Camp Cooking on the River

This simple but delicious camp meal was a breeze. I marinated the London broil and made the quinoa, avocado and mango salad at home. Our garden peas were stir fried tender crisp with butter and spring onions. 

I wasn't always a food Nazi, but now that I am, kinda, I see no reason to eat anything camping that I wouldn't ordinarily consume. PK and I are moving toward "later life", but we still sleep on the ground in a tent, stumble outside in the dark seeking nighttime bladder relief, and cook under what some might consider primitive conditions so we can spend a few days rafting and camping on the banks of Oregon's Wild and Scenic Rogue River, which is literally in our backyard. We've also done self-guided trips on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, on the Snake River between Oregon and Idaho, and on Idaho's Middle Fork of the Salmon through the Frank Church Wilderness. Every trip, we have to cook, and, most often, enjoy (or endure) the cooking of our companions. 
 A few of you may have read a post I wrote in August 2009 in which I declared a hiatus from river trips. Obviously I have come around. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip described here. Of course, we had benevolent weather and there were just four of us. It was heaven. It will be my one river trip this year. More than that, and I could get sick of river trips for the reasons described in the earlier post.

But back to camp cooking. We do not suffer. Through the years we've developed a proper kitchen that weighs a ton and is getting harder to sling around as the years accumulate. However, once it's set up, it's deluxe.

This custom-made aluminum box holds enough cookware, cutlery and

dinnerware for preparing breakfast, lunch and dinner for about 16 people. 

But eeeuuwww. I don't like those big groups anymore.

Fellow camper and friend of 30-some years, Linda Shonk, is up at the crack heating water for our morning beverages in the camp kitchen. The rectangular thing on the ground by the camp chairs is a fire pan, a mandated piece of equipment to save beaches from fire rings. We barbecued our London broil over it, using a portable grill. The small boat between the rafts got away from another group. We secured it on the beach for them to find. Hope they did!

We haul a giant cooler packed with anything we want to eat or drink. And I mean anything. On one trip, another couple prepared a salt-encrusted prime rib roast on a 100-degree day! (They later divorced, and that may have been the reason.) We've had stuffed cornish game hens, eggs Benedict with hollandaise made from scratch, pork roast, lasagna, cherry cobbler, chocolate cake—whatever will fit into a Dutch oven, over a grill or into industrial-sized cooking pots or fry pans.

The homemade table folds up as does the muslin utensil organizer.

As usual, rocks become part of the kitchen. 

Here's PK, always ready to ply his companions with quality tequila.
After the big rapids, of course. 

Cocktail hour after a tough day of floating class 2 and 3 rapids. Linda and I also hiked several miles on the Rogue River Trail. Note the crowds. For an appetizer we made fresh guacamole with plenty of lime, salt and chopped sweet onion eaten with blue corn chips. 

Our home for the night in our vintage Moss tent. Ahhhh.

PK packing up the kitchen on day two as we prepare to move downstream.

Here I am at our second and last camp enjoying a cold drink and cool river on a hot day.
My bikini days are long over, by the way. I'm now a cover-up girl.

Going Local on the Road

The low ceilings of Ye Olde Castle and Antique Emporium in Burns, OR,  drip with antique toys, and every wall, nook, and cranny is festooned with items of charm and/or weirdness. Delightful!

It's sooo easy to slide into a Red Lion or a Hyatt or a Motel 6 or whatever motel/hotel clone appears on your travel route. You know what to expect. It'll be clean. You'll have WiFi and probably a big-screen TV. There'll be a predictable "free" breakfast that, if you're lucky, will include a bit of protein to share your styrofoam plate with massive carbs. Ditto the road food. You know what's goin' down at Apple Cellar, Shari's, and if you're in a desperate hurry, MacDonald's. The chains are easy hits along the main thoroughfares, but the local gems are hidden.

Not anymore.  Got a smartphone? That's all it takes. That and a mindset that prefers adventure over all-the-same on the road. Delicious regionalism exists, despite a huge effort at national homogenization and Big Brand blanketing. The little hide-aways and pockets of eccentrics wishing to sell their wares and offer you a bed and a hot shower exist everywhere. All you have to do is want to find them and recognize that the journey can be as fun as the destination. 

On a recent trip to western Wyoming, the skiing diehards, to their credit, decided that we'd have nothing but local food and lodging on our return trip to Southern Oregon. Four of them in one vehicle, equipped with smart phones in search mode, checked out the Yelp! and tripadvisor picks along the way to select our culinary and slumber sites. It was good. Very good.

