Camp Cooking – Vidalia Upside Down Cornbread on Lake Erie

Where do I even start? This weekend was awesome. A while back, I wrote about visiting Sterling State Park in Monroe, and how I hadn’t visited since 1984. This weekend we ventured out and were lucky enough to get a lakeside campsite. Wow.

I know it’s Lake Erie and all, not the ocean, but it’s not often we get to camp with this kind of view. It was super cool to sit by the fire and listen to the waves crash that Friday evening. The sun set directly across from our site, so I knew it would rise over the lake. I checked sunrise and it was 6:53am. Yikes. I set my alarm and was glad I did. I got up for coffee Saturday morning and the wind shook the trailer. Thinking it would be chilly being right on the water, I dressed for it, but when I stepped outside it was surprisingly warm.

Didn’t realize I caught the seagulls until looking at this later. There were two other people, a ways down the beach from me, sitting on a picnic table. This was one of the most peaceful moments I remember.

It was a HOT and humid day. Cooking breakfast outside on the grill I kept smelling propane (not from the grill I was using). Bill later confirmed it to be a leaky hose on one of the trailer’s tanks, inside one of the side compartments. Off to Camping World we go. $75 later we come back with two hoses (not sure which one would fit), teflon tape, red solo cup party lights, clips, a replacement baggage door clip and this awesome new bouncy thing.

Bill was talking about the propane leak and how he thought he smelled propane earlier but wasn’t sure it was us. Then when I smelled it, he went to check it out. “So I opened up the door and whoop, there it is.” Which made us both promptly break out into song and laugh for the next half hour. LOL

So I’ll finally get to the point of this blog post – my recipe for this trip was Vidalia Onion Upside Down Cornbread. The plan was to make it in a dutch oven over the coals. I cheated and bought cornbread mix and brought along in a jar the wet ingredients – milk, eggs, oil.

You slice the onion, place it in the bottom of the dutch oven, and pour the cornbread mix over it. When done, flip it and voila – similar to making a pineapple upside down cake.

So I was all excited to put the dutch oven on the coals and try it out. We met this awesome couple from Utah while out in Sturgis (check out Outdoor Cooking with Al!) and I was all excited to ping him on Facebook as I tried out my first experiment. He’s done many recipes cooking with dutch ovens.

It turns out I should have watched a few more of his shows before I tried this! Within minutes, smoke was pouring out from under the lid and the bottom was clearly burned. I kept sticking a knife into it but it was still batter-ey inside. Rats. I left it on the side of the fire ring until it was done cooking.

Dammit.

Luckily it was so thick I could trim off the burnt sides and we still had cornbread. Al advised me to have less coals on the bottom and more on top of the lid to get it to 400 degrees. Next time.

Next, the meatball hobo pies went into the fire.

But apparently, tonight’s dinner’s theme was Burnt. Yum! Not.

Oh well, it was an experience! Saturday night came to a close and we burned the last of our wood. The skies cleared to reveal the big dipper and a sky lantern made it’s way across the night sky. I wished we could have slept with the windows open to the sound of the crashing waves, but the humidity was unreal, even overnight. Sitting by the fire dried things out a bit, even though it was a warm evening.

On our way out the next morning, I took a panoramic pic from the truck bed of the site of the old campground. I’d mentioned in the other blog post that the camping loop had been moved – when, I haven’t yet found out. But there’s very little trace of it now, at least from this angle. I guess it doesn’t take long for nature to reclaim things.

We were right under the emergency siren when it when off – talk about deafening. It was right at 12:30pm and I thought perhaps that was when Monroe performed their weekend test similar to other cities. It was from a friend’s Facebook post later when I learned a tornado touched down in Milan and we were in it’s path! We made it home with no incidents, but coming down our street we snagged a branch from a tree and took it with us. Great.

Stopping in front of our house, Bill climbed up the back ladder and knocked it down into the street. Our neighbor was outside and said, “Are you going to put it back where it came from?” Bill replied, “It’s camouflage. You can see this?”  Haha. I was paranoid something was busted – AC unit, vents, but there was no damage, thank God. More kindling to add to our pile.

Thanks for coming with me on this roundabout way of sharing a new recipe! Haha. Since they’ll take place on camping weekends, there will be additional twists to the story. At least, I hope so. 🙂