A Forest Dinner
It seems fitting to me to start this with an early-season forest dinner. In other words, I went camping and got to cook for friends over an open fire, something I can’t do every day. I enjoy the challenge of cooking in the outdoors, the excess char I can get away with, and the organic happiness that we feel when we spend time outside (even if it's pouring rain).
A note: I really enjoy reading recipes more in the fashion of storytelling, I mostly reference cookbooks only for their lists of ingredients and take direction from the titles. To me, cooking is a way of building knowledge, so that eventually, if not already, you, too, can simply look at a list of ingredients and hop into the kitchen. If you’re already there, call me and let’s cook.
Another note: I love brown paper and lists. I write most the menus to house dinners on brown paper, a theme that will often pop up in these stories.
THE DINNER
Thinking through a forest dinner, whether we’re out camping for the weekend or made a point to build a bonfire, I almost always choose a fish for the main event. It’s relatively easy to cook, hard to mess up, and impresses the friends. When shopping for ingredients at the local co-op, I picked up two dressed rainbow trout (dressed=all innards removed, but head and tail still intact) from a local spring-fed trout farm, Rushing Waters. I stuffed them with Meyer lemon slices and thyme on-site on the picnic table next to the campfire, and gently lay them onto the oiled cast iron griddle heated over the flames. A few distracted minutes spent wrapping up the paper packaging and laughing with a beer in hand, I flipped the trout. They spend even less time on the second side before being moved to a metal serving platter.
I will always choose the local Wisconsin version of my ingredients if available, but I also am grateful for the abundance of things we have access to year-round. Like the kale in the salad– it’s there for bulk and something green in a diet of otherwise oatmeal, carrots, and hummus. The dressing is almost too thick to be called a vinaigrette, a mix of maple and tahini, with enough salt and acid to balance the sweetness. A few good cracks of black pepper and it’s drizzled between the layers of burnt leaves.
In the time it took to cook the fish and char the kale, I was rolling out sourdough flatbreads and tossing them straight onto the hot grill grate. I brought along a raw dough I had made the day before we left for the campsite and kept it in the fridge overnight. I wasn’t worried about it–the dough happily fermented away in April outside temperatures until I used it later that night. I flipped over the cutting board I had been using to oil the kale and dusted it with flour, then sliced off chunks of dough using my bench scraper (yes, I bring my bench scraper camping. I consider it an indispensable kitchen item, even outside). By the light of my headlamp, I stretched the dough and dropped it flat onto the oiled grill grates directly over the white-hot embers I’d moved from the main fire. Slice, stretch, fire, repeat until all the dough was gone and I had created a mountain of crispy flatbreads.
I did make a few things ahead of time to cut down on prep and mess at the campsite itself, like that tahini maple dressing. I had found frozen Wisconsin sweet corn in my freezer, and made a fluffy cornbread with it and another locally stone ground corn flour. I added a few chopped sprigs of rosemary and some black pepper. I baked it, wrapped it in foil, and set it aside with the rest of the camp gear. While the cornbread was baking, I blended a literal bunch of parsley, the juice of a lemon, a serrano pepper, salt, and olive oil together to make the green sauce. For what the sauce was intended, I didn’t really have a plan. The plan was to spoon it over bread, fish, chips… anything. But like the kale, it was a welcomed bright green and added an acidic tang to each bite.
We moved the whole mess to the picnic table and gathered our bowls, flatware, and drinks. We dove into the trout first, still steaming from the grill. You could smell the burnt edges of the lemons and thyme that spilled out during cooking, and they tasted even better with a piece of the sweet, white meat. The kale salad was passed around, along with the plate of blackened flatbreads. Extra dressing and a parsley-lemon sauce I’d made the day previous were handed over the table as people wanted to dip pieces of bread into something saucy. I stacked pieces of trout on top of a bread, chewed slowly amongst the chaos of dinner, and washed it away with a sip of cold beer.
THE PAIRING
As much as I wish I could tell you we paired this with a nice, citrusy white wine, something natural and bubbly, I can’t. Natural wine is by far my drink of choice, but when the friends show up with a 30-rack of Hamm’s, that becomes the drink of choice.
A QUOTE
“Every meal you make carries within it the ghosts of other meals” — Thom Eagle, First, Catch
Everything you have cooked previously is knowledge you use, and every recipe is also built on the histories of the ingredients and other recipes that led to it. It evolves and becomes your own, until you pass it on to another.
A RECOMMENDATION
My checklist of camp kitchen gear: flatware for eating, a sharp knife, a cutting board or two, a cast iron pot, I like a cast iron griddle plate and copper pans to cook with over the fire, tongs, bench scraper, chopsticks, serving spoons, a spatula (a fish spatula or otherwise, but definitely metal), a whisk and a large bowl, serving platters or large plates, little sturdy glasses for drinking, a few kitchen towels, salt (fine and flakey), pepper, and olive oil. To clean up: biodegradeable soap, a sponge, and a drying towel. And if your friends don’t bring their own plates or bowls, make sure to bring extra!
-Elizabeth
