The Moss Pot

Roasted Chicken Thighs Part II

2010-08-03T13:15:00.006-05:00

Well, it has been a really long time since I have posted anything. It's not because I've been lazy with my posting, it's because I've been lazy with my cooking. I haven't touched my Dutch oven in over a year and a half I think. That's kind of sad I guess, but I'm still gaining weight, so it apparently hasn't stopped me from eating.

Ever since I did my first Roasted Chicken Thighs dish I have wanted to try again, mainly because it wasn't very good. After getting some great feedback on ideas that might make it better I decided to try again and incorporate some of those ideas.

Above you can see the ingredients that I used for this dish. I purchased two whole chickens and cut them, saving the thighs and legs for this dish. I cut off all the excess skin but left enough to neatly cover the meat. I then lightly coated the chicken with olive oil, mainly just to help hold the spices that I would rub on them. This included some salt and pepper and a whole bunch of thyme. I also prepared four slices of thick-cut bacon and a bowl with one chopped bell pepper, one half a chopped onion, and a bunch (technical I know) of cloves of garlic.

Taking advice that I needed to have my fire hotter underneath and to use some type of real fat, I put enough coals under the pot to cover basically every square inch underneath and began cooking the bacon for its grease and to be used as part of the dish.

Once the bacon had cooked pretty well, I added the bowl of onion, peppers, and garlic and began cooking them in the bacon grease.

After they were pretty well ready, I scooted everything over to one side and added the chicken, skin side down, to the grease to brown and begin cooking.

I flipped the chicken and turned the pot periodically until it looked good. I guess it may have cooked about thirty to forty minutes. I scooped it all out onto one plate as seen in the opening photo from this post. My wife and I sat down at the patio table with that one plate and two forks and ate every bite of it. Oh yeah, redemption......feels good......and tastes better.

Thanks again to everyone who offered advice on things I could do to make it better.

Peach cobbler

2008-10-14T10:33:00.003-05:00

Well, I made a peach cobbler this weekend at a Cub Scout campout at Brierfield State Park. I didn't have my camera handy, so I don't have any photos to post this time. Sorry.

Our Den had a family meal on Saturday evening. I was supposed to bring a desert, so I thought making the peach cobbler would be a kind of cool thing to do. I did a quick and easy one.

Basically, I just dumped a can of peaches in the pot, poured about 10-12 oz of 7-Up in, dumped a yellow cake mix on top, sprinkled some brown sugar and cinnamon on top and then put some pats of butter all around. Then I cooked it with a few coals on bottom and a good bit on top (pretty specific huh?) for about 40 minutes. Served it up. Not bad. Too bad we didn't have any ice cream.

Campfire Dutch Oven Pizza

2008-09-10T07:37:00.006-05:00

Finally. Finally, I got to go outside and try another Dutch oven dish. It was a lot of fun to try something new regardless of the fact that it started raining part way through and I had to carry my coals around the house to shield them under the front porch...but...I digress.

I had a hankering for pizza and I had heard of folks cooking one in the Dutch oven, so I thought I would give it a try. What better place to turn when you are looking for a Dutch oven recipe than Byron's website, so I headed over there and sure enough picked up a pizza recipe. I guess one day I will run out of recipes to try off of his site, but I don't think it will be anytime soon.

I ran out to the supermarket and purchased everything I didn't have, fired up the coals, and prepared the ingredients. Here they all are spread out on my kitchen table. I have already mixed the Italian seasoning and garlic powder into the meat.

Then I started browning the meat as indicated in the recipe.

After removing the browned meat and setting it aside, I wiped out the Dutch oven with paper towels. Then added the olive oil, crescent roll dough, and pizza sauce.

Then I added my main ingredients. This was for the whole family and since we have differing tastes, I tried to divide it up some. The boys got no ingredients (cheese only), my wife got meat only, and I added a generous helping of black olives and mushrooms to mine.

Here it is with the cheese added and ready to be put on the fire.

I have this thing on the coals now. I cooked it for about 25 minutes, rotating the pot and lid in alternate directions every 5 - 10 minutes or so. In hindsight, 20 minutes may have been better. The dough didn't get burned in the most technical sense of the word, but it was getting close.

Here is the finished product. It turned out very well. I think that one day I would like to try and make some homemade pizza dough and do the same thing over again. I've just always wanted to make homemade pizza dough, I can't explain it. Also, getting this pizza out of the Dutch oven whole proved to be impossible. So, I just sort of cut it into fourths in the pot and scooped the four pieces out.

Thanks again Byron for another fine recipe.