Consider Ye Olde Castle in Burns, OR, which we've passed maybe 20 times over the years without even considering stopping. It looks like a wreck, a dive, lost in the 1950s without a facelift. It looked so unpromising, as did all the other cafes the Diehards rejected as they searched Burns for breakfast, with PK and I bumping over curbs and through alleys as we followed. The Diehards even touched down in the Apple Cellar parking lot, but after 10 seconds, roared off, back to Ye Olde Castle.

Here it is, in all its un-glory,  on Hwy. 20, the main drag through Burns.

The wooden walkway was frayed and creaky, paint flaked from the walls, and I thought, Ok, here we go! Me of little faith. But the place captured me. A round table near the entry was populated with old guys in bib overalls, a sure sign of local approval. Then there were the toys and bicycles and antiques and paintings converging into the aisles. This decor would never pass muster in a chain restaurant.

Items are artlessly displayed but were collected with love. And dust.

Here's Roxanne, the dishwasher, cook and waitress. She's worked here for 30 years and now
lives in quarters above the restaurant. She told us about the resident ghosts and
the phantom crying baby.  Would she be happy working at Denny's? No way.

Ye Olde Castle's breakfast was OK. Typical fare that you would expect at a chain,  except that one in our party scored a six-egg omelette, and I was thrilled with an Atkins' breakfast of eggs, bacon/sausage and low-carb toast. It wasn't the food that scored the reviews and pledges to return, however, it was the bicycle room dividers and the copper-plated prints en route to the restroom and on and on. Ye Olde Castle is not yet reviewed on Yelp! or tripadvisor. Just go there if passing through Burns.

Burns yielded other discoveries:

The Silver Spur Motel, $42 per night with "cowboy hospitality,"  was clean and featured some cool old timey Western decor and knotty pine walls. If you pulled the curtain back in the bathroom, you could see the "backside" of Burns just one street off the main drag: dilapidated houses, scruffy lots, and junky vehicles. The economy has been particularly hard on rural Oregon. 

But the best thing about the Silver Spur was it's walking-distance proximity to a great surprise gourmet restaurant, Rhojos. My five-star review on tripadvisor:

Wow! Great food and service, reasonable prices. Surprising gourmet quality in rural Oregon. Everything fresh and carefully created. Loved it!

If you're ever passing through Burns, Oregon, don't miss it! Chef Michel Johnson is a culinary wizard working on a four-burner electric stove in a non-gourmet-looking kitchen in full view.  It's all part of the restaurant's charm and local flavor.

Back in Wyoming, we ventured down from the Grand Targhee ski resort into the Teton Valley for dinner at the Knotty Pine Supper Club. The Knotty Pine, as its name suggests, is an old-fashioned restaurant with a dark wooden interior and rich smoky aromas. It also turns out to be a popular venue for traveling big-name bands—Galactic played there in March.  After one meal, it's easy to see why the place draws a crowd. It specializes in house-cured meats and seasonal offerings that include buffalo and elk sausage pasta with garlic, tomatoes, red wine and herbs; and kurobuta pork chops stuffed with chevre and bacon over sweet pea risotto. PK and I shared an excellent warm cabbage salad flavored with pancetta, pecans, garlic, and gorgonzola, a dish that warrants trying to duplicate at home.

My delicious dinner at the Knotty Pine Supper Club in Victor, Idaho. Half a side of house-cured hickory-smoked BBQ ribs, a few veggies, and the biggest serving of the best onion rings ever.
Photo was taken AFTER numerous onion rings were swiped by my companions.

Next up, lunch in Pocatello, Idaho. A Yelp! search yielded the Butterburr, which was not that convenient to the freeway, but then, we weren't in a hurry. Were we? This place is a mom and pop restaurant that serves enormous portions. For a carb-avoider, it wasn't a great choice. I got a Cobb salad that was, to be generous, dismal. But others were pleased with homemade noodle soups, burgers, and scones accompanied by whipped butter with powdered sugar. This is the type of restaurant that contributes mightily to the infamous girth of about two-thirds of the USA population. Yet it gets great Yelp! and tripadvisor reviews and beats the chains. 


I've been back home long enough to enjoy my two local favorites in Rogue River, OR:
The Station and Paisano's Italian Kitchen. There's no place like home.