Grilled Pizza: Bear Locker Surprise

Camping is all about the food.  Well, OK, and the relaxation and the decompression and the breathing fresh air and the listening to loons and the blah blah blah, but for me, all of that is accentuated by and/or includes eating and cooking.  I see no reason to sacrifice wine and cheese appetizers just because I’m in the woods.  If I’m inspired and have mental prep time, I try to branch out of the comfort zone of the usual potato pocket and pork loin staples and try something a little new.  This year I saw some flatbreads at Trader Joe’s:  inspiration for grilled pizzas.  Thought bubble:  what a great way to get rid of some leftovers at the end of the week….     I understand that these grilled pizzas are quite popular with the home grilling crowd – make your own dough, stick it on the grill, make delish pizzas - but I’ve never done it.  And to make your own dough out there was ridiculous and so I thought these little flatbreads could be perfect.  And let me tell you... they were even better than I had thought they could be.

All week long we made too much of everything - that is how I am - and so by Friday night, we had leftover grilled chicken, leftover grilled pork tenderloin, a salami we were eating all week with appetizers, enough onions to float a boat, and some leftover grilled pineapple we had hanging around from an earlier meal where we grilled the pineapple with a little oil and crushed thai hot pepper as a pork side.  It was all good stuff, but it had to go.  The bed of coals was laid, the fixin’s were pulled out from the bear locker, and the drinks were poured.  The sun was still up, but it was perfect weather finally and the Cedar Waxwings were buzzing their way into evening mode all around us.   Bring on the pizzas.

 

Grilled Pizza

THE STUFF:

Flatbreads (1 or 2 6” Trader Joe’s Flatbreads/person did the trick for us – tortilla and pita are not the same!)

Pizza sauce (we used pizza sauce and leftover salsa, but of course pasta sauce would be good, too)

Grated Mozzarella Cheese (or Manchego or whatever rocks your world)

Olive Oil for brushing on flatbreads

Fixin’s       (whatever you may have:    we had grilled chicken, grilled pork, onions, hot pepper, salsa, hard salami sliced thinly, grilled pineapple chunks, Pasta spices from Penzy’s, crushed dried Thai hot peppers from my garden, salt and pepper)

HOW TO:

-Arrange the grate over the coals so that you have a hot spot (lots of coals), a warm spot (on edge of coals), and a safe spot (no coals) – which means, in our case, we had a couple of rounds of making these as we could only fit about 3 on at a time safely.

-We pre-heated our toppings a bit in beds of tinfoil over the coals and cooked the onion a little bit in its tinfoil bed over high heat (we should buy tinfoil stock when we go camping)

-Brush the flatbreads on both sides with olive oil and place directly over coals on hot spot – it will very quickly start to inflate a bit creating a bubbly topography on the top and nice grill marks and toasting on the bottom.  Turn the flatbread over and move to the cool side of the grill

-Make your pizza like you normally would by topping flatbread with sauce and cheese and toppings to your liking and tent the pizzas with tin foil and move back to ‘warm’ spot on grill to toast the bottoms and melt the tops.  For us, that meant I rotated the little jobbers after a few minutes to make sure both sides of the flatbreads got toasty.  This should take maybe 5 minutes total to get a nice brown on the bottom and melty bubbly cheese on top.

Pull them off the grill and chow!   They were crunchy and tasty and man oh man a great use of leftovers from our bear locker.  Everyone made their own combinations and it was a grand success. This whole process would be just as easy if not easier on a home grill, so I plan to make my pizzas like this forever!  You may note that I still haven’t come up with a home-made pizza crust I really like so if you have any clues on that one, let me know….  For now, the flatbread over coals method rules.

Grill on!

Lake Camping ADK Style: Forked Lake, Owls Head, Rain

I’ve had a taste of fall over the last week, and while thunderstorms ring in the air and moisture gathers on the wide-open screens still here in Philly, change is in the air.   After 9 days in the Adirondack woods, I am almost ready to embrace that change.   My dismount from the mountains is never fully smooth.  By mid-camp, the mind opens, the brain declutters, the ears hear warblers and waxwings and leaves turning in the trees, the eyes relax with the views of lake sparkles and voluminous clouds.  Mountains cascade upon themselves under the brightest blue sky and the smell of campfires resets a switch in there somewhere.  I don’t want to lose that.  And while I know that relaxed feeling is already gone,  I hope to keep the perspective a bit longer.

I picked up a notebook to jot down some notes, but it was late in the week (I had forgotten mine at home) and so unlike my usual self, I didn’t do too much journaling this trip and for that I’m a little remiss.  Hoss’s General Store in Long Lake of course had a lovely little journal and we decided on the last night to write down a few things and then bring it back the next year to keep adding to it.  A communal journal in the making.

 

This year we had old and new players, folks coming and going, new foods, new music, new fun.  A particularly challenging new thing for me was a hike up Owl’s Head mountain to the fire tower.  It overlooked everything and the 360 view was worth the hike up the scary tower.  It turns out, I don’t dig heights so much and man that tower was moving in the cold wet wind, I swear.  The rains began in earnest as we made the treacherous decent.  We thought the hike up was difficult scrambling up nearly vertical rock faces and stream beds and slick rooty rocky scrabbles.  All of that in reverse now with pouring pounding rain made for rather technical 3.2 mile hike out.   Really, it was only the part near the summit that was rough, and anything you read about Owls Head generally indicates that it is an easy to moderate hike, but I would beg to differ.  If you go, buck up and hope for non-deluge situations.

After signing out at the trail head and ringing out the pants, we stopped for a coffee on the way through town and discovered we had about an hour window before the heavy stuff came down.  We headed back to Forked Lake, kayaked out to our site, prepped all the fixins for dinner and snacks and settled in for a rainy night under the food tent.  Dinner that night was leftover pasta and what we lovingly refer to as Bear Locker Pasta Sauce (leftovers and veggies that need to be cooked – all thrown in with a few herbs and spices).  It turned out to be a great evening and dinner and lovely day under the clouds.  One of many great days all strung together with good people and good fun. 

 

I hope this new bloggy journal will hold me to next summer when new memories will be made with the call of the loons.  Music, games, stars, and of course, more food to come.  It is good to share the memories.