Earlier this year I had blogged about some of my strategies for serving up tasty meals at the cabin without having to spend so much time in the kitchen. I love being at the cabin in cold weather and it can be fun to cook on the wood stove up to a point, but I don't really want to spend my entire time up there cooking. Also, the weather can at times be warmer than expected, and if it is too warm, you don't necessarily want to be firing up the cook stove. Once the stove heats up the cabin it takes a long time for the place to cool down. So I have to have strategies for multiple ways to put a meal on the table. I also do some cooking ahead to speed things up while I am there. While "quick" is a relative term, I think you will find these recipes worth the effort.
Of course a soup or stew is great on the wood stove. You can have the stove banked low and let the food cook in a long slow simmer. To make the cooking up there a little easier, I sometimes brown the meat and onions until the meat is cooked through and then freeze them. It saves a little time on the cooking and cleanup while at the cabin. The potatoes and carrots go with us whole and I cut them up when I'm ready to start the stew. I throw in a can of tomato sauce and some frozen peas and the stew is on the stove to simmer until ready. I once tried to cook the stew in an electric frying pan when the weather was too warm to start up the cook stove. It cooked, but it just did not taste like stew. It was hard to get the potatoes and carrots to cook through. The vegetables needed a longer, slower cooking time.
Three bean soup is one of my favorite soups for cooking in the mountains. It is delicious and ready in a matter of minutes. Saute some onions, garlic, and green pepper. Throw in a can each of kidney beans, black beans, and re-fried beans (mashed pinto beans), add about a salsa (I use our homemade, canned salsa), a can of chicken broth, and chili powder about 2 teaspoons, pepper and cumin. Easy on the cumin, I use only about a heaping quarter teaspoonful. Start there and add more spices to taste. Depending on the type of salsa you use, you may not need any more chili powder. If you use a mild salsa, adjust the chili to your level of heat. Or, throw in some chopped fresh jalapeno pepper. After that, the mixture only has to simmer about ten to fifteen minutes. We usually make fresh bread baked outside on the grill to serve with the soup.
This recipe makes a big pot of soup. The good news is that it freezes well. After eating soup for a couple of meals we put the rest of the soup in the freezer and bring it home for later use. Even better, it also tastes great over macaroni. You can use it to stretch the portions out for extra servings. It makes a great Tex-Mex style chili mac.
As I mentioned earlier, it is sometimes too warm to be worth heating up the cook stove. This is a huge stove. Once this cast iron stove heats up it stays heated up for hours. I needed other ways of cooking the meal to make sure I can get a meal cooked other than depending on cooking on a wood stove. I have done some experimenting with alternate means of cooking.
These recipes can be cooked in an electric skillet, but the results are mixed in an electric skillet. And depending of the size of the skillet, it could be a problem with handling the volume of stew or soup. We have a hot plate, but I get concerned about knocking a large pot of stew or soup off the burner. Although our hot plate was rated at 1500 watts, it was that wattage split between two burners. All in all, it is only good for heating small portions. We also bring a Coleman camp stove up with us and can cook on the porch if necessary. You are not supposed to cook with those inside because of carbon monoxide build up. We use the Coleman stove for cooking items that need high heat for relatively short periods of time, such as boiling potatoes or making hard boiled eggs. Generally, this stove is used only for emergency cooking. Up in the mountains we sometimes have electricity outages. There are a few million trees growing near the power line. When something falls on a line we can be without electricity for a while.
I am becoming enamored of our small roasting oven. You generally see these small ovens on sale around Thanksgiving. The oven cooks very slowly, and I am not sure how well the temperature is calibrated, but it does work. A stew or soup can be put into the roaster oven in a Dutch oven and cooked using the oven like a slow cooker. It makes for a long slow cook, which is great for a stew. Our main problem with using the roaster oven was that it is heavy and hard to get down from the attic. We started storing it wrapped up in plastic bags under the bed. (There was absolutely no other place where it fit. Space is at a premium in a small cabin.) Storing it downstairs made it much more usable. Before finding a place for it downstairs we avoided using it if at all possible. We have to use a heavy duty extension cord with this. The makers saw fit to add only an eighteen inch electrical cord to the appliance. If you decide to use one of these ovens, make sure you have an outlet nearby for it or make sure your extension cord is rated for the wattage of the oven. Using a cord that cannot take the wattage could be a fire hazard.
Anyway, those are a couple of my recipes for up at the cabin. I have a couple more, but I will put them in a separate post next Sunday. This post is getting a bit long. Check back then for more cabin cooking recipes.
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