I’d never done pizza in a dutch oven before this weekend. I love to make it on the grill, but that’s been the limit of my outdoor pizza making.

On Friday, we ended up making three dutch ovens worth of pizza for a small OA event. It was unbelievable. We cheated and used Rhodes bread dough for the crust, thawing it and rolling it out into large rounds. We set the rounds into the bottom of well seasoned dutch ovens (with a little corn meal to help reduce sticking), and baked them for 45 minutes or so until they’d cooked through. Then we put down a light coat of sauce on the crusts and a thick layer of toppings (think two of those huge Godfathers Pizzas stacked atop each other), and put the whole thing back on the coals to cook.

It ended up being so good that on Sunday night, I made another one for my family at home. This one goes right onto the ‘do again soon’ list. 5 years ago

I’ve done Thanksgiving dinner in Dutch ovens before, but this year I’m not responsible for the whole dinner — just some rolls. Dutch oven rolls are easy, though, and they taste great :) 5 years ago

Last week the scouts wanted to learn more about cold weather cooking (we’re planning on a lot of cold weather camping this winter), so I decided to do something to supplement the training given by our senior patrol leader.

I really liked a chicken dish served at a recent order of the arrow activity, so I decided to make it for the boys. I started by cutting up some chicken breasts into 2 inch (or so) squares and browning them with some onions in a bit of oil. Then I added a can of green beans, a family-size can of cream of mushroom soup, and a box of stuffing mix. Then I baked the whole thing for about 30 minutes.

The scouts liked it enough that they were talking about changing their menu for the next camping trip to include it. And I had enough left in the dutch oven to take home to my wife and enjoy as leftowvers for lunch the next day. 5 years ago

I ended up making chili for my family, just to try things out, before the camping trip. When the scouts made the chili, they did an awesome job (and since the weather was kind of cold, it was even better). We had the stuff to try a different dinner, peach pies from a campfire pie-maker, but everyone was too full from seconds and thirds on the chili to bother. 5 years ago

I don’t know that I’ll use it before then, but I’m headed up to Maple Lakes with the scouts in a couple of weeks. We didn’t lug the dutch ovens up on our last trip, but they want to make dutch oven chili this time, so I guess we’ll be taking them again. Maybe we can come up with a desert other than cobbler to go with the chili. 5 years ago

I stayed up too late last night making an apple crisp. I’ll probably be doing a couple more of these in the next few days, we have a bunch of family celebrations going on right now. 5 years ago

Wednesday night I pulled out one of my Dutch ovens and an outdoor stove and experimented with a chile verde recipe. It turned out pretty well, so I’ll probably make it again. It also prompted me to add this to my list here on 43 things :)

I’m not sure how well I’ll do on this one, though — not that I don’t know how to cook with my Dutch ovens, but that, between my own hectic schedule and my kids’ food preferences, I end up either getting fast food or playing short order cook most of the time, and neither of those is particularly compatible with good Dutch oven cooking. On the flip side, though, I’d kind of like to have more “good” family meals instead of the quick-and-dirty that I so often do these days. So I’m happy to have this on my list. 5 years ago