Sulky Stew

We have all heard about the so-called “Hairs of the Dog” recipe’s for morning after cures of alcoholic indulgences. How some blokes rave on about raw eggs with Worcestershire sauce and tomato juice and vodka, well this is one that has been perfected over the years by Hully and may come in handy.

What you need:

• Hangover
• Swag
• Dog

What you do:

Wake up well after sunrise, in fact wake up when the sun is high and has been blasting down on your swag for a couple of hours so that when you finally “come to” you have lost a gallon of sweat, and your throat is as dry as the Strezlecki Track. The cockatoo’s will no doubt choose this moment to gather and screech with laughter at your pain, while the wedge tails will be circling you way up high in the sky, sensing another desert dehydration victim is imminent.

Stagger blindly to the nearest leaning post and get a good grip on it with one hand while you empty even more precious liquid from your bladder. Ponder how it could be at all possible to be so dry this morning when you drank so much liquid last night.

Attack the esky in search of any non-alcoholic liquid, barring vinegar, (a lethal mistake once made by Ron, to the amusement of the whole camp), take a long hard swig then head for the nearest dog and give him a kick for good measure.

Then drag your swag back under the nearest shady tree cursing all the while your so called mates, who in your belief are totally responsible for your present state. Swear off all further communication with them for life and then crawl back into the swag where you spend the rest of the day dozing, waking only briefly to sulk a bit more before slipping back into a death like sleep.

Tricks & Tips:

Always work out where the shade is going to be in the morning and plant your swag there before crashing. Also remember to keep an esky with cold water no more than an arms length from your swag. Make sure you kick someone else’s dog.

Rating:

Death could be a serious alternative and should be contemplated

Bush Tucker Recipes

After eating a hearty camp oven meal, we’ve watched many a campfire burn down to embers as we tossed verses to and fro under a blanket of outback stars. It was around one of these campfires that it was decided to put together a collection of bush tucker recipes that could be used by campers throughout Australia and assist them to step into the world of a couple of modern day Bushmen, Bush Poets from the Back of Bourke.

The bush tucker recipes can be cooked with basic tucker box ingredients to a standard that may have other wise been a bit ordinary. After your meal, you can turn the page and recite some original Bush Poetry and in so doing live out a lifestyle that has been idealised throughout history as being “Truly Australian”.

The recipes have been written to be “yarns” in their own right, making the book readable even from the comfort of the lounge chair at home. The most important ingredient is typically Australian. It’s a “no worries” approach to food and cooking. If you haven’t got the exact ingredients, substitute. If you haven’t got a substitute, use the exact ingredients. With any luck, you are enjoying a few beers or a nice Australian red anyway, so it probably won’t make that much difference. The idea is to make the recipes your own.

So whether you are camping somewhere in the bush or at home, dreaming that you are, read on and enjoy.

Back ‘o’ Bourke Tails And How To Cook ’em

A collection of original campfire meals and bush poetry written by Ron Wilson and Andrew Hull.

Originally intended to be published in book format it has now been provided in an interactive format for the web. The authors hope to have this book published in the future.

We hope you get a good laugh from this book and hopefully a good feed from the outback food recipees provided.

How to Use a Camp Oven

What you need

Camp oven

Shovel

Fire with heaps of coals

A bit of wire or steel doubled over at one end for a handle and bent at 90 degrees at the other to pick the lid up with

Something for lifting the oven on and off the coals if it has no handle, a hat for instance

A big rock or a couple of bricks or anything at all that you can sit the lid on and keep the bottom of it clean

Patience

 

Burning In
When you buy a new oven, “burn it in”. What you do is build a big fire and put your oven on top and get it hot. When you think it is hot enough it probably isn’t, cause we’re talking bloody hot. Rip it off the fire and drop a good lump of fat (not oil) in it. Then put on a leather glove and rub round and round the entire surface of the oven with a couple of sheets of rolled up newspaper. If it catches on fire just throw the lid on for a second or two, and be pleased with your self because you have probably nearly got it hot enough.

