Glamping: Tales from cooking on an open fire

We took advantage of the long Jubilee weekend to get the hell out of London and retreat to a beautiful bell tent in Surrey for a few days of walking, visiting village pubs, reading in the sun and cooking on an open fire.

It was beautiful. It was also quite rainy.

Although reading in the sun was sadly curtailed due to limited sunshine, we did manage to visit multiple pubs and a few walks (mainly to pubs), but most of all we cooked!

We really did do a lot of cooking.

 

We made smores, carbonara, cooked breakfasts (including bacon, eggs, fried bread, garlic mushrooms etc.), soda bread, drop scones, orange cakes, fried potato hash, pasta with a tomato-anchovy sauce and butternut squash risotto.

  

I'd previously not done more than boil water over an open fire, so cooking all our meals by fire was certainly a learning experience...

  

• It takes an age (especially when you're hungry) for a fire to be ready to cook on, so start early. However once it's ready make sure you are because it cooks hot and fast!

• You can speed the process up by getting your pots and pans warming up before the fire is ready. We had pots above the fire and the dutch oven/kettle below from the start to minimise cooking time once the fire was ready.

• The cooking life of your fire can be short - Dutch ovens sit in the embers to eke out the use you can get out of each fire. 

• Consider cooking time-consuming breakfast foods the night before. We made some incredible fried/roast style potatoes in the embers of an evening fire to use for breakfast the next day with fried eggs.