Bill of Larder from the 2008 GNE War, Courtesy of Vance, Thunder Mountain's Favorite Camp Cookie

From UtterChaos
Jump to: navigation, search

I'm sure that's the smartass retro word for "shopping list"

This will feed 5 people. It will feed 4 people with leftovers (seriously you will be all 'man i feel bad for ethiopians now'). It will probably feed 6 people and is probably scalable to more but some things will fail if you go too much higher; at around 8 I imagine you'll want to upgrade your kitchen gear to increase throughput.

VEGETABLES

- Bag of Vidalia onions (at least 4 onions)

- Bag of potatoes (10 lb)

- Small bag of carrots - you shouldn't need more than 1lb

NEEDS REFRIGERATION

- 1 lb butter

- 16 oz honey (or so, seriously, just grab most of a lb of honey from your meadmaking supplies)

- Sausages: 2 sausages per lunch per person. Get large sweet Italian sausages (McKinnons, Star, Costco I suppose)

- For roasts, 1/2 lb meat per person per meal (McKinnons, Costco)

- Beer - make sure you have this, don't run out, you need it for every meal (Costco for shit, or your local liquor store for beer that doesn't suck)

- 1 package hot dogs (Star, unless you really want leftovers, then Costco)

- Mustard, if you like

SPICES / HARD GOODS

- Salt

- Pepper

- Beef broth, if you like - not strictly necessary but might come in handy. Just bring one can for each roast/stew you want to make.

- Jar of pre-minced garlic. Large. You won't use it all, but it's awesome.

BAKERY

- 1 Costco flat of croissants from the bakery

- 12-pack bagels (Costco)

- Hot dog buns

KITCHEN GEAR

- Forks, knives, spoons. Cups, bowls. You need 4-6 of each.

- 2-4 serious plates will be required. You won't eat off of these very much, mostly you will use these as platters.

- 2 honest to Christ Knives. You're already roughing it, don't fuck around when it comes to knives. Besides, it says you know what things must be quality when you show up with a tote full of plastic bowls and nickel-and-dime silverware and a $200 God Damned Knife.

You want two because there will usually be someone who is being all well-intentioned and wants to help and you want the help because otherwise you have to do it yourself.

- A ladle.

- A spatula.

- A potato peeler.

- A frying pan.

- A Dutch Oven.

- A propane stove with extra propane tanks.

- A cutting board.

- Something flat to use as a food prep surface. If this means you use the cooler, fine, but make sure you pull absolutely everything you need out of there before you start.

- Dish soap, sponges, dishrag, and a washbasin.

- Paper towels.

NOTE: A lot of the stuff below is pretty vague. "Put the potatoes in." "Dice the onions." That's because I am assuming you know how to fucking cook. If you are an idiot, these instructions are not for you. I'm not going to tell you to put in 1/4 tsp pepper. Do you want to taste the fucking pepper? Then put it in the pot. I'm not eating this, you're eating this. Should you peel the potatoes? Well, I put a goddamned potato peeler in the list. It's up to you. You're in the woods and your potatoes are covered in dirt. You do the easiest thing you feel like to clean them up, mkay?

I know someone was going to fucking ask some asinine retarded short-bus hydrocephalic fetal alcohol syndrome wrong fuckin number of chromosomes SuperDuperMan special olympics ass question like "Hey, should I peel the potatoes?" I don't know, genius, do you want skin on the potatoes or not? It's going in your piehole, not mine.

First, figure out what you are serving Friday night. Your options are "roast stew", "sausages", or "beer". If beer, you're not making food on Friday night.

You need to be cooking for these meals:

Friday dinner Saturday breakfast Saturday lunch Saturday dinner Sunday breakfast

You may also want to be cooking for Sunday lunch. If you're camping with Kim and Tom, plan for Sunday lunch because those fuckers can never seem to pack their shit up in time to leave before the camp closes and nothing's sadder than rolling out at 11am with those two still surrounded by a full tent of crap being all "I gotta wait till the archery range closes for the man with the metal detector to go find my arrows" and you know they're not going to leave the camp till like 4 and if you don't cook lunch for them they're going to starve and die and you don't want that on your conscience now do you.

You only have one option for breakfast or lunch. For Friday dinner, if you aren't sure if you'll be able to get a fire going for a dutch oven, you can make the sausages "lunch" as a post-travel snack.

Do your math accordingly.

PREPROCESSING

You can do as much of this ahead of time as you like. I suggest doing the honey butter ahead of time just because non-honeyed butter in the original paper wrapping gets destroyed real fast in an ice-and-water filled cooler.

  • Honey Butter

Soften (DO NOT MELT) the butter (all of it) in a container that it only fills halfway. Once it is softened, squeeze a bunch of honey in. The original recipe was 4 parts butter to 3 parts honey, but frankly, fuck it; the main thing you are going to use this for is caramelizing on bagels, so getting a bit more sugar there to caramelize is a win. Mix it 1:1. Stick a spoon in that shit and stir it until it is whippy and creamy. You'll know when it's nice and good.

  • Roasts

You want about 1/2 lb of roast per person, for each meal. If you want to brown, cross-hatch, and garlic up the roasts ahead of time, and like beer marinade or soy marinade them in a big ziploc bag, the people you are feeding will jizz all over themselves.

  • Bagels

Costco bagels don't come cut in half. You could do that before going out to the camp.

