Campfire Cooking: Roast Chicken in Dutch Oven

  

One of the pleasures of camping is cooking outdoors, but after a while BBQs can get a bit boring and something more substantial is called for.

Dutch ovens, heavy cast-iron pots which can be placed directly on a campfire, allow you to cook decent meals while still preserving the essential elements of camp cookery (i.e. lots of fire and large quantities of meat).

I bought an 8 litre dutch oven from Ronnie Sunshines - they have a good reputation on bushcraft forums in the UK, and sell a decent range of ovens.  

This size of oven is 12" across and will let you cook meals for up to eight people: it's also incredibly versatile, allowing you to cook stews, casseroles, roasts, puddings and even bread.  You can cook on open fires with wood or charcoal but it can also be used at home on the hob or in a normal kitchen oven.

I figured it was best to give it a trial run in the comfort of the back garden - there's a time and a place for experimenting with camp cookery, but a chilly evening with a hungry family waiting to be fed is neither the time nor the place.

No point doing things by halves so my first meal was Roast Chicken with Bacon and Cider.  

I chose this meal partly because it's exactly the sort of thing that would go down well on a campsite, but which is difficult to cook using a typical camping stove.  I also figured if I can get that right then the same principles should apply to pork and beef joints, with endless variations in the sauce options (red wine, white wine, balsamic vinegar, tomatoes etc).

I took some inspiration from a couple of American sites (dutch oven cookery has deep links to the pioneers and wagon trains of early American history).  This blog post in particular gave me a lot of pointers - having been on the receiving end of cremated BBQ chicken I wanted to make sure this meal was something I'd actually want to eat.

Roast Chicken with Cider and Bacon

Assemble the ingredients:

- one chicken (approx. 1.2kg)
- smoked streaky bacon
- red onions
- a lemon
- garlic
- creme fraiche
- vegetable oil
- fresh herbs (marjoram / oregano)
- 500ml dry cider

I normally by free-range chicken but for this first attempt I bought a cheap bird in case it ended up as charcoal!

First prepare the chicken. 

Half the bacon is layered over the breast to keep things moist, then the chicken is stuffed with lemon (chopped into quarters), 3-4 whole peeled garlic cloves and a good bunch of fresh oregano.

Finish off with a few sprinkles of salt and pepper to season.

I added a couple of tablespoons of oil into the oven and heated it over approx. 24 charcoal briquettes; then I sauted the onions and remaining bacon until soft and golden (about 10-15 mins).

Once the oil is hot add chopped red onions and the rest of the bacon and let them gently cook for 10-15 mins.

Once the onions are soft and the bacon is cooked through in goes the chicken and the cider, along with some extra bunches of herbs.

You can see the 12" oven has plenty of room with no danger that the chicken will touch the underside of the lid.

Once the chicken's in the lid goes back on and I moved 15 coals onto the top, leaving 9 underneath.

For cooking over charcoal a good rule of thumb seems to be to take the width of your oven in inches and double it to get the number of briquettes needed: so in my case a 12" oven needs 24 briquettes for a 160c / 325f temperature.

At some point I'll try with a wood fire but I think that's slightly harder to gauge the temperature.

I found this guide on one of the American dutch oven cooking sites which might be useful:

I gave the chicken 2hrs cooking time - when I finally removed the lid the bacon was crispy and the chicken was perfectly cooked through.

Smelled fantastic too!

Remove the chicken and keep warm under kitchen foil.  Add a couple of dollops of creme fraiche to the cider sauce and let it cook for 10 mins.

Transfer the sauce to a serving dish and carve the chicken.

Then serve chicken and sauce with some fresh vegetables and enjoy!

Overall I'm really pleased with this first attempt. The chicken was cooked beautifully with no risk of raw meat and the temperature seems to be spot on to avoid drying out the meat.

In terms of timings I started preparation at 6.30pm (lighting charcoal, preparing ingredients) and had the chicken in by 7.15pm. It was ready by 9.15pm but I reckon I could have got away with 15-20 mins less cooking time.

I popped a couple of extra briquettes on (2-3) towards the end of the cooking time but with a better brand of charcoal this might not be necessary.

So there you go - if you've been wondering about getting a dutch oven, or are fed up with blackened burgers and badly-cooked sausages round the campfire, I'd really recommend giving a dutch oven a try.

Pizza... Troubles With Bubbles

You can't beat a pizza for tea... tangy tomato sauce, meltingly golden cheese and as many toppings as you can cram onto the base before it's too high to fit in the oven.

Home-made is always best (we use our bread machine to mix and prove the dough while we're at work, so we can be eating pizza 20 mins after getting home from work).

