The book, Dirty Gourmet: Food for Your Outdoor Adventures, is chock full of recipes and tips for cooking for all of your outdoor adventures, whether that means a five-day backpacking trip through Sequoia National Park, a large family “glampout” at a fancy beach camping resort, or just a quick impulse picnic in your local public lands. We will teach you about important considerations for adapting your food to your trip so that you can execute delicious meals without getting stuck dragging a super heavy backpack or becoming a slave to your camp kitchen.

The year’s first winter storm in California is finally upon us, and it’s getting us excited about plans to host some wildflower-filled events to celebrate the book’s launch. We will keep you posted on dates and locations soon!

Until then, we’re back in our camp kitchens creating more recipes to share with you starting with a twist on a classic (one of our favorite things to do). Pineapple Coconut Upside Down Cake is conveniently vegan, making it a bit healthier and easier to execute at your next winter campfire.

Drape blankets across all your camp chairs and grab a Vanilla Cider Cocktail to accompany gazing at the Pleides and Orion.

At home, we place the whole eggplant in the oven, but at camp it can be wrapped tightly in foil and tossed directly in the embers of your campfire. Roast it until it’s very soft and finish the dish in a skillet on the grate of your campfire or on a camp stove.

I’ve had it both with and without peas mixed in, but I definitely prefer it with peas. I brought a bag of frozen peas and they were fine even after defrosting in my cooler for two days.

Serve this as a healthy appetizer with fresh veggies, or make it a meal with flatbread and a simple pot of beans. Enjoy!

This attitude is very common among outdoorspeople. Most of us have been going out there to find seclusion and ourselves for a long time. We all want others to experience this, in theory, but not in the same place we’re doing it. Wes and I had this discussion as we slowly trolled through the first-come, first-serve campgrounds looking for a place to sleep. It is often hard to find a site, but it was ridiculous this time. And the worst part of it was that some of the people we spoke to were actually quite rude. We witnessed arguments, park rangers regulating improper parking, wildflower crushing, and frowny faces. Camping is supposed to bring out good vibes and connection! What was this all about? Don’t these people know the rules??

We ended up backcountry camping, which is an option most people don’t know about (or maybe aren’t comfortable with), and it was one of the most relaxing nights we’ve had in the park. Sunset fading to a full moon, quiet, and our own personal field of untrampled wildflowers. We cooked these hearty mushroom french dip sandwiches, adapted from this recipe, on the grill at a day use area before heading out so we didn’t have to carry much with us (since we didn’t even bring real packs).

When more people want to spend time outdoors, the need to protect more places for all of us to fit in will increase. This is a good thing! But let’s all do our best to communicate the important outdoor ethics that we know, and learn the ones that we don’t so we can keep these places wild. They belong to us all.

Fall is (slowly) taking over now, which is a great time for us to think back before we think forward to the next season. What went right? What went wrong? Did we find new places to explore more? Did we come up with any new ideas to put into practice? The answers are all yes for us. What about you?

Some things we learned:

• Maple sugar can be melted into water to make pretty perfect maple syrup that doesn’t spill in your pack. Coconut oil can be found in individual packets fairly easy, and is solid at room temperature, coming close to solving the same spillage issue for backpacking with oil.
• If you’re cooking for a crowd, this Camp Chef Explorer stove is an awesome thing to own. A cast iron griddle is, too. We’re excited about having a large propane tank so we don’t have to waste so many small green canisters, since we do so much camp cooking.
• Leave Los Angeles for a road trip north at 4:15am, and you’ll sail. You’ll be in San Francisco by 10:30am, or Tahoe by noon. This is very doable for a quick 3-day weekend trip. We’re going to start planning more camping trips around there.
• If you’re not sure how much fuel is left in your compressed gas canister, you can float it in water and it will float at the line the fuel is down to. Thank you to the Outessa participant that taught us this one!

While teaching our Campfire Cooking classes for the REI Outessa events this summer, we came up with a few recipes. The Mountain Berry Cobbler we recently posted was one, and here is another. This is a simple sandwich that reminded us how good simple can be. We used a spicy dairy-free pesto, which is a good option to have around for sandwiches in warm weather, where perishability is a factor.

We started looking at our pie irons as leftover transformers. The pesto and cheddar were reused ingredients from other meals we’d made. When we eventually ran out of these ingredients, we switched to a chocolate and Probar Almond Butter sandwich, which was also incredible.

Fall doesn’t mean camping season is over. It means you get your favorite trails to yourself. Let this beautiful season begin!

We taught three classes: Campfire Cooking, Backpacking Cooking, and Fun Family Camp Cooking. Our first class of each day was “Campfire Cooking.” This was a fun class to teach, even though we couldn’t have an actual campfire on the premises. We did some magic cooking, and made this delicious and impressive Mountain Berry Cobbler in our virtual campfire. We got LOTS of positive feedback, and tested this recipe about 8 times, so we feel pretty confident that your co-campers will love it too.

This cobbler is a quick and easy dessert, but would also go great with a cup of coffee the next morning. It’s not too late to sign up for Outessa Weekend #2 in Powder Mountain, Utah. We’ll be there September 9, and hope to see you too!

Aimee is the baker. Mai-yan and I like to bake for Aimee as a joke. You should’ve seen the soggy granola-crusted cheesecake we attempted for her birthday last year. (“Water bath? Springform pan? Wait-what? We have to chill it for 4 hours? It’s 10pm now and we are ready to sing Happy Birthday!”). So it was an equally funny joke when my friend from work brought me some sourdough starter. I kept it alive because I couldn’t let him down.