  • Potatoes, onions, carrots

If you cut your shit up ahead of time you're a tool; this always goes poorly. Leave them alone in their bags and cut them when you're about to use them.

HOW TO MAKE THINGS

Breakfast: Honey Butter Bagels

  • Cut your bagels in half
  • Put honey butter on them
  • Put the frying pan on the stove, turn the burner on
  • Leave it there for a minute or two to heat up
  • Put your bagels in there butter-side-down. You'll see the butter melt and form this pool of oil. Don't fuck with it. When the butter starts soaking back into the bagels, turn the bagels around (on their faces - this is just to make sure that one side of the bagel face isn't burnt while the other side of the bagel face is soggy with butter). Whatever you do don't flip the fucking bagel, you only buttered them on one side for a reason. Your bagels are basically done cooking when the butter has receded most of the way back into the bagel. Alternately, when you smell scorching. Don't leave the bagels on there past the part where there's black burnt shit on them.
  • Pull the bagel off the frying pan. Put it on the plate. Put new bagels on the frying pan. Each person will eat 2-3 half-bagels.
  • DON'T FUCKING CLEAN THE PAN. If someone's hungry for something more than just bagels, you can dice up about 3 potatoes and half an onion, and throw that into the grease after you're done caramelizing bagels. Pretty much you want to do this every time you use the pan; cook off the grease and oils with some onions and potatoes, and serve this to Kim^H^H^Hsome fucker who will eat anything. Or the camp dog, that works too.
  • Let the bagels cool before serving. They're OK right out of the pan but they are fucking awesome (and good hangover food) if you give the caramelized sugar a chance to cool and solidify and become chewy.
  • You don't have to clean shit here. You should be serving the onions and potatoes in like one bowl, and the bagels on one plate. You won't dirty up enough stuff to warrant cleanup duty.

Lunch: Sausages and onions and potatoes

  • Take your sausages
  • Fry them in the fucking pan - the same pan from breakfast. If you were a dipshit and cleaned the pan, throw a pat of honey butter in there.
  • Make sure they're done. Seriously don't give your dudes trichanosis. Raw pork is bad sauce.
  • When you're done with the sausages, throw 1/2 onion and about 3 potatoes, all diced up, into the pan. This will taste meatier than breakfast's onions-and-potatoes! Congratulations.
  • Make sure you're scraping all the black shit into the onions and potatoes while you're cooking them. You're camping, water is at a premium, washing dishes sucks. Give the cleanup crew a break and scrape the pan clean before making them wash your pot.

Dinner: The roast beef stew

  • Take your meat. Brown it on all sides. Crosshatch it, and rub salt, garlic, and pepper in it. Put it in the dutch oven.
  • Chop up 15 potatoes or so, and 1 to 1.5 nice bigass Vidalia onions. Throw them in the pot.
  • Chop up enough carrots and throw them in to convince yourself that you're not just eating the same thing you ate for the last two meals. Because they're colorful. That's why they're there. That's it.
  • If you brought the beef stock, that goes in now.
  • Pour a beer in. If it's Guinness or something else of quality, you are kind of obliged to take a few long pulls off of it. If you're leeching off of the camp's Amstel Light keg (you tool), just put it in the pot.
  • Make sure you've got enough liquid for stock. Yes, the veggies will cook down and release some liquid, but no, it won't be enough to calculate. If you don't have enough stock, get some water and put that in. Don't go thinner than 1 part beer : 2 parts water. (So, put in about a plastic cup or Poland Spring bottle's worth of water, that should really be sufficient.)
  • You made a fire already, right? Oh, I guess you're fucked. OK. You want a fire at the "coals" stage. If you are like me and can actually build a fire, and you have the wood nearby to do it, you can get to this point without accelerants in about 20 minutes.

Take your dutch oven and put it on the coals. Put some coals on the lid. I'm skeptical about the usefulness of this in some situations, because you're basically boiling the shit out of your stew, but whatever, it's what you *do* with a Dutch Oven.

  • 45 minutes later, pull it off the coals. Serve. You want your ladle, and you want to cut chunks off of the roast. Don't forget to grab the flat of croissants, they are really good with the broth this makes.

OTHER THINGS TO REMEMBER

  • Every fucking piece of food above goes well with beer. This is good because if you bring soda to an SCA event that makes you a choad. I'd stay with water or a light wheat beer for breakfast but the bagels do work with the beer.
  • Everything above is cooked by boiling or high heat frying. This is for sanitation purposes. You probably suck at keeping things super clean in the wilderness. If it's been pan fried in boiling fat I am pretty comfortable guaranteeing you're not going to die of a bacterial infection. If for some reason you can't get a hot fire or preferably a stove for breakfast and lunch, stop and fucking find one.
  • The pack of hot dogs above is for kids. SCA events have so many goddamned kids. And you'll meet some people and you'll want to have them hang out and then POP there's a kid that just came right out of the woodwork. Kids get all picky about burnt-tasting potatoes and onions, and then their parents have to go take care of them, and then you're not hanging out with their parents anymore. Kids love hot dogs. They also love glowsticks; I got like 10 of the Thunder kids to go do something useful with their time (read: do something not around me, not talking to me) by handing them glowsticks.
Retrieved from "http://wiki.utter-chaos.net/ucwiki/index.php?title=Bill_of_Larder_from_the_2008_GNE_War,_Courtesy_of_Vance,_Thunder_Mountain%27s_Favorite_Camp_Cookie&oldid=11165"