A Jalapeño Poppin' Good Time!

So I am really excited to bring to you the first round of food selected for trial! I thought we would begin our journey through the outdoor culinary world with the best of jumping off points... Appetizers! Before getting too far ahead of myself, I need to thank two people who rocked out with me on this culinary expedition this week! Chase and Jimmy, two friends who also happen to be Eagle Scouts, helped me on every step of the process this week (and will hopefully continue to do so)!

In thinking about what exactly I should cook, I looked back to a camping trip I had taken with one of my best friends a few years ago. While there we cooked up some true delicacies, but two recipes, for similar dishes, really stood out in my mind... Jalapeño Poppers!

Now I know what everyone is thinking... "How could you possibly make good poppers without a fryer?!" But frying anything over charcoal would be difficult (and dangerous) for even the most experienced of outdoor chefs! For recipes I turned to the Food Network! They had all sorts of recipes for Jalapeño Poppers and two quickly rose to the top of my list! One was for Baked Jalapeño Poppers, while the other was a Roasted Jalapeño Popper Recipe.

On a quick side note, a great place to look for recipes that translate well to dutch ovens or flash/reflector ovens is in a cookbook like Cooking Light or other health conscious cookbooks. The reason for this is that they often go out of their way to bake dishes that are traditionally fried or similarly cooked!

One of the important things about cooking over real fires is learning how to control your temperature within your "ovens." Jimmy has a good rule of thumb each briquette will give you about 15 degrees of heat in a dutch oven. For longer cooking it is necessary to keep an eye on your oven temperature and have extra coals handy!

Anyway, these recipes really translated well into the outdoor setting. I cooked the Baked Jalapeño Poppers in a reflective/flash oven that was made out of sheet aluminum, some skewers and a few paper clips. It was super easy to build and pretty easy to work with. The trick was adding charcoal as was necessary to keep the temperature up around 350 degrees, like the recipe dictates. Because heat loss can be a bit of an issue with this type of oven it is important to have plenty of coals ready to go as others die down. These poppers came out picture perfect!

The Roasted Jalapeño Popper's were cooked in a 12 inch dutch oven and were absolutely delicious... but I messed the slicing of the peppers up a little bit... and well... the cheese ooozed everywhere. Nonetheless, these were pretty low maintenance because the dutch oven just distributes heat really well. They came out nice, tender and full of flavor.

Overall, this week's recipes were a hit with everyone who tried them... with one minor exception. Libby felt that there was too much cheese... but who cares?

Check out the pictures below!

A Cast Iron Dutch Oven and an Aluminun Reflective Oven

Roasted Peppers (pre-cooking)

A Charcoal Chimney, the best way to light charcoal.