Peach Cobbler

2008-06-04T07:58:00.005-05:00

Well, I finally decided it was about time to try to cook a desert. After all it was a desert that first piqued my interest in the Dutch oven.

So once again I turned to Byron Bill's website for a recipe. This time I settled in on the Fruit Cobbler Delight. The recipe can be found here. I have to admit that I did change one thing on this though. My wife doesn't like fruit cocktail so I substituted another 30 oz. can of peaches for the 30 oz. can of fruit cocktail.

Here are all of the ingredients ready to add to the pot (except the cake mix, I forgot to put it in the picture, whoops!). I had pre-measured the spices, sugar, and tapioca.

Basically you just dump the fruit, tapioca, and spices in and stir them around. You can see the result above.

Then you sprinkle the cake mix on top of the liquid, sprinkle the brown sugar on top of that, and dab butter all over. Now it's ready to go on the coals.

I cooked it with 12 coals on top and 12 on bottom per the directions and rotated the pot and lid every 10 minutes or so. I let it cook for about 55 minutes.

This is what you get, a fabulous peach cobbler. You can see a picture of it in a bowl approximately one minute prior to consumption at the top of this post. Warning though, this stuff is HOT!!! My waiting taste buds couldn't stand to wait for a cool-down, so now I have a scalded tongue . It was worth it though.

This is a great recipe, especially for folks who like fruit. I have a confession to make though. While I like fruit cobblers, I don't actually like to eat the fruit. I just like the crust and gooey stuff. So if I were cooking this just for myself I might cut it back to maybe one can of fruit to try and increase the crusty/gooey factor.

Also, while I have not yet had a hard time cleaning my Dutch oven, this sticky desert stuff has been harder to clean than the other things I have cooked . So, in the future, when cooking a desert, I may try to line the pot with foil.

Memorial Day Potatoes

2008-05-29T07:29:00.003-05:00

Well, it has been a while since I have posted anything on here. Basically our family has been on a pretty tight budget lately and I just haven't been able to cook anything for the past few weeks.

On Memorial Day my in-laws came over to grill out. So I decided to cook a side dish of Moss Style Potatoes in the dutch oven. I did not take any photos since I have done this dish in the past. This time I cooked about 14-16 potatoes. This larger quantity cooked just fine in the same amount of time as a small batch. However, they did not brown as well as the smaller batch. I guess the amount of browning is just a function of how long the food sits against the bottom. More food = less bottom time. So, if you want browned potatoes either cook smaller batches or use a larger dutch oven.

What an Exciting Day

2008-04-17T12:53:00.003-05:00

Wow! This is great! As I spend more time looking around on the net, I am finding more and more great resources for Dutch oven cooking. Not just some recipes in a book somewhere but real people out doing this stuff. This is great because you can really see people being creative with their dishes and gives me hope that maybe one day I can cook some neat stuff too.

I ran across Mark's Black Pot. What a great resource. He has been posting details of his experiences with the Dutch oven for over a year and has lots off good information and recipes. I look forward to try some of them soon.

Chicken and Potato Delight

2008-04-16T07:52:00.006-05:00

After my success with the Hawaiian Braided Bread recipe that I got from Byron Bills Dutch Oven Cooking website, I decided to try another of his recipes. There are quite a few that I would like to try out, but the Chicken and Potato Delight really caught my eye. You can find the recipe here.

This seemed like a logical choice. After all, it has everything a growing boy needs: bacon, chicken, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, cheese, and sour cream. As I see it, it's only missing one on the Man's List of Good Foods, and that would be to somehow deep fry the whole thing when your done.

Let me say that I did kind of mess this one up a little bit, and it is something to be aware of. This recipe generates a huge amount of food. I realized that was the case because of how many pieces of chicken and potatoes it called for. But what I didn't notice is that the recipe clearly says to use a 12 inch deep dutch oven. I don't have a deep dutch oven and so had to reduce the amount of chicken and potatoes that I added. I still added the called for amount of the other ingredients, because I had prepared everything ahead of time. What this means is that mine turned out a bit more soup-like than proabably intended. While still very good, if you don't have a deep dutch oven, I would recommend adding as much of the main ingredients as possible and reducing the cream of chicken and mushroom soups. Also maybe draining some of the juice that accumulates as the chicken cooks would help too.

Here are my first ingredients to cook. The bacon goes in first. Then you add the onions, mushrooms, and chicken below.

Here I am trying to get my bacon to brown. This takes a good bit longer than you would think.

