Festival Cooking.
As somewhat as a novice at festival cooking, and with BJC just around the corner, I would be interested in hearing your favourite festival recipes. I recently bought a camp stove, so I'm hoping to get the most out of it this BJC (and beyond).
Still on my to do list at some point is to compile a festival cook book. Containing quick & easy recipes that can be cooked on a single burner, can easily scale if friends get together & cook a part of the meal each. Or foods that can be cooked beforehand & keep well in a tupperware box.
I mostly just cook tinned foods or pasta with something to stir in while camping for convenience, but I will also often chop & cook up a load of veggies then mix in an unholy amount of pesto.
Another quick an easy meal I like is to boil some rice, then a few minutes before the end tip in a tin of peas & a tin of sweet corn & boil the whole lot up together.
This Chickpea & Chorizo Curry is good too.
If you are just getting your camping kit together, may I also recommend a Kuhn Rikon Colori paring knife. It's a really sharp good quality knife that comes with an excellent blade guard so you don't slice your fingers off when scrabbling around trying to find it.
Talking of cooking gear for camping, I'm still looking for a decent container for cooking oil that is bullet proof, open/closeable with one hand & has a mess free pour. Anyone know of something that fits the bill?
Cous cous is very camping friendly and you can put nuts and raisins or dried fruit in it, and lemon zest if you can be bothered.
If you've just been to the supermarket then grab a rotisserie chicken and some tasty bread and salad and some napkins, and um this is not really a recipe. But it tastes nice.
Those straight to wok noodles can also be used in soup. Thus: fry an onion (if you can be bothered). Add coconut powder (if you have some) and thai curry paste (this is essential). Add plenty of water. Tip in some tofu or chopped up hot dogs from a jar, or whatever other protein stuff you fancy that won't give you food poisoning just because you kept it in a tent. Add some greens if you want. Break up the noodles in the packet and chuck them in. Add fish sauce if you brought any and lime juice ditto.
If you are not fussy then you can make spaghetti sauce of any kind and then stick those noodles in it.
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
This seems a good opportunity for my cous cous recipe:
1. Toss chunks of vegetables (include red onion & garlic) in oil and balsamic vinegar and then roast.
2. Bring to boil :
400ml stock,
1/2 tsp turmeric,
large piece of cinnamon,
juice of one lemon,
juice of 1/2 or one orange,
1 tbsp olive oil,
bay leaf.
When simmering add 250g of cous cous. Take off heat and cover for a few minutes.
Separate cous cous with a fork and add :
Freshly chopped parsley,
chopped dried apricot,
chopped lemon zest,
chopped orange zest,
the roasted vegetables.
Tasty and lasts for days!
Sounds pretty impressive, but I imagine roasting some veg on a campfire or camp stove would be tricky.
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
It would be tricky but I was thinking of making it beforehand, hence the 'it lasts for days' bit.
It's also a good opportunity to use one of my clip-down tupperware boxes. I love those boxes, saddo that I am. Sometimes I pop into Robert Dyas especially to browse the tupperware section and see if they have any new ones for my collection.
Robotic juggle - - Parent #
in boy scouts we put some burgers in tin foil and threw em by the fire till they were cooked (not elegant but if spiced correctly very tasty and juicy)
Robotic juggle - - Parent #
yah but a few of those will have ur heart in a greasy grogg so you may not want to eat it more than once a day
Little Paul - - Parent #
Would be a better call if open fires were allowed at bjc, but they're not ;)
Burgers can be done in a nonstick frying pan though if you're desperate for a burger
I feel qualified to talk about this as I've done it before. My methods range from the laborious and lavish to the lazy but good enough.
If you can be bothered:
Make things beforehand, freeze them and put them as insulated as you can. These will last a few days in English weather so you'll be fine. I recommend chilli or other forms of meat and sauce that you can easily heat up. Rice is easy to cook in a field, so eat lots of it.
At BJC southend we made a great sandwich beforehand filled with meat, onion, cheese, mushrooms and more, it was great, but very difficult to eat.
If you can't be quite as bothered but still want hot food:
Get microwaveable ready meal type things that come in plastic pouches. You can get pasta sauces and other filling type stuff which go great with pasta, or better - rice!
Pot noodle (or ethnic equivalents which tend to be far better but have names I can't read) is easy and cheap as you just need boiling water.
However my current favourites which require the least cooking:
Hummus, avocado, and anything that you like eating hummus with. You can get bread, carrots, tomato, crisps, a spoon etc.
Tinned mackerel and sardines are also both delicious and if you have them with loads of lemon you get a meal with a lot more flavour than most festival food. You can also get mackerel in a bunch of different flavoured sauces if you like. Tinned fish can (as I'm sure you've witnessed) be cooked in the tin on an open fire and is delicious.