However, done properly (with a blisteringly hot oven and a paper-thin crust) you can sometimes end up with bubbles popping up in the base... personally I quite like them but for professional pizza chefs they are a definite no-no.

Although this is probably the absolute definition of a first-world problem, the internet can supply a solution to your pizza-bubble woes.

The best option is to "dock" the dough... essentially pricking it all over with a fork or similar spikey implement to allow any air trapped between the dough layers to escape during cooking; if you are making pizzas in bulk you can even buy a machine to do it for you.

If your docking technique is not up to much and you still end up with bubbles - and especially if you're cooking in a full-size pizza oven - you can also buy a long-handled bubble-popper, designed specifically for this problem.  Alternatively a garden fork would probably do the trick.

So there you go... if your pizzas are plagued by bubbles do not despair, with a credit card, more money than sense, and a 3-4 week wait for transatlantic shipping your troubles could be at an end!

As for me I'm going to stick with my bubbly pizzas... there's something about the gentle rise-and-fall of the dough's undulations that puts me in mind of landscape around the southern fens where I grew up (that piece of parma ham totally looks like Ely cathedral too).

"Perfect" Jerk Chicken

Despite the relentless rain this summer it's still nice to eat food that tastes of sunnier shores.

This week we tried a Jamaican jerk chicken recipe from the Guardian's "Perfect" series by Felicity Cloake... a mouth-tingling mix of chilis, all-spice, lime juice and thyme slathered over chicken and served with rice and peas.

I ended up going slightly off-piste... time constraints, the limits of my fridge and biblical levels of precipitation outside meant that we used chicken breasts (ideally you'd use legs with the bones left in), only gave it 30 mins to marinate (overnight is better), and cooked it in the oven (rather than on the BBQ).

I also avoided the scotch-bonnet chilis in favour of milder versions... the next time I cook it I'll increase the chili heat slightly, the flavours of the marinade are strong enough to cope with more chili without being overpowered by it.

Still, even with those tweaks it still made an excellent mid-week supper... the addition of soy sauce to the marinade (apparently an authentic Caribbean ingredient... who knew!) means you're left with extra sauce to serve it with, rather than just a dry rub which can take some of the moisture out of the chicken.

And I guess rice and peas doesn't generally mean basmati and birds eye, but it did the job!

This would work brilliantly on the BBQ or for large numbers of people so definitely one to try if the sun ever appears this summer; alternatively with a bit of pre-planning and 30 mins preparation the night before this makes a quick and easy post-work dinner.

Final top tip: if you buy packaged chilis from the supermarket keep any spare ones in the freezer in a bag so they don't go mouldy; give them 10-15 mins to thaw and use them as normal.

Changing a Ford Focus (2002) Key Fob Battery

Last week the remote locking on my aging Ford Focus gave up the ghost; the manual locks still worked but the key fob no longer activated, all of which pointed to a simple flat battery in the key fob.

Normally the batteries in the key fob will last several years so it's likely (as in my case) that many Ford owners will not have needed to change the battery - hence a quick pictorial guide as it's not always obvious how it's done.

How to change the battery in a Ford Focus 2002 key fob

Step one:  You'll need your key without its keyring (not essential but makes life easier) and a small, flat-bladed screwdriver.

Kenilworth Past and Present

Photo Credit: Mike Musson

Having got to know a few residents who were born-and-bred in Kenilworth I've enjoyed finding out about the history of some of the buildings in town.

I've learnt that the house a few doors down was a popular fish-and-chip shop, a house over the road was hit by anti-aircraft fire from Crackley Woods in 1940 resulting the death of the owner, and the recycling centre on Cherry Orchard was formerly a large brick-works which supplied many of the bricks from which Kenilworth is built.

And the Coconut Lagoon (aka "Balti Towers") on Warwick Road apparently used to house the local House of Negotiable Affection!

Properly spicy!

To settle an argument in the office about whether the She Bar used to be the old station waiting room (apparently it wasn't, although it certainly felt like it sometimes!) I looked up a couple of local history websites and found some old pictures of Kenilworth Station.  There's currently a lot of talk about re-building Kenilworth's railway station, especially with HS2 in the news, but while I often walk along Station Road on the way into town it's hard to get a sense of there ever being a station down there.

Inspired by the blog of a Russian photographer called Sergy Larenkov (who has merged WW2 photos with more recent pictures to make some truly haunting images) and the History Pin website (which lets users overlay historic photos onto Google Maps' Street View application) I thought it'd be interesting to fire up photoshop and see how much the view has changed in the last 100 years.

