Campfire Breakfast
My mate Leigh was peering over my shoulder as I wrote an article for Get Your Grill On. “I’ve got some pictures you can use” he said and downloaded pictures of one of his many campfire cookout breakfasts he and his mates regularly make by the bank of the mighty Murray river, Australia’s biggest and longest. If there is an equivalent river in the States, I reckon it would be the Mississippi, both these rivers have soul and a say in shaping the character of the places they flow through.
Leigh gets up the river in order to waterski. He had an old wooden boat, built in the 1960’s, fitted out with an engine that was salvaged from Noah’s Ark. He sold that in order to build another wooden boat fitted with an engine that could pull a tank. It’s a project that, so far, has gone on for three years and Leigh has already lost three bets on exactly when his boat will be in the water.
As you can see, it’s quite an easy breakfast to cook over a campfire, just bacon and eggs cooked on a portable grill, giving the flexibility to cook wherever you can light a fire. Up around these parts, red gum is the wood of choice, it burns long and slow, breaking down to good sized coals, giving off plenty of heat. The smoke flavour is fairly neutral, but lends a pleasing tang to foods cooked over it.
Of course, the trick here is to let the coals burn down a bit so as to not have too much heat. To my way of thinking, really hot coals lead to dried out bacon and burned eggs before the whites are properly set.
Can you think of a better place to be, by the banks of a river as the sun comes up, birds singing in the background as you get ready for a day of fun and adventure? I can’t.