Supplement everything with fairly stale bread, crisps and chocolate.
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
"anything that you like eating hummus with"
I've yet to make nice falafels. I've tried various different ingredients but they're never as nice as the packet ones. Should be so simple. What's the secret?
I suspect you are making the common mistake of cooking your fava beans or chick peas first or even worse using tinned ones.If you do this the mix will be hard to form into balls and stodgy to eat because of the high moisture content.If you soak your beans/peas over night,rinse well and put them raw into a food processor with your other ingredients(onions,garlic,chilli,cumin,coriander,salt pepper etc)and pulse till a paste it will form balls and fry into nice light falafel.
forgot to say that you need to leave the mix for a couple of hours before frying this helps with the texture and marinades the flavours.Also if the mix is too wet to fry add a little gram flour.
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
Brilliant, thanks that's exactly the problem! Stodgy and damp, so I add too much flour to dry them out. I have used tinned chick peas before and I also tried the bagged ones - soaking over night then boiling for a few hours. So I still soak them but don't boil them at all, is that right?
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
Apologies, you answered that already - raw in the food processor. Thanks again.
pumpkineater23 - - Parent #
Such a great tip that was Monte... raw chickpeas instead of tinned. Yesterday I added Lebanese seven spice with the mixture, just had them this evening - delicious.
Monte speaks sense! Tinned chickpeas in general are bad. That said there are a lot of foods where I think making your own is a waste of time. I rarely eat falafel but Hummus is definitely one of those. I've made my own once or twice and it just wasn't that great and it was a lot of effort. Tesco in my opinion do the best hummus money can buy (especially since they started putting less tahini in it).
Cedric Lackpot - - Parent #
If your hummus ain't that good, then you're doing it wrong. Homemade hummus is the dog's fucking bollocks, a country mile better than almost anything you can buy, and light years better than the insipid shite the supermarkets slap their own labels on. And it's a tiny fraction of the cost to boot.
For me the key to great hummus was partly getting the proportions right, but probably mostly down to reserving the chick pea boiling water to dilute the finished product to the correct consistency.
Give me what you think is the ideal hummus recipe then and I'll follow it and see whether or not your opinion is valid. I think you're being way too harsh on supermarket bought stuff though. Sainsburys have recently changed theirs and it's gotten a bit better, Waitrose is poor but I'm fairly confident of the fact that Tesco has some of the finest chick pea chefs in the world.
Cedric Lackpot - - Parent #
Gah, hung by me own petard.
This is my recipe, but I confess the quantities are vague because I just know how much to use from experience.
Ingredients :-
1 cup dried chick peas, picked over to remove any duds.
Extra virgin olive oil.
Garlic.
A lemon or two.
Bay leaves.
Tahini.
Method :-
There are numerous methods to hydrate dried pulses. Mine is a quick one. Chuck the chick peas and three or four bay leaves in a pan and cover well with cold water. Put a lid on the pan, bring it to a rolling boil for a minute and then let it simmer for a few more minutes. Turn off the heat and let it stand for an hour. Strain off the liquid and discard it, along with the bay leaves. Put the peas in a pressure cooker, cover well, and bring to the boil at high pressure for 45-60 mins. Allow the pressure cooker to cool, strain the peas but reserve the boiling liquid!!
Peel four cloves of garlic and put them and the strained peas in a blender until reduced to a fairly fine paste, but a bit of texture is nice. You might need to do this in batches if your blender isn't big enough.
Put it all in a large mixing bowl, and add a really generous glug of olive oil, perhaps 100ml or more. Squeeze the lemon(s) and add their juice to taste (it will also help preserve the hummus). Add the zest too if you can be arsed. Add salt if that's your thing, but in truth we're making hummus, not tequila slammers.
Now get your tahini and make sure it is thoroughly mixed. This can be a tedious job if it has been standing a long time. Add, I dunno, 200ml tahini (quite a bit).
Mix everything together, to form a horrible stodgy paste that smells of sesame oil.
Now comes the magic : You're going to use more olive oil, and the pea boiling liquid you reserved, to make the perfect hummus. You add oil to make it more unctuous, until it begins to glisten. And you add boiling water to transform the consistency from aforementioned horrible paste, to gloriously goopy and smooth paste, with the consistency of a very soft cream cheese.
It's that last bit that really makes the difference, and a little trial and error will teach you how much of each far quicker than I can. You can make your basic horrible stodgy paste, then divide into several smaller batches and play around with the quantities of oil and water until you get your perfect hummus, just the way you like it.
Consume with good pitta from a decent Turkish grocer, crudités, crostini, and an awful lot of cheap red wine, or even Retsina if you can get it.
Store the leftovers in the fridge in a covered container, with an thin layer of olive oil on top to help preserve it.
