Baked Vegies

Making baked veggie’s in a camp oven can be enjoyable or infuriating, depending on your disposition. The best advice is to not get yourself all stressed out over having your veggies turning out a bit mushy. Because I can guarantee that even though you might end up needing a spoon to eat them, the flavour is going to be unbelievable. Anyway, your eating by the light of a fire and the food on the plates will be partly obscured by shadows, so what you can’t see cant hurt you.

The camp ovens do such a great job of baking the veggie’s, they literally melt when cooked. Hopefully the hints below might help you to cook them and still have them hold together long enough to get them onto a plate.

What you need

• Spuds
• Pumpkin
• Onions
• Carrots or Zucchinis
• Cooking Oil

What you do

Make sure your meat is cooked and ready to go, just leave it in the oven by the fire to keep hot. 
In another camp oven, cover the floor of the oven with about half to three-quarters of an inch of oil. Get the oven fairly hot, testing with chips of potato. When the chips start frying like they should, throw in your veggie’s, leaving the softer one’s like zucchini until the last few minutes of cooking time before they go in. Now as soon as the veggies hit the bottom. Roll them around and around so that they get completely covered in the hot oil. This will just seal off the surface of the veggie’s enough so that they won’t stick to the bottom. Now you can put the lid on, lifting regularly to roll veggie’s over to cook on a new side. Once the veggies are golden all over you can serve them up with your meat.

Tricks & Tips

Try leaving the skin on your pumpkin pieces if you are using the old “QLD Blue” or “Jarradale” varieties, and don’t be afraid to eat it as well, baked pumpkin skin is bloody good tucker.
Try cooking the veggie’s in the same oven as the roast meat, to take on that extra flavour. But be warned, veggies cooked in this way are more easily broken and mashed up as you try and juggle it around the meat.

Rating

Nearly good enough to make a vegetarian out of a bloke.