Aimee lent me her book, Josey Baker Bread, and I spent a day off following the rules and baking some bread. It came out “great.” Brown, sour flavored, bread shaped. I didn’t love it, though. There wasn’t anything special about it. So I gave it away.

I tried again when I visited my parents in Las Vegas a few weeks later. We were at the stage when you let it sit on the counter for 3 hours before shaping the loaf, and after 1 hour, it had blown up like a balloon and oozed out of the bowl all over the counter. My mom made me bake it anyway, and it turned out like bread again, and everyone ate it (I told them I was testing their politeness threshold).

It took me months to want to try again, and by that time, it was last week, and it was 100 degrees outside. I did NOT want to turn on my oven. I decided it was time to test this thing out as a Dirty Gourmet recipe, so I set up my backyard fire pit and got out some charcoal and a dutch oven. I followed the recipe for a “hearth loaf,” which is free form and you get to slash the top of the bread with a scalpel, leaving that beautiful crack in the top. I followed the Dutch Oven Temperature Chart we often use, but it doesn’t go high enough in temperature so I added a few extra coals. The first loaf baked quickly and burned all across the bottom, but I’ve never seen such color and texture on a homemade crust before! The coals had died down significantly by the second loaf’s turn to bake (have an extra batch ready), so it took longer, but it still baked up crusty and sour like I wanted.

This is how I’ll be baking my bread from now on, and I’m going to be baking a lot more often now that I can avoid turning on my oven.

Camping and baking can be more tricky. I recommend doing the whole process at camp, rather than trying to travel with shaped loaves. Start with your backyard. That still counts as getting outside in my book!

Aside from veganizing it, there are a couple of other things I wanted to change about the recipe. First, in the original recipe, we called for canned or frozen corn. That still works fine, but with the abundance of corn in summer, I opted to use fresh. It’s worth the effort to grill it and then cut it off the cob for some smoky flavor. Second, this is a great recipe to make entirely on the campfire. Grill the veggies on the fire and then cook the soup in a dutch oven instead of on your camp stove (of course you still can just use your camp stove though!).

Instead of sour cream, I used cashew cream that I made ahead of time at home. This thickens the soup beautifully and makes it rich and satisfying. You can substitute 1 cup of vegan sour cream if you don’t want to make the cashew cream.

I’ve always wanted to make potato skins on the campfire, but I didn’t want the extra task of dealing with the rest of the potato. I finally devised a way to do it with no waste or second recipe. I cut the potato into thick disks, or medallions. They baked up nicely in a dutch oven in a matter of about 15 minutes. A dutch oven would do larger quantities, but I also like the idea of using a pie iron and having my guests cook up their. This would make cooking them into more of an activity, and it would be more difficult to get filled up before dinner. (It’s hard to stop yourself from shoveling too many potatoes into your mouth when you’re hungry- or ever).

I recently tested this recipe out while I was stuck in the latest “storm of the century” on the east coast (we’ve been having a lot of those lately). I was in North Carolina, which got more ice than snow. Though dangerous, the woods looked incredibly beautiful. It was as if every tree branch and blade of grass was encased in glass.

Campfire food is my favorite kind to make in the winter. No one should have to be banished away from the warmth while cooking for the rest of the group.

If you’re intimidated by dutch oven cooking, this is a great recipe to start with. It’s not super easy to burn, which is always a concern with cooking on a campfire, and even if it does burn, it will probably be salvageable if you just scoop it out from the middle.

You can vary the fruit according to the season, but I love the combination of cranberries and apples. Both are tart and add a bright element to this crisp, in contrast to the sweet topping. I love the subtle coconut flavor from virgin coconut oil, but you can use refined coconut oil if you don’t like that flavor. A good pinch of salt really makes a difference in the topping, so make sure you taste it before you bake it and add more if needed.

To avoid having to bring your entire package of flour, sugar, etc, measure and mix the dry ingredients at home. You can mix them in a ziplock bag or in a tupperware. In this case, you would have one container for the fruit and another for the topping.

This weekend, we wanted to focus on the holiday season while camping at Leo Carrillo (our favorite standby local spot- especially in the winter). We decorated camp in festive lights and centerpieces, and played Christmas music that we’d downloaded onto our phone before the trip. We’ve been doing mostly homemade gifts for each other this year, and wanted to start a tradition of homemade ornaments as well.

I wasn’t sure about this salt dough ornament recipe, but it worked out great on the campfire!

Salt dough is a quick and easy dough that you can easily make at camp with kids. It becomes the consistency of Play Dough, and you can shape it into whatever you want. We made one in Ravi’s favorite shape- an ‘O’- and another in Asha’s favorite shape- a rocketship.

A few notes:

• When forming your ornaments, don’t forget to poke a hole for a string to feed through later. We used a glow stick bracelet as our hole poker, but a stick would work just fine.
• The children tried to eat the ornaments as soon as I handed them over. They do resemble cookies, but they do not taste like them. Don’t worry- there’s nothing toxic or dangerous in the dough if this happens to you.
• Cookie cutters work great for this project, but I just cut out freehand shapes with a knife.
• The original recipe for these suggested to bake them in a low oven for 2 hours. I tried baking one in a pie iron directly in the fire, and the rest were done in a cast iron skillet on the grate. All dried out well. The one baked in the pie iron turned a lovely golden brown.

Decorate your ornaments with markers or paint after they dry. Then hang them all over camp, or on your Christmas tree back at home. Happy Holidays!