Bon appetit!
Cedric Lackpot - - Parent #
Spotted a mistake : The bay leaves go in the pressure cooker, not the initial boiling water.
As you were chaps!
Robotic juggle - - Parent #
ok this may seem rude, but i love that your typing has an accent. makes me read it in an accent in my brain.
You may be hoisted by a petard, but to be hung by one would be a peculiar turn of events. I'll give this hummus a go within the next 6 months and let you know what I think
Again if you use tinned chick peas your hummus will be inferior. It is worth soaking and boiling dried ones as they have a lower moisture content and better flavour. If you are fussy about not having too much tahini then it must be better to make your own. I like a lot of lemon not too much garlic in mine.The supermarket ones are too finely processed and bland in flavour in my opinion.
Little Paul - - Parent #
J and I tend to eat at the catering stands most of the time these days (especially if Monte is cooking) but we do cook from time to time when there's nothing on the menu J fancies (he can be a fussy bugger)
As we generally don't know the menus in advance, anything we take with us has to be easy to store (as well as easy to cook, quick, hot, filling, one pan, minimum washing up etc)
This one isn't especially classy, and it makes wilful use of convenience food, but it's hot, filling, cheap, quick, easy to wash up and (most of) the ingredients store easily in a tent for up to a week. Serves 2, takes about 10 minutes.
- 1 packet Uncle Bens "spicy mexican" express rice
- 1 packet tortillas
- half a red pepper, sliced.
- half a red onion, sliced.
- cheese (more about cheese storage in a minute)
- harissa paste to perk it up a bit
Fry off the pepper and onion for a couple of minutes to soften them. Add the packet rice to the pan along with some water (as per the instructions) - while that's cooking spread some harissa and cheese on a couple of tortillas. Add the cooked rice, roll up and scoff.
The other half of the pepper/onions keep well in a tupperware container. For cheese, only buy in small amounts.
We never have a grater with us (and the pre-grated packet cheese is a step too far for me) so we tend to avoid hard cheese and make a lot of use of soft blue cheese or those sausages of smoked cheese.
We don't have a fridge in the van, but a washing up bowl full of water left under the van (in the shade) keeps the container with the cheese in it fairly cool (handy place to store a pint of milk as well) - at Bungay, before we got the van that bowl of water used to live in the hedge.
Cheese doesn't present much of a storage problem anyway as we tend to snack on it with biscuits/bread throughout the day - so it's never around for much more than 2 days anyway.
Other favourite standby foods - soup is great for lunch on a cold day. Don't like tinned soup? The "carrot/potato/stock cube" approach works fine in a field (and stores just as well) - overcook the potato slightly and use a fork to mash it up a bit.
Orin's famous courgette + lemon linguini also works well, but really needs 2 burners. Perhaps join forces with a friend, one of you cook the pasta the other cooks the courgettes.
#recipe
Little Paul - - Parent #
Oh, and this works better than you might expect: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/nigella-lawson/rice-and-tomato-soup-recipe.html
My courgette & lemon linguine is famous?!
I've yet to come up with a decent way to juice a lemon using my minimal equipment in the field though. Best I've come up with so far is squeezing the halves then just fishing the seeds out of the pan. Although come to think of it I've got some muslin cloth now (& have overcome my fear of using it) that I use for ginger beer production that wouldn't take up any extra space in my kit...
Little Paul - - Parent #
I juice lemons with a teaspoon (even at home) and strain the pips out by running the juice through my fingers.
I'll see if I can find a video of someone doing it.
Little Paul - - Parent #
What I do, is sort of a combination of these two ideas, but rearranged so I can do them both at once. The juice is trained through the same hand as the lemon.
https://youtube.com/v/Y9VN1dVosjw
https://youtube.com/v/SHGtzm3Uous?start=32
I've used the fork technique for years now. If I'm worried about pips, I use a separate bowl first and fish out the pips. It's an amazingly efficient technique.
You've got a sink in your BOV haven't you! Not sure about using my hand as a strainer in the field (especially with cut & bruised hands after a night of gladiatorial combat, I'm with Miracle Max on that front) but will give it a try though.
Little Paul - - Parent #
lemon juice and cuts is erm "interesting" - I think in those situations I'd probably go with Dee's suggestion of juicing into a cup or bowl and then picking the pips out with the fork/spoon whatever.
Look, I'm not going to claim it was amazing, but what I did the other day was really simple and surprisingly good.
1) rinse some bulgar and add to pot
2) add water and make hot.
3) put on lid, turn off heat, add crushed garlic, leave for ages until liquid gone and fluffy.
4) to serve, mix with water, olive oil & salt in bowl (cold water if contents are still really hot).
Herbs would be an option, but I doubt I added any (rosemary if anything).
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