Dutch Oven Friday

Steamin' Fiesta Chicken:


Sparky and I have been invited on a 4 day Selway trip this summer, and have been put in charge of meals. So to prepare a good menu, we're doing a dutch oven meal every Friday evening we're in town.

We've gotten some good recipes from several different places, and this week we're going to highlight one we found on Byron's Dutch oven pages that we'll probably use on the trip.

Our criteria for trip inclusion are three:

1. It's got to taste really good.
2. It's got to be really easy to make.
3. It has to appear as if we've done more work to make it than we have.

For all the recipes we will end up using, there will be "the right way" of making the food, and then the way we'll do it. Which will entail a lot of short cuts. If we make brownies (which we will), they'll be out of a box, not from scratch. Simply because, even though we want to eat well, we don't want to spend all of our off-river time in the kitchen.

So if we have garlic bread with our Lasagna (a possible menu item), we won't be making the bread from scratch, we'll be probably be using something like this.

Which tastes fine I might add. But will appear to the others (if we're careful) that we've done more work than we have.

From Byron's recipes, we decided to try his Fiesta Chicken with Black Beans. It fit well with our criteria: though it has a lot of ingredients, it's relatively simple in that you pretty much just combine all the ingredients in the dutch oven (other than the chicken seasoning) and cook it. Another appeal is the number of canned ingredients: on river trips, that just makes one less thing to keep refrigerated (always a difficult issue to balance with the beer).

We served it with baked brown rice and flour tortillas, and most folk made it into a burrito. The only things we would change about the recipe would be to leave out the can of whole tomatoes (it has enough tomato flavor with the paste, and the extra chopping means it's the can to be left behind), and we would cube the chicken instead of cutting it into strips: the strips cooked themselves into funny shapes (one came out shaped like Elvis, but Sparky ate it before I could even get a picture: probably could have sold it on E-bay). The funny shapes were of course funny, but for the people who wanted to make burritos, they made strange lumps.

Everyone very much liked the recipe, it's actually strangely similar to the chicken enchiladas we made last year on the Middle Fork of the Salmon trip, except of course with this you make your own wrap: we'll have to decide which way we want to go. The enchiladas require a little more prep work, but with that recipe, the rice is cooked inside the enchiladas, so one less dutch oven is used.

On the other hand, we've been experimenting with lining the dutch ovens with aluminum foil which can then be recycled or thrown away. CB brought the idea to my attention last year on the Middle Fork, but I thought the foil would create too much of a thermal barrier to work effectively. I was wrong. It works great. They're even selling pre-formed aluminum dutch oven liners at Sportsman's Warehouse, though they're amazingly expensive.

When stuff gets cooked (or burned) onto the foil, it can be easily thrown away. This of course is wasteful, so I'm working on alternatives, but for now I can't justify not using it, since it saves much time and water on the river, both of which come at a premium.

My improvised cooking surface:

The giant cookie for dessert:
The baked rice:The Fiesta Chicken with melted cheese: