I have more to say about our camping experience at Bon Echo, but it’s been so busy around here lately that I’ve hardly had time to regroup.
I wanted to jot this recipe, er, assemblage, before I forgot.
A lot new campers ask me about the meals I make while we’re away. Camping food and outdoor cooking in general is a big mystery until you find yourself having to figure out how to make your family favourites with nothing but a fire pit and a two-burner camp stove.
I have a few campfire recipes that we return to year after year, but this is one of our faves. It’s one of the easiest camping foods you can pull together AND it’s one the kids can actually help making. And that’s a good thing.
I haven’t tried making pizza on the firepit using raw dough, but maybe next year will be the year. :)
Campfire pizza
You need:
- greek pita bread (it’s thicker than the stuff you’d usually buy to eat with hummus)
- a small can of pizza sauce (you did pack the can opener, right?)
- mozzarella cheese (Do yourself a favour and grate it at home and bring it along in a container. If you forgot to grate it, you can cube it instead. Works just fine… and if someone complains just remind them that THEY ARE CAMPING and CAMPING IS NOT LIKE HOME.)
- Maybe now is a good time to let you know about our camping mottos: “Do what you can with what you have” and “Eat what’s on your plate because mummy didn’t pack any extra food.”
- Assemble your ingredients and make your pizzas. You can make it as gourmet as you want. How about grilled red onions, roasted red peppers, chicken, and feta? It’s totally doable. We keep it simple and limit our toppings to a stick of pepperoni we slice on site. You can add whatever you fancy. It’s your pizza man.
- Bake!
It took us awhile to figure out how to bake them so they crisp up on the bottom and get melty on top.
The trick is to create a special camping pizza oven. Mark deserves all the credit for this idea. You basically fashion a little oven out of a bit of aluminum foil. This is what it looks like when the pizzas are baking:
The result is a lovely crisp crust with a perfectly hot top.
I would love to post a photo of the finished product, but our pizzas disappeared so quickly I didn’t even have time to reach for my camera. Sorry. :)
I’m thinking of you as I write this Lynn. :)
If you hate camping you will want to make it easier on yourself. And by “make it easier” I mean:
- choose car camping over canoe camping
- book a spot near a comfort station
- for only a few nights
- and bring inflatable mattresses
- and as many comforts from home that you can squeeze into the car
- and most importantly, don’t go easy on the bug spray. It won’t kill you.
You know what tune I had in my head while I was at Bon Echo? This one. God that makes me laugh.
It’s about blackflies, but I believe that it applies equally to those other bloodsucking savages, mosquitoes.
I hate mosquitoes. I really do. But they absolutely love me, and they love my ankles most of all.
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This Flickr set represents a mere fraction of the photos I took while we were away. You will, no doubt, notice a very high ratio of chipmunk photos. What can I say? They’re cute. (This is one of my faves in the whole bunch.) STEEL YOURSELF FOR THE CUTENESS. You might just fall over.
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We are a camping family. We’ve been going every year since the girls were wee. I think Sarah was about 18 months old when we started camping.
This year we went to a place called Bon Echo Provincial Park. I wanted to share more about it because it is really and truly a lovely spot that deserves a little spotlight shone upon it.
If I had to summarize our trip in a handful of words I’d put it this way: good weather, bad bugs. (In fact, the bugs are going to get their own special post. THAT’S how much I have to say about the matter.)
We chose to visit Bon Echo, not just because it’s totally new to us, but it has some really unique geological features. Mazinaw Rock, for one, is a monolithic escarpment that rises 100 metres straight out of the one of the deepest lakes in Ontario and features ancient native pictographs. It’s one of the largest collections of pictographs in Canada and is designated a national historic site. And it’s breathtaking.
Rocks aside, it goes without saying that whatever place we went to had to have a great beach. The swimming at Bon Echo was pretty close to perfect. There was good sand, bordered by a very large shady area with picnic tables. The main beach is a good size and the swimming area is clear of weeds and is virtually rock-free. I liked that the swimming area was clearly marked with ropes and is divided in two lengthwise, the smaller of which was super shallow and perfect for the youngest of children. You caught a glimpse of that in this post but here’s another view:
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