Bored Suburban Dad Cooks: Campfire Cooking

Maybe 3 or 4 steps above Neolithic

As always with BSD Cooks, recipes first:

Bored Suburban Dad's Extra Fart Chili...Campfire Option

The ingredients below are for my tried-and-true Extra Fart Chili Recipe. The Instructions are how to make it over a campfire, like your Gramma (or Great Gramma for you young-'uns) used to have to do in their "Greatest Generation" Great Depression unnaturally hard life until WWII ended kind of way.

Ingredients

2 T high-heat oil (like canola)
1 large sweet onion, chopped all rough like a cowboy would, because they had shit for knife skills
1 jalapeño, chopped, seeds and everything 
8 garlic cloves, chopped
2 lb ground beef
1 lb Bob Evans or Jimmie Dean ground sage sausage (or spicy if you want more kick)
¼ C chili powder
2 T ground cumin
1 t paprika 
1 28oz can diced tomatoes; juices and all
2 15oz cans kidney or pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 15oz can of some other bean, I dunno, pick one
14 oz (canned or otherwise) beef broth (smoky is best)
Sour cream and grated cheese of your choice for garnish, but no cilantro because that tastes like soap

Special ingredients:

1. 12” cast iron pan with sides at least 2 ½” deep

2. Campfire cooking grate of your choice

How

1. Get that fire going 90 minutes to 2 hours before you need it; you’re gonna want a nice roaring fire and a bed of hot coals, but you'll want the fire spread out so your grate and pan isn't, you

   

   Good for French food, but bad for the campsite

   
   know, engulfed in flames because you made a fire with 28-inch logs standing on end

2. Adjust your grate so that it’s just above - a couple inches - the actual flames; perhaps a foot or so above the coal bed

3. Set that heavy, cowboy-lookin' cast iron pan on the grate. Make sure everything is sturdy cuz you’ll be stirring, and the last thing you want is for the grate to collapse and dump your pan and its lovely contents into the fire. This is not an autobiographical statement, because I’m a gods-damned professional

4. Oil the bottom of the pan with a high-heat-tolerant oil like canola; just coat the bottom, but not so much that what you’re putting in it is swimming. 

5. Onions. Saute until brown, like maybe 5 minutes or until they're...brown

6. Add jalapeño and garlic, for like a minute or two

7. Add ground beef and sausage. Brown it, mix it all around.

8. Add all the spices to this aggregate and mix it all around, covering everything

9. Add tomatoes and juices, the drained beans, and mix it all around, but carefully-er because your pan is getting pretty full

   
   

10. Add only about half the broth. You’re going to save some, because this chili will thicken faster than the stove, so you’ll want to add broth occasionally to keep the chili from getting too thick too quickly, not cooking through, and sticking to your pan

11. Boil like crazy for 30-45 minutes. Add broth when needed. If you run out of broth, add a little water if you need to

12. Move the pan around the grate too, to find a slightly cooler spot if you need to.

13. Time’s up, ring the dinner triangle, call the cowboys in, serve it up the same way as above: sour cream, cheese, etc. Maybe find very manly bowls and manly spoons.

Not only a consequence...but also our goal

There you have it: a chili for the stovetop, made over a fire. Super easy, actually, and your campers and all the surrounding campsites will look upon you with something akin to worshipful adoration. They will talk about you in a legendary sort of way, looking wistfully at the sky whilst they recall that one time this one guy made chili in a big-ass cast iron pan over the open fire, just like our Grammas used to do right after they got done hand-grinding the cow they slaughtered that morning and all the other chores Grammas did in addition to cooking over open fires because of the Depression, and they did it all after they walked uphill both ways from whatever horror they had to do by hand prior to that.

Seriously, I'm not sure what Grampas did, and frankly, we keep holding cowboys and vikings to all this ancient hand-wrought badassery, but history shows us it was consistently the women who did that kind of badassing, and the men apparently just beat the shit out of each other and chewed loudly with their mouths open.

Finished and ready for methane production

I make this chili with lots of extra beans and I made sure to add ground pork to the initial recipe as I made this up a few years ago, because those two things in combination add to your methane output. Hence: extra-fart chili. Our tent, enclosed, that evening, is testament. My boys love this chili not only for the fart factor, but also because it's a fairly flavorful but relatively mild chili, which pleases their chicken-nugget/pepperoni-pizza palates. Doing it over the campfire added this really nice smoky quality to it.

The boys ate with a gusto - an abandon - akin to all those gross, loud, eating-parts of action movies,
where everyone eats with just a little bit much joie de vivre and open-mouth smacking while breathing really loudly through their nose. Seriously. Why do movies do that? Why is the thing with badguys or dudes about to go out on a thing that everyone chews with their mouths open, breathing like they just ran a marathon? Anyway, it was horrifying, but they ate a lot, so I was fairly happy.