Keep rubbing the fat into your oven and it will burn itself into the porous surface of the metal, until eventually you can see that you have made a new surface, similar to what a BBQ plate looks like. That means you might be getting close so throw it back on the fire, get it hot and do it all over again. Make sure you do under the lid as well.

Repeat this until the surface of your oven is jet black and then keep rubbing with clean pieces of newspaper until there is not a drop of fat left in the oven. It should have a dull black hard surface and this will protect your oven for life. It will never rust.

Burning in an oven may take a while but it is important. We recommend you have a mate on stand-by to help keep the fluids up to you during this arduous task. The next thing to do with a new oven is cook “baked dinners” in it for a week. This will seal all those areas you are sure you covered but didn’t and will also ‘load’ your oven wall with flavour. Of course you don’t have to cook a baked dinner every day of the week, just make sure that your first few uses involve roasting meat and veggies and you’ll be right.

Ronnie Wilson

Camp Oven Temperatures

Assuming you already have a healthy campfire blazing, rather than try to balance your camp oven in the middle, shovel coals out of the fire to a cooking area and place the camp oven on them. The further you move from the fire, the more control you have over the heat and the more comfortable you will be while cooking. However, if you start making little piles of coals all through your campsite the one thing you will be sure to cook is the bottom of your feet. Coals will stay hot long after they stop glowing.

Do not put coals on the lid unless you are trying to brown the top of something or unless you only have access to really sad timber that only burns to ash and not coals and you just cant get any heat out of it. Some timber burns ‘hot and fast’, some burns ‘cool and long’, we recommend the stuff that burns ‘hot and long’, Gidgee wood being the ultimate in “Camp Oven Wood”.

In camp oven cooking, even the best cooks are at the mercy of raw materials. Peter,another good camp oven man, came out from the coast and was watching us prepare the evening meal, which was a big leg roast. He watched us sprinkle a shovel full of coals onto the ground and then throw the oven full of meat on it.

All this was well and good until we sat down to have a beer and recite some new poetry. Peter nearly had a fit. He thought we were going to be there all night unless we got coals packed around that oven like an anthill.

We then proceeded to have a polite discussion about the pros and cons of our different cooking styles and whose bloody place it is anyway. All became clear to Peter an hour later as he marveled over the quality of the “Gidgee” coals. They burn slow at a high, even heat, and take the guesswork out of camp oven cooking.

The shoe was on the other foot a few months later when we dropped in to sample Peter’s fine home brew. We were astounded at the amount of coals and mainly ash that he had to use on his camp oven to get anywhere. He actually has to completely bury his oven in ash and coals and replace this regularly so as to get any heat at all. The obvious problem with this is not only the amount of drinking time you miss out on while shoveling coals, but all the risk you run of getting ash and coal in your food.

So there you go, we can assure you that before long you will become an expert in judging the coal value of timber in different areas of Australia. That is why we will only describe the hotness of the oven and not the amount of coals to use in this book. You will just have to experiment.

Ronnie Wilson

Yab Babs

The trouble with these things is, to make them, you have to prepare a heap of yabbies that are already peeled. So for every one you put on a skewer, you eat about ten. Yabbies are like peanuts and beer, one is too many and fifty is not enough.

What you need

• Cooked yabby tails
• A couple of “Sweet Chilies” (They are the really long thick ones, 
  Capsicum will do but it is not as good)
• A couple of onions sliced length ways
• Bacon
• Fencing wire cut ten inches long for the kebab sticks

What you do

Wrap each tail in bacon and thread onto wire with pieces of sweet chilli and onion in between every tail. Cook until bacon is crispy. Bewdiful!

Tricks & Tips

You can cook this on the barby or on the floor of your camp oven

Rating

I wonder what the poor people are eating.

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