Your Dream Dinner

[mo_bears]

This'll be my first year as a cook for you folks, and I'm starting work on the menu. I thought I'd take an informal poll to answer the question: What is your dream dinner?

(/lunch/breakfast...)

[RPF]

Anything, as long as desert is fresh rhubarb pie.

[Nate]

Dishes are really individual, but the stuff that sells at fast food places tends to get good response if you're not in a camp chock full of people with gourmet tastes. People love pizza nights, burger nights and taco nights, that sort of thing. Not exciting from a cook/chef's perspective, but there's a reason that every restaurant has a burger on their menu.

Couple of general thoughts on cooking from a planter's perspective:

- Try to cook to the weather if you can. Rainy days people want carb-heavy, hot dinners. Hot days they often appreciate/are more receptive to something lighter/greener. Fish (grilled tuna/salmon, whatever) with fresh salad and veggies is a bright, hot summer day type meal, definitely not a pouring rain, early in the season type meal.

- The one thing I appreciated most as a planter was the Brinkman cooks who would put out a simple soup/bread for when the planters came in before dinner every day. They'd put a giant pot of soup out in the mess tent and some bread and people could help themselves. If your crew got in early you wouldn't have to sit around for two hours not eating anything or try to scavenge whatever's leftover at the bottom of your dry sack. I've often thought this could be an effective way to keep food costs down to boot: let planters fill up a bit on soup/bread, meaning they'll eat less of the higher cost dinner foods. Just a side theory though.

- Not sure what your background is, if you've been around planting camps before or not, but it's easy to get jaded/frustrated with planters as a cook. Try to be as positive as you can and realize that planters are not normal human beings when they're planting. A positive cook can make all the difference at the end of the day to people. Don't by default assume people will do the right thing and get frustrated when they don't (whether that's walking to the other side of camp to recycle their bottles or whether it's about leaving the mess tent in a respectable condition). You need to set expectations/rules for planters and get help from your camp's management to enforce the right behaviour and you need to set things up so that it's as easy for them as possible to do the right thing. It's not personal (usually) when planters are inconsiderate, they're usually just inhumanely tired and incapable of thinking of the needs of others.

- Portion control planters on their first breakfast/dinner pass and let them come back for more. Planting camps can be really bad for garbages full of good food if you let them load up with whatever they want on their first pass through the kitchen. Also, planters will steal high cost breakfast items to take for lunch (e.g. a full bag of bacon).

- Speaking to the above point, try to have some cheap, filling options (like bread) that you never run out of, so if people are hungry they have something to fill them up. Hungry planters after dinner is the nightmare scenario that leads to camp mutinies. You don't want to overcook and waste food obviously, so having a solid supplement item that people like and can fill up on is a nice way to buffer yourself for the first couple of weeks while you get your food volumes down.


I didn't really answer the question there. My dream meals:

Breakfast: Shredded hashbrowns, bacon, eggs, fruit smoothie.
Lunch: Don't care, I never ate much for lunch.
Dinner: Ribs, baked potato, coleslaw, veggies + cheesecake for dessert.

[theBushman]

Lasagne, but its a PITA to work around the alternate diets: the vegetarians, the lactose intolerant, the mushroom haters like myself.

Mexi buffet is a good time.

I like breakfast for dinner, but mainly because I don't eat hot breakfast for breakfast.

[chrisdunn]

Ditto on the soup and bread.

I like to eat simple in camps. Some of the places I work the cooks try to get too fancy and sometimes the guys won't eat it. You could tell because the garbage cans fill up quicker.

[jdtesluk]

My favourite from my Zanzibar days:

Start: Fresh baked bread, veggie butter, and hot soup
Also: Simple salads (Bean or greens)

Dinner: BBQ salmon and veggies and potatoes

Dessert: Baked meringue (Pavlova) with strawberries and whipped cream

Seafood is a real treat when in the interior, so nicely BBQ'ed salmon is awesome.
Thank you Micheline wherever you are....you made my dream dinner come true so many times. I realize that meringues are fickle creations, but you always got the perfect crispy-chewy texture and perfect balance of fruit and whipped cream.


Second place......Christmas in July (gobble gobble gobble!)

[mel_eff]

Quesadillas!!!

[newforest]

If there is a good home-made dessert that's all anyone will talk about afterwards.

[dirtpenetrator]

peanut butter chicken, rice, crispy spinach, cauliflower, and stout ale.