After a bit of fiddling about with the software I ended up with a reasonably fair representation of how things might have looked back in 1900.  It's remarkable how unchanged many of the buildings are... with the exception of a few additional chimneys and some TV aerials the view isn't too much different to a century ago.

The back-and-white photo comes from the Warwickshire Railways website and is dated approx 1900-1910; the colour image is a recent picture taken by the Google Maps service.

It's hard to make out but according to Robin Leach (an excellent local historian who has uncovered loads of interesting info about Kenilworth's past) the office window on the house on the left reads "Walter J Lockhart, Coal and Coke Merchants, Agents to Hunt, Edmunds and Co, Brewers, Banbury".

Although it's a bit rough-and-ready this technique does help bring Kenilworth's history to life so I might try to dig out some higher-quality images and see what other locations around town might lend themselves to it.

 Kenilworth Clock Tower: 1910 vs 2010

(Source: WW2 in Kenilworth)

All change for Raffles

From the end of March 2012 Raffles Restaurant will have a new home in Kenilworth.

The popular Colonial Malaysian restaurant is moving a couple of hundred yards down Warwick Road and from 29 March will take up residence in the Grand Hotel.

This afternoon the decorators were out putting the finishing touches to the outside of the hotel in preparation for next week's re-opening.

Raffles have recently been offering some decent money-off deals via the Groupon website; the current deal expires on 31 March but if the offer is refreshed it might provide a good opportunity to try the new venue.

It will also be interesting to see whether another restaurant will move into Raffles' previous home.

I'd love to see a really good BBQ restaurant (along the lines of Bodean's or Pitt Cue Co) but I fear another bland chain restaurant may snap up the building.

And it's not just Raffles that's changing... since the demise of V2 earlier this year a lot of work has been taking place in the building on Station Road.  New shutters are up in the windows, and the old "She Bar" sign has been put back up (although to be honest it might never have come down!).

I'm surprised that this venue isn't more successful, but the last two ventures have folded relatively swiftly; I guess it's always going to be tough for a new bar/restaurant to establish itself in a relatively small town like Kenilworth, but Ego, Zizzi and Beef have managed it in the last couple of years so there is clearly a market for something new.

 

Kenilworth Restaurant Reviews

I tend to do most of the cooking at home -  after spending all day staring at a computer screen there's something intensely relaxing about coming home from work and preparing a meal for the family (even if it's just a quick plate of Spaghetti Monsters). 

When your working day is measured in miliseconds you cannot beat pottering about in the kitchen with a cold cider in hand and a bit of Bassdrive on the stereo while waiting for a casserole to gently bubble in the oven or some homemade pizza dough to rise.
 
But now and again it's nice to let someone else take the strain in the kitchen and head out for a meal.  When we moved to Kenilworth we were pleasantly suprised by the variety of places to eat.   There are at least 45 different places where you can get a meal in Kenilworth - everything from formal French bistro dining to trendy gastro-pubs and cosy cafes to late-night takeaways.  For a town of 25,000 this is remarkably good; in contrast the village where I grew up boasts a single pub and a chinese restaurant (plus a kebab van at weekends!).

In the six years we've been living here we've sampled a fair amount of the food establishments in town, but my plan over the next few months is to get around as many of the rest as possible and share my thoughts on this blog.

Can't beat Spaghetti Monsters for tea

When I eat in town I'm usually joined by two delightful dining companions: my better half and my 3y/old daughter, plus various other friends and family depending on the occasion.

Kenilworth is increasingly a family-oriented town, and now that I am well into my 30s I have found that the criteria by which I judge a pub or restaurant tend include how well they accommodate small children and provide space for families to relax and spread out (rather than the ease with which they allow me to nail Jaegerbombs on a Friday night).

Clearly there are some restaurants in town which are not aimed at children, so on the rare occasions we get a child-free evening Mrs W. and I will aim to visit these establishments with our expectations appropriately adjusted.

So here's the list... I've separated it out into restaurants, pubs (only those which serve food), cafes & tea rooms, and takeaways.  There are also a couple of places slightly further afield which are close enough to interest locals and visitors to Kenilworth.

If you know of anywhere I've missed please leave me a comment or send me a tweet and let me know!

As I visit and review each establishment I'll update this post and add a link to the blog's sidebar.

