Weekend Cooking 8/24

Each weekend, Beth Fish Reads hosts Weekend Cooking.  This is perfect for me since I love food and cooking almost as much as I love books!

Wow, I haven't been home and/or had the time for a Weekend Cooking post since May - gives you some idea of what our summer's been like!

We spent two weeks this month on vacation, camping in New Hampshire and Vermont (you can check out some of my NH photos on my Snapshot Saturday post). One of our favorite camping meals is a Foil Dinner. It's very simple but incredibly tasty! You just take some heavy-duty foil, spray it with cooking spray and add ground beef or turkey (or chicken sausage or whatever kind of meat you like) with a bunch of chopped veggies. Season it simply with salt and pepper, maybe a bit of oregano or thyme. Then wrap it up tightly in double foil and place it directly on hot coals in the campfire. We cook it for about 20 minutes, flip it (carefully!) and cook it for another 20 minutes. By then, you can hear it sizzling inside the foil packets, and the smell is mouth-watering. It's just simple ground beef and veggies, but it tastes so good!

We had that twice while we were camping, and on the way home, I saw a recipe in Redbook Magazine's September issue for a similar dinner that you can make at home. I never thought of doing the same thing on the grill (you can also use a 400 degree oven)! This was a recipe by Carla Hall, of the TV show The Chew, for what she called Campfire-style Shrimp (guess we didn't invent the campfire foil dinner!). In her version, she used shrimp, along with cherry tomatoes, red onions, fresh thyme, and small pieces of corn on the cob. I did something similar this week with shrimp, using the veggies we had on hand from our local farm CSA: cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, red onion, and mini Yukon Gold potatoes. It was delicious!

And now I know we can make our favorite camping meal - plus lots of other variations - right at home, anytime.

I hope you are enjoying good food this weekend!