Roast smores by a fire

It’s the most wonderful simple thing, and it tastes good ^__

It’s a wonderful thing to do. Especially when your in the middle of the woods around a campfire surrounded by trees.

My family and I do this regularly in our backyard with friends – makes tons of memories for the kids!

Sometime after my childhood but before my parenthood, American Hershey bars mutated.

They no longer melt quickly into thick sticky chocolate at the touch of the hot marshmallow.

Does anyone else remember when you couldn’t eat a s’more without getting chocolate on your elbows? Now the dang chocolate barely gets shiny. We put ours on the graham and put it on a rock by the fire to soften it up, but it’s such a complication!

We have a fire ring in our backyard. We can have s’mores any time we want… :^ ) A few weeks ago for our weekly family-at-home evening, whichever kid was in charge of “treats” opted for s’mores—with a variety of highly experimental candy bar fillings. White chocolate oreo bars…Rolos…peanut butter cups…

The trick to roasting marshmallows is patience. The fire should be well-established, which means no flames, only glowing embers. As you hold the marshmallow near the fire, slowly rotate the stick. After a minute or two, you should see faint wisps of smoke emanating from around the marshmallow as its side lose structural integrity. From this point on, it’s imperative you keep the rotation going. When the outer shell is a light tan, remove the stick from the heat and squish the marshmallow between the chocolate and the graham cracker.

If the marshmallow catches fire, blow it out and throw the goop onto the fire. Its burning is sure to amuse any male/juvenile members of your camping party. When the flame subsides, start over.

My parents fed my kids, unknowingly, bad salad dressing at lunch. My husband and I then took the kids in the afternoon into the woods on the Olympic Pennisula, set up the tent, made dinner and finished up with the traditional smores.

That night, with the bad dressing poisoning their stomachs, the kids barfed up everything, including the smores, over and over again, until the entire contents of their digestive systems were empty. They threw up over all the sleeping bags inside the tent, such that I had to bundle up everything in the middle of the night and run it into an all-night laundramat in Forks. It was a NIGHTMARE, the worst camping disaster of family history of the outdoors.

This was years ago, but even to this day, my elder daughter says that the thought of roasting marshmellows makes her want to spew. Personally, even though I escaped the food poisoning myself, I have to agree.

life tastes better next to a fire.

And two weeks ago. I take my boys camping every other weekend and this is one of our favorite ways to end the day…under the stars which were really beautiful last night. :-) It’s a worthy goal!

You must “feel” when it is ready to squish onto the chocolate and gramcracker. It’s the moment before it bursts into flame, but after it has become gooey inside.