Because Breakfast Is The Most Important Meal Of The Day

There is only one real reason to go car camping, and that is to eat smores and be able to enjoy dinner outdoors.  I'm not entirely certain why the average American thinks that it means you have to have hamburgers and hotdogs of dubious quality or that you have to eat instant oatmeal or cereal for breakfast.  A campstove and/or grill plus tin foil and/or a good cast iron skillet will give you all you need to eat well in the great outdoors. 

Boy and I headed down to Kentucky for Memorial Day weekend with a slew of old and new friends to do some via ferrata style climbing.  Basically, some experienced rock climbers went and installed iron rungs and hand holds to allow us less experienced climbers traverse formations that would otherwise be completely out of our ability.  I always volunteer to organize the food, at least for our carloadful, because I don't quite trust others to think outside the bag of frozen hamburgers and hotdogs from CostCo.  And so, our menu for dinner was organic grassfed beef burgers stuffed with garlic and blue cheese with an assortment of grilled veggies.  They were better than most burgers you get at fancy restaurants (photo courtesy Alejandra).

But that's not why I write here today.  I love breakfast.  Breakfast is really the best meal of the day.  Since I'm naturally an early riser when camping (aka the stupid chirpy birds wake me up before everyone else), I always have ample time to put together a great breakfast.  And we were going to need our energy for climbing.  So, we had the traditional breakfast staples of sunny-side up eggs, toast, and I opted this time for organic turkey bacon... and Cast Iron Skillet Berry Cobbler.

This cobbler is super easy to prep ahead of time.  Throw 1 cup of all purpose flour, 2 tsp baking powder, 2 heaping TBSP nonfat powdered milk, 1/2 cup sugar, and some cinnamon into a ziploc bag.  Pack a stick of butter (which can be used for toast and corn on the cob, too!) and a bag of frozen mixed berries into your camp cooler.  I actually rebagged mine into a big ziploc to make sure it wouldn't leak.  I preheated a cast iron skillet on the campstove for about 5 minutes on medium and while it was heating up, I added about 3/4 cup water to the flour mixture and just mooshed it around in ziploc bag.  Then melted about 1/8 cup of butter into it.  Once the butter was melted, I poured the batter in.  I took the mixed berries, which by that time had defrosted, drained off the excess fruit juice, and then poured the berries atop the batter.  Then I covered with a cast iron skillet lid and baked for about 20 minutes. 

I would change two things I did with this.  First, I was going to do this with charcoal because you can put charcoal under the skillet and on top and do it by the fire ring.  However, given some miscommunications, Boy decided he wanted to throw all of our charcoal on the fire the night before.  Next time, I will communicate to Boy to save some charcoal.  Second, if I were to do this on a campstove again, I would have heated skillet with the lid on and I would have cooked this on low, and taken the cobbler off after about 10 minutes, and then let it cook with the residual heat for another 10 minutes.  Mine came out a bit too crusty on the bottom (okay, so it was basically black), but the sides were great!