Here it is after adding the chicken, onions, and mushrooms and letting them cook. Here you can see the amount of juice that is produced from the chicken cooking. I left this in, which probably helped the taste to some extent but also contributed to the dish being more soup-like.

Also, it takes a while to get the bacon to brown and then to cook the chicken and onion , maybe thirty minutes. So what I did, and what you may want to do, is to start some additional charcoal while this cooks. After this stage you will be adding the other ingredients and it will require an additional forty-five minutes or so of cook time, so you will need that new charcoal to replace your first ones that have burned down by now.

Here is the dish after adding all of the remaining ingredients (except the cheese, which goes on last). Now it will need to cook for forty-five more minutes to cook the potatoes. At this stage you cook in a traditional manner with about twice as many coals on top as on bottom. I stirred this about every fifteen minutes and so didn't bother with rotating the pot or lid.

Here it is after fully cooking and everything is nice and done. All that is left to do is put the cheese on and let it melt. You can see the final product with the cheese at the very top of this post.

This turned out to be a very enjoyable dish. It tastes good and is actually very easy to prepare, but it does take a little work ahead of time just because you have so many ingedients and because there are large amounts of each ingredient. You have to kind of prepare everything ahead of time. About the only thing that you may want to not prepare ahead is the potatoes. If you slice them up at the beginning they will turn that brownish-pink color before you use them.

That said, I have enjoyed this dish very much. Next time I will try to make it a little more on the solid side and less on the soupy side.

Hawaiian Braided Bread

2008-03-21T19:33:00.007-05:00

Alright, I decided to have a go at some Dutch oven bread. Since I have no idea how to cook bread, I searched around and found a recipe for Hawaiian Braided Bread. It is not my intention to reproduce the recipe I used but rather to chronicle my attempt at cooking this bread.

The recipe I used came from Byron's Dutch Oven Recipes and can be found here. There are a ton of other recipes on this site. Check them out.

First I ran out and got all of the ingredients. Then I mixed up the dough and kneaded it per the directions. Then I put it in a bowl to rise to double its size. This took a couple hours (an eternity it seemed). Here it is after rising.

Then I cut it into three parts, rolled them into thin ropes, rolled them in the macadamia nuts, and braided them together. I then put them in the oven to rise again to double their size. I set the oven in the sunshine to warm it and hasten the rising.

After it had risen and I brushed the dough with the melted butter and sprinkled with poppy seeds. I had timed my coals to be ready at about this same time. This picture is of the dough just prior to being put on the fire.

I made sure to rotate my pot about 1/3 turn every 10 minutes and to rotate the lid 1/3 turn the opposite direction to help distribute the heat.

I checked at about 30 minutes of cook time and the outer edges were beginning to brown. So, I moved all of the coals on the lid to the center to try and concentrate the heat closer to the center. I let it cook for 5 more minutes for a total of 35 minutes and then took the oven off all of the heat (removed the pot from the coals and the coals from the lid). I let it sit for 5 minutes to cook from the residual heat in the oven as per the instructions. Here is what it looked like.

It took me a little while to figure how to get the bread out of the pot without tearing it up. It didn't stick, I was just trying to be delicate.

I made some honey butter to spread on the bread and gave it a taste. WONDERFUL.

Thanks for the recipe Byron!!!

Roasted Chicken Thighs (sort of)

2008-03-18T19:00:00.003-05:00

Well, for my second dish in my Dutch oven, I decided to try some meat. It seemed like roasted chicken parts would be a good idea, so I got a big pack of chicken thighs.

Let me start off by saying that this didn't work out quite like I had hoped. While the end result did taste good and was very tender and juicy, it wasn't really roasted so much as boiled. So in the end there were several lessons learned. If anyone reads this and would like to offer suggestions, I would love to hear them.

Ingredients:

Pack of chicken thighs
Paul Prudhomme's Chicken Magic
2 Leeks (the meaty end chopped up)
About 6 cloves of garlic (diced)
Salt and pepper to taste
2 bay leaves

I started out by removing all of the excess fat and excess skin from the chicken. On a few pieces I removed all of the skin as a test. (In the future I think I will remove all of the skin entirely).
I sprinkled the chicken which a generous amount of the Chicken Magic.
I added salt and pepper.

I got my coals going and added 10 to the bottom and 18 to the top, using regular Kingsford charcoal. In hindsight, I still don't this this was enough. It just didn't seem that hot and the coals burned out before I was done. There was a LOT of wind though and that may have contributed to not enough heat.

I added several tablespoons of olive oil to the pot and put in the chicken, skin side down. I thought this might help brown the chicken a little to start with. It did not...

There was really too much chicken also it seems. In the