It’s one of many angling axioms, how the outdoors-fishing ritual guarantees some unnatural food tucked away in a vest, or cooler, and daylighted with great trepidation knowing the catcalls and scorn that will greet luxury items from those roughing it.
A couple days worth of whiskers and yesterday’s underwear is about as close to Jim Bridger and Dan’l Boone as they’re willing to go, and reverence for the wilderness experience won’t slow them while they help themselves to your Big City larder and that bottle of fine brandy.
Hardened urbanites prefer speed over flavor, evidenced by the growth of drive thru eateries. It may be time to fuse technology and outdoor cuisine and give the traditional campfire fare a similar expedient makeover.
The threat of bears and lack of refrigeration eliminates “real” food from our repertoire, but Modern Science has provided us with Freeze Dried, desiccated powders we can recombine with creek water, and aerosol-extrusion whose tasty flatulence can now change camp life forever…
I call it “Blort” cuisine. Things that dispense noisily that bears won’t eat.
I’ve always found the Batter Blaster indispensable on my expeditions – and have christened it “Culinary Duct Tape.”
Any lip from “Mr. Roughing It” on the far side of the campfire and you give him a three second burst … flat tire? The Batter Blaster will seal the puncture and inflate the tire in seconds.
Shat onto a hopper hook, it makes a resilient foam body that can be shaped with a pocket knife into a dizzying assortment of terrestrials.
It’s chum for coarse fish, “silly string” for the kids, and any resemblance to actual pancakes is accidental.
Tags: outdoor culinary adventure, don’t try this at home, duct tape, roughing it,
Aerosol cans and bear stories remind me of my first job out of college when we were camped out deep in the woods of the Sierras, mapping stands of redwoods in Kings Canyon-Sequoia Nat’l Park.
We were getting visited nightly by a very large black bear, who’d rummage though our tents and kitchen area.
We got the bright idea to wrap bacon around an aerosol can and coat it with pancake syrup figuring that one good bite and he would find another camp to raid.
When the bear showed up that night we all hid behind a big tree, so as not to get sprayed with flying breakfast ingredients and aluminum shards.
When someone finally peered around the tree, the bear was content to lick the can.
There’s five years of college for you. Us, not the bear.
Irony of ironies, Batter Blaster is actually super tasty. Organic, too. Go figure!