

1 little lime juiced
1 medium lemon juiced
6 glugs of olive oil
1 dollop of salt
1 nudge of ground chipotle chiles

I mixed all that together in a bowl, emulsifying the oils with the citrus, and poured it over the steak to marinate.

The meat and marinade rested for a ninety minutes before I got down to the business of cooking it low and slow over a bed of campfire coals.

The result was delicious.

The meat was seasoned enough as to not overpower the flavours of the salsa or roasted peppers I’d added, but held its own sliced thin and wrapped into toasted shells.

Next time I may go with a thinner cut of meat as bringing up the internal temperature over the hot campfire coals left a bit of a drier, chewier crust to form on the outside.

And folks who like spicy food will definitely want to amp up the pepper or chili quantity in their own version.

All ’round, not a bad Mexican-style substitute for a Canadian backyard lockdown, and a taco recipe I will be building on and from as the summer rolls on.

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Campfire Salsa

I’ve been looking for an excuse to break away from the purely carnivore approach I’ve thus far taken with my backyard firepit culinary experimentation.

I may like my fire-grilled meats, but I’ve also had some great vegetarian fare that partook of the smoke and flame. And here I’m thinking well-beyond the starches like wrapping a potato in some aluminum foil to sit in the hot coals or pan-frying some mushrooms atop the heat. Both are excellent, of course, but I was hoping to branch out and be a little more adventurous.

Inspiration struck from a variety of sources, but the mere notion of getting some peppers over a bed of charcoal got ramped up to a full-blown idea when a Youtuber I watch spun up a wicked salsa recipe over the fire in his backyard.

A trip to the local grocer found me with the following fresh ingredients:

4 vine-ripened tomatoes
1 head of garlic
1 medium white onion
1 large spicy pepper
1 sweet yellow bell pepper
2 limes
1 bag of locally made tortilla chips

The Roast-ening

The ultimate plan was to cook up some seasoned flank steak that could be chopped up as a kind of psuedo-barbacoa taco filling and to make a full meal centred around that same theme. The salsa would be the side dish and filler, and a necessary one for tacos some might say.

I got a fire ready and let the wood burn down for a good hour before I dared put any actual food on it. I’ve learned some tough lessons over the last month when it comes to being too anxious to get your grub on the flames.

I will admit I got a little cautious with my yellow pepper and pierced the skin with a knife as it sat among the other sizzling veggies. The bell pepper seemed to have a life of its own, rocking to and fro on the cast iron grills. I’d just watched a video last night about food bursting explosively from overheating so I was feeling nervous as my blackening pepper seemed to hiss and crackle over the coals.

Fire roasting vegetables, by the way, smells amazing. I didn’t think I’d notice much, but the heat brought out the scents of the garlic and the onions and the tomatoes as I hovered nearby tending and turning them. Yum!

When it was all done I brought them inside to cool and finish the preparation.

(Garlic stays really hot, I will tell you. Even after ten minutes when I accidentally touched the core of the garlic stem I burned the tip of my finger!)

Char scraped, seeds scrapped, and stems sidelined, all the good roasted bits went into the food processor with some salt. I squeezed the roasted limes in too, and even put in a bunch of the pulp which flowed eagerly out of the rind. Pulse blend magical.

Result… a mild and delicious salsa.

Were I not cooking for a spice-hesitant family, and were I not (surprise!) allergic to jalapenos I may have spiced it up a few notches. I like my spice but the fam does not. The flavour, though, makes up for the lack of spicyness … and you could, of course, add as much spice as you wanted to bring up the temperature.

My only mistake was not doubling the recipe and jarring some of the extra.

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Backyard: Fire

In recognition of yet-another-local-lockdown due to the ongoing pandemic, I'm doing a week of feature blog posts about living in the backyard. From May 10th through 16th, my posts will be themed around life outdoors but as close to home as possible, a few steps out the back door.

It’s been about a month since I settled on my backyard firepit solution but I haven’t said much about the pit itself save for posting a few photos of the results of my outdoor cooking efforts.

My upgrade from a simple steel fire bowl was an effort to find a backyard firepit that answered a number of questions:

How much was I willing to spend?

My initial research had led me to a company out East who build custom iron fire pits. I corresponded with their sales guys for about a week back and forth, negotiating a price, but at the end of the day I wasn’t going to be able to get what I wanted AND have it shipped across the country without spending well over a thousand dollars. I’m all for good quality, but knowing that I also needed to spend some money on firewood and other supplies, that was pushing the budget into the neighbourhood of $1500 which was substantially more than I wanted to spend. I landed on something on the slightly-fancy end of the box-store firepit selection.

How much of my yard was I willing to convert to a permanent fire pit?

A couple months ago I was still debating the question of whether or not to install a permanent firepit in the yard. Given fire regulations and safety considerations, there were a couple candidate spots in the middle of my lawn that were possible locations for this… but only a couple. I was really deciding on what was more important out my backdoor: a fire pit or an open lawn. The compromise was a firepit that could be relocated, moved, or even stored. I have the sense that it will stay in roughly the same space for the rest of this summer, but going with the portable solution avoided major landscaping efforts and converting a part of my yard into “the firepit” forever.

Could I cook on it?

I dug around the internet looking for solutions to my cooking dilemma. I found tripods upon which I could hang a camp oven. I read the reviews of wire racks and iron grates. I contemplated the effort to build a stand-alone spit that I could pound into the soil and from which I could suspend my culinary creations. Ultimately, the firepit I discovered was a single unit that was a cylindrical fire bowl with a notched holder for two included demi-circle cast iron grill attachments. One of those grills is a grated grill, while the other one is a solid half circle of smooth cast iron joy. These both provide direct cooking surfaces but also as somewhere to rest a pan or Dutch oven above or near the fire.

A month after bringing home and setting up my new fire pit I’ve stoked at least five backyard cookouts, seasoned my grills, and begun to seriously dabble in open fire cooking… right in my own backyard.

And oh man, are the neighbours ever getting jealous.

Reminder: Blogs are not a replacement for professional advice. Please read my note on safety and safe participation.