Restaurants
Petit Gourmand  |  Harringtons-on-the-Hill  |  Beef  |  Restuarant Bosquet  |  The Cross  |  Loch Fyne  |  The Grand Hotel  | Ego  |  Zizzi  |  212 Bistro @ Holiday Inn  |  She Bar / V2  |  Thai Kitchen  |  Jade Restaurant  |  Full House Chinese  |  Raffles  |  Coconut Lagoon  |  Zaika  |  Indian Edge  |  Seetar Tandori  |  Sunam  |  Bilash

Pubs
The Green Man  |  The Clarendon Arms  |  The Queen and Castle  |  The Famous Virgins and Castle  |  The Almanack  |  The Cottage Inn  |  The Bear & Ragged Staff  |  The Lion  |  The Gauntlet  |  The Tiltyard

Takeaways
Alfie Grimshaw's  |  School Lane Fish Bar  |  Chips 'n' Fishes |  Kenilworth Kebab House  |  Sonali  |   Crystal Chinese  |  Kenilworth Cantonese  |  Mulan  |  Pizza Bella  |  Dominos Pizza  |  Subway

Cafes / Tea Rooms
Rocking Horse Cafe  |  The King's Table  |  Kenilworth Castle Tea Room  |  Cherry Tree Cafe  |  Escape  |  Ardens  |  Time for Tea  |  Costa  |  Starbucks

Further afield
The Anchor in Leek Wootton  |  The Saxon Mill in Warwick  |  The Red Lion in Hunningham

SMART Polaris 1/2 Watt LED Rear Lights

Now that I'm back cycling one of my first tasks was to sort out some new bike lights.

Over the last few years LEDs have pretty much sown up the market for consumer bike lights, and since I was last on two wheels LED technology has moved on immensely so I thought it worthwhile upgrading my lights.

I started with rear lights as these are (arguably) the most important lights to get right, simply because cars approaching from behind are on the same side of the road and therefore need more warning.

To help me decide I spent a fair bit of time online looking at what other cyclists are using.  As with anything in life you can spend a little or a lot depending on what you want.

I set my budget at £10-£15 to start with - if I ever start commuting or riding more frequently I'd consider spending more, but for the occasional ride to the pub or Kenilworth Tennis Club a basic set should be fine.

After reading some visitor comments on the London Cyclist blog I decided to try the SMART Polaris 1/2 Watt LEDs.

I ended up buying two Polaris lights from Planet X cycles - they happened to have a special offer on their website and I managed to get them for £6 each (incl. delivery) which was a real bargain.

 
The Polaris lights are small, light-weight and exceptionally bright and at less than £10 they won't break the bank.  Illumination is provided by three LEDS - a half-Watt central LED for the main light and two smaller LEDs to provide visibility from the sides.  The Polaris has two modes - flashing and constant - and is attached to the bike with a simple clip and bracket.  It's also possible to attach the lights to clothing or bags etc using the same clip but I prefer to keep mine fixed to the bike frame.

So far I'm really pleased with them - I have one mounted on the seatpost which is set to flashing mode, and another on the rear fork which is set to constant mode.

 

This provides approaching drivers with the best of both worlds: a bright flash to gain attention and a steady light to help judge distance and speed.   There's also a reasonable amount of spill from the sides to help visibility at junctions etc.

As you can see from the video these are seriously bright lights - ideal in town to stand out against other competing light sources, and also useful on some of the darker country roads around Kenilworth when I want to be seen as far ahead as possible (especially useful when bombing down Silks' Hill in Leek Wootton on the way back from a late night session at the Saxon Mill!)

I'm still on my first set of batteries, so I cannot comment yet on burn times, but because my journeys tend to be there-and-back-again I've put a small sticker (courtesy of my 3y/old daughter) on one of the lights so I can rotate between flashing and constant to even out the battery wear.

Back On Two Wheels...

Nearly six years after we moved to the Midlands I finally decided to rescue my old bike from the shed.

I guess it qualifies as a “classic” by now… a 1994 Marin Muirwoods which I got for my 16th birthday.

Needed a bit of a scrub, and I treated it to a service from John Atkins Cycles in Leamington; the only major work required was a set of new gear shifters and a replacement front tyre, but otherwise it’s in pretty good shape for an 18 y/old bicycle!

First proper ride was a chilly 16 mile loop west of Kenilworth on some of the quieter country roads, heading through Haseley Knob, Berkswell and Balsall Common.

Plan is to gradually replace shorter car journeys with the bike, based on petrol costs of 15p/mile I’ll need to cycle 660 miles to recoup the cost of the service and repairs... that's the equivalent of cycling to Glasgow and back so it might take a while!

I'm using a site called Endomondo to track my distance - hopefully being able to watch the miles build up will help with the motivation!

With the weather being so grim recently I've been a bit slow starting but the miles are building up.  I've separated out riding for "fun" and riding when I'd usually use the car: the latter will be off-set against petrol costs, but all miles are good miles!

And in the end it's not the number of miles that matters... it's about getting out of the car and into in the great outdoors with the wind in my hair.