Cooking with Gilman

I smoked homemade bacon. This has been on the bucket list since around 2007 when I first saw this blog post (later posted as a LotD in 2010 after the reboot). I also sourced some advice from this article in the LA Times.

Cooking a roast in a dutch oven has been my holy grail. I've also been captivated by the idea of cooking it packed in rock salt - how does that change the roast? Does it help turn out a better roast? How salty is the result? I'm glad to have finally answered these questions.

I made Frito casserole for some friends at a campout. The recipe isn't complicated or particularly healthy but it is very tasty. It even got a few recipe requests! The only substitution I made was switching out for low-sodium cream of mushroom. It cooked for about 25 minutes in my 10 incher dutch oven with a 14/7 coal split. The resulting casserole had fully melted cheese and the internal goop was hot enough to require cooling a bit.

I've finally given biscuits and sausage gravy a shot. It's one of my favorite breakfasts and one I don't have a whole lot of experience with given my Yankee upbringing. My sausage recipe came from a Google search and my biscuits came from this forum post.

This recipe was taken from the Everyday Dutch Oven blog. As things neared towards Thanksgiving he started putting up seasonal recipes and descriptions of his (elaborate) Thanksgiving Dutch Oven setups. I saw this recipe earlier in the month and tossed it into my file because of the cranberry. Also, right before Thanksgiving I went to the local Tractor Supply Store for their Black Friday deals. They had a regular height 12 incher for $15 (marked down from $20).

I baked the same stew as the previous recipe with the few tweaks mentioned. The low-sodium cream of mushroom worked just as planned and picked up the flavor of the stew by letting you taste more than the salt. A few of the bacon pieces were not as crispy which some people complained about: I guess people don't want a whole bacon. I was in a time rush otherwise I would have made all the bacon crispy. The finished product was delicious and a very solid addition to my repertoire.

Gil's LotD readers: I've decided to bring my dutch oven cooking blog posts into this blog. If you're not interested in this or future blog posts there is a page available here with only links of the day on it. RSS readers can find a feed on that page as well.

This recipe was pulled off of the Yahoo dutch oven mailing list archives. I spent an hour or so the previous day looking for a stew recipe to polish up for the next DOG meeting and settled on this one. I prepared it without the onions, with a can of water and with only two carrots.

I pulled this recipe from Everyday Dutch Oven. I hadn't cooked it before but decided to give it a shot at my first DOG! I understand it's kind of mean to try something out on strangers but I'll cook what I want to cook, damn it.

I followed the recipe off the back of the Creamette macaroni box. Note: the proportions are for half of the box of noodles!

3 tbsp butter
3 tbsp flour
2 1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese (I just used a whole block which was probably closer to 3 cups)

The smashing success of the first recipe drove me to try and reproduce it about a week after the first cake. Although it was a while ago I think the two things I did differently were using tinfoil and redoing the coals. I think I was at 4 on the bottom and 18-19 at the top but there may have been 5 on the bottom. The tinfoil was used to help with the cake flip which came out perfectly this time.