I love to cook
and I have some interesting dishes which I’ve created over the past 40-some years since I became an adult and waded out into the world. But I have one story about food and cooking which has stuck with me for well over 30 years now…
My late in-laws spent their weekends and summers in a Jeep Wagoneer (a Jeep station wagon), driving around the national forest service gravel roads within the Gifford Pinchot Forests of southwest Washington state. My mother in law, Pearl, would pack a cardboard box with inserts (for 16 oz glass bottles of pop) full of cans of pop, candy bars, nuts and small bags of chips and a cooler full of sandwiches and fresh fruit in season. Les, my father in law, would drive and Pearl got the front seat, the rest of us piled into the two sets of seats and the back. It was the 1970s and traffic laws were more lax and life was a lot slower.
So I got “trained” by the best on how to prepare for a trek into the woods in October or November for an Opening Weekend for deer or elk hunting.
Round about 1983 or 1984 my ex-husband and our best friend and I set out for the plateau above the Columbia River north of White Salmon, Washington which is about an hour and a half drive from our home base in Clark County, Washington. I’d packed us up for four days in the wilderness, with food to cook for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. I was Camp Cook while the two guys were out there in the woods with rifles seeking some future dinners.
Neither of them shot anything but ghosts that week, and all in all it was an unmemorable hunting trip. Except for one thing. The Shovel Burgers.
Because I had brought hamburger and weiners (that’s what we called them in the day, not hot dogs) to cook for dinners. Bacon and eggs for breakfast and sandwich meat and soups for lunches. I brought spices for the meat and condiments from mayo to mustard to ketchup; lettuce, pickle and tomatoes for sandwiches. Even milk and a box of cereal if no one wanted hot breakfast. Napkins, paper towels and even tin foil. Spatulas and silver ware and a tub and dish soap to clean up after each meal.
I brought along everything except the kitchen sink — and my cast iron pan to cook over the fire. Which I didn’t find out until the first evening there. We’d come in, in later morning. Set up camp, which included me hunting down and dragging up the hillside of the tongue of land we chose for camp some rocks the size of dinner plates, to form a ring to build our campfire inside of — to prevent the fire escaping and starting a forest fire.
So we’d put in a good, hard day’s work and our camp was great. Campfire burning, popup chairs set out, our travel popup table set up with the “kitchen” goods beside it. Ready to make those first night burgers to enjoy and I couldn’t find my pan. I spent 20 minutes or more searching everything for my pan. To no success, because I hadn’t packed the damned thing. So we were miles and miles from any store, much less a restaurant and it was already dusk. But no way to cook the food…
Until I spotted the shovel sitting up against the opened truck tailgate, there to shovel dirt over the fire if need be. It was a commercial grade flat shovel with a flat nose, made to shovel hot road slurry, the type the Ex used at work, where he worked building roads.
This isn’t perfect, and it’s not wrapped in layers of Tin Foil to protect the food from previous uses of the shovel, but you can get the idea:
So I grabbed it up and wrapped it in a couple layers of Tin Foil and set it out over the fire and I used it to cook Shovel Burgers for dinner that night, and eggs and bacon the next morning, too. In fact, that shovel was the means of cooking almost everything we ate for that four days. I just had to watch how hot the wood handle got near the shovel so it didn’t catch fire, too!
So whenever you find yourself in a kitchen missing some “necessary” bit of specialty kitchen equipment? Remember my weekend with the Shovel Burgers and do a bit of #MacGyvering of your own.
How was your weekend?