Tin Foil Meals

We just spent a very fun, but rainy, week camping. My sister and I plan all the dinners for the week and one of our favorites is a tin foil meal. This was inspired by my husband's many years of Boy Scouts and he is definitely the master of the charcoal. We just bring all the ingredients and everyone builds their own dinner.

We start with a good sized sheet of heavy duty foil sprayed with non-stick cooking spray. We flop down a hamburger patty (or two if you're a very hungry camper ☺), then add sliced potatoes, carrots, zucchini, onion, salt and pepper, and a slice of bread. Yup, that's right, a slice of bread. The bread absorbs the liquids from the veggies as they cook and it sorta turns into stuffing. Our group is split 50/50 between those of us who like to add bread and those who don't. (I vote yes! to the bread). This dinner must have belonged to a non-bread-adder.

 We don't add anything like ketchup or hot sauce until after everything cooks because we found that any sugar in a sauce just makes the meal burn easier, we figured that out the hard way years ago!

Now wrap up the foil and then double wrap it in a second sheet of foil so nothing can leak out while it cooks. Then you give your foil dinner to The Mayor who sets it on the charcoal. None of us can figure out how he remembers whose dinner is whose (there are 9 of us) but he remembers! It must be his Eagle Scout skills kicking in, incredible memory stimulated by the smell of food cooking in the woods.

 We use a couple of metal shelves from an old refrigerator as our grates and The Mayor has a really heavy pair of gloves that he wears so he can just pick up the foil packets and move them or flip them.

The Mayor lets them cook for 10 minutes, then flips them and they go for another 10 minutes. They start to smell so yummy I am surprised the bears didn't come check us out!

These are hungry children, waiting for their dinners to finish cooking, passing the time in the hammock. See the sun streaming in through the trees from the lake? Truly beautiful. Take a good look because pretty soon it will start to rain...and rain...and you will be stuck in your camper or under a 10 x 10 awning listening to NOTHING BUT RAINDROPS!!! Okay, back to the dinner...

Ahhh, yumminess in a foil packet. Thanks Mayor/Dad! Luckily I remembered to take a photo before I doused mine with ketchup so you could actually see the food! I am a ketchup queen. Somehow the burger gets cooked and the potatoes come out tender and it tastes oh, so good! It tastes like camping... but without the rain!