Cooking Disasters

[moxieman]

Reading the other thread "If we joined your troop, we'd starve..." brought back memories of cooking disasters I've experienced as a scout or observed as a leader.

 

As a scout: Carbonloaf. Not Meatloaf, but carbonloaf. Our patrol planned meatloaf on a campout. Great plan, but somehow we forgot the cover to the dutch oven. No problem! Our SM at the time had an old No Parking sign in his trunk. We improvised. Except a thin piece of steel doesn't distribute heat like a cast iron lid. We burned our meal. How bad? The APL bent his steel fork trying to stab into the carbonloaf. Suffice it that we ate other stuff that meal.

 

As a leader: Macaroni and Glue. One of the patrols decided they were going to make mac n' cheese from scratch. Alas, when they got ready to do so, they discovered that they forgot the cheese. So they added lots of butter to their pasta and it stuck together like glue.

[John-in-KC]

So son is planning his menu for his First Class requirment of cooking. He likes one of my recipes, Briar Patch bake (browned beef, onions, and bbq sauce layered with Mac and Cheese.

 

He tries it at home... not bad! He also tries doing it as a variant of chili mac, mixing the whole kit and kaboodle together. Still not bad.

 

It's going to be a relatively small camp, Scout camp is 10 days away. PLC decides to do it as one patrol. Son takes his menu to SPL for approval... and shows costs.

 

SPL changes the briar patch mac to Mac and Cheese from the box.

 

Son prepares it... and gets ripped by an ASM for not going farther. SM takes ASM and I aside, and explains to said ASM: SPL changed it.

ASM storms off and leaves the camp.

 

BTW, the SPL didn't go on the camp.

 

Next day was a good time to teach son: Get mad, get over it!

 

[Trevorum]

I'll never forget the hungry wail that arose from the Dragon Patrol campsite early one Saturday morning:

 

"ME? OH NO! I thought YOU were the grubmaster this month!"

 

[eagle90]

Just last weekend we were cabin camping and were deep frying turkeys. The last one was a 15 pound bird. There is a thermometer you must put into the oil to keep the oil about 340 degrees, but when the leader put the thermometer in, he inadvertently stuck it into the bird instead of the oil. It kept registering about 280, so he kept firing up the propane more and more to get it to the desired 340. When he finally realized what he had done, the oil was at about 450, and the 15 lb. turkey was a little petrified and looked like a 3 pound chicken! Of course we will never let him forget this!

[DugNevius]

at summer camp it always seems that someone adds pasta to cold water before its boiling.

[yelruh]

The other common mistake is for someone to not drain the elbow noodles before adding the butter and cheese powder for mac & cheese.

 

Usually, it is an older scout that catches that and steps in to explain the time their patrol did it.

[epalmer84]

As a youth, I helped cook turkeys in dutch ovens one year. Had to do CPR to squash the birds to get them to fit. We used one aluminum dutch oven- it overheated and fell apart.

 

Many years ago I was a Scouter in the Transatlantic Council in Germany. We went to Camp Dahn in for a week, not long after I arrived in-country. We decide to make a peach cobbler for the troop campfire one evening, and requested the ingredients from the quartermaster.

 

So- we have cake mix, butter, peaches and a dutch oven. We toss it all together and throw it on the coals. Thirty minutes later, we have peach soup. An hour later, we have cooked peaches, but nothing is rising. I grab a Scout whose German is better than mine and we take a good look at that cake mix box. There is a beautiful picture of a Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte (Black Forest Cherry Cake) on the cover. We start reading the back and figure out that the recipe is calling for eggs, flour, sugar and other stuff. It dawns on us that this really isn't a cake mix. I decide to taste the concoction and realize that we had dumped a box of corn starch in the oven. As I recall, hot peaches with corn starch syrup isn't too bad.

 

Some time later, we had a camporee at the Hohenstaufen Scout Trail near Gppingen (cool patch from that one). We decided to get dinner started before we left on the trail, so we threw a pot roast and veggies in a dutch oven and put it on the coals. My assistant Scoutmaster was recovering from a leg injury and was not going on the hike, so he stayed to mind the meal. We were on the trail two or three hours and were hungry for that roast when we got back. I found that my young apprentice had built up a blazing fire and the oven was in the middle of this conflagration. I knew we were in trouble when I saw blue flames escaping from between the lid and the pot. When we got it out of the fire, we found very little left- it was carbonized to the point where there were flakes of ashes in the form of the roast and the veggies. Luckily we had enough spaghetti fixings from lunch to get by with for dinner.

 

I did the thermometer in the deep fried turkey thing one year as well. Luckily I looked at it before it burned up. I use a remote thermometer probe now to measure the turkey temperature- works like a charm.

 

The troop committee chairman an I used to do outdoor cooking for Pow Wow. One year he decided to do donuts. We had a cast iron pot of oil on the burner. I didn't know he was going to do this, so I didn't have a thermometer at hand. The oil got a bit overheated- when he dropped in the first donuts, there was a blue flash and they instantly carbonized.

 

Ed

[LongHaul]

I've posted this before but it doesn't loose the laugh with re telling, you just have to picture the look on our little faces and imagine the stiffled laughter of the adults waiting for that look.

 

Our patrol decided to make Mac and Cheese from scratch using on scout's mother's family recipe. We split the tasks of the meal up umong members of the patrol. One guy had salad, one guy had bread, we were doing rolls on sticks, I was in charge of the sauce. Each had his own part of the recipe to work from. After making the sauce it was supposed to be poured over the noodles and then baked. Yah you guessed it no one boiled the noodles. The first clue was the small amount of food in the dutch oven after the required 20 minutes cooking time. The next clue was the crunching sound as we sampled our fare. "My moms doesn't sound like this" is what broke the leaders restraint and sent them into full out laughter. We always had enought food around so we didn't go hungry but looking over the entire menu and recipe has stuck to this day. It was funny though.

LongHaul

[OldGreyEagle]

I was always taught that carbon was good for your teeth and that since charcoal is a natural filter, that while camping eating a portion of carbonized food was healthy.

 

Leastwise that what the adult who always burned his food said

[eagle90]

How about the patrol who soaped the INSIDE of the spaghetti pot and put water in to boil. They realized their mistake as when the water boiled the suds just about put out their fire. PL said he should be more specific when telling his kids to "soap the pot".!

[LongHaul]

Back in the 60's when you went to Philmont you purified your water by adding iodine tablets. Our dinner for the night was Beef Nuggetts in Gravy over Mashed Potates. Beef Nuggetts went well but as soon as the mashed potatoes hit the water everything turned BLUE. Bright BLUE! I laughed at first but had a very hard time convincing the adults it was safe to eat.

LongHaul

[baden]

My favorite debacle was on a backpacking trip in Wyoming. Our Scout was making instant mashed potatoes on a 1 burner stove and way overdid the water. Had a soupy tan looking mess. One of the other adults advised putting in a noodle fettucini meal we had to see if the noodles would soak up the excess water. They did, but we had a gloppy grey mess. We added some Spam to add color and ate it. It was delicious. I have never had the urge to attempt to duplicate this meal, however good it tasted.

[gwd-scouter]

Spaghetti. Scouts in charge of cooking did a great job on the sauce. Noodles on the other hand? For five Scouts they had purchased a large box of noodles. Without reading the directions on the box, they started boiling the water in a good sized pot, but not big enough for a full box of noodles. In went the noodles and then ignored. Scouts didn't stir them while they were boiling. Water absorbed into the chunks of noodles so that in the end there was very little water and a sticky gooey mess of noodles. Clean up wasn't much fun either.

[eagle90]

Last year at Sea Base on Munson Island, we were making Spaghetti, and overdid the water on the sauce, turning out like soup. We looked in the P-Box and found some canned chicken, corn, a little pancake batter to thicken, and anything else we could find in there to give it a little flavor. We then added some of the fresh snapper and mahi mahi we caught that day, and it all ended up like a fish chowder. The Scouts and our adventure mate loved it!

 

[CalicoPenn]

Patrol decided to make blueberry pancakes. Scout volunteered to be the cook. He prepared the pancake batter then stirred in the blueberries. Batter turned green - Scout forgot to drain the blueberries. Had the blueberries been canned in water, it wouldn't have mattered much - so the pancakes were green - call then St. Patricks Day pancakes - but no, the blueberries were packed in heavy syrup. Tried cooking them anyway - I've never had a worse tasting pancake in my life. Fortunately the other patrols had extra pancake mix so we just had regular pancakes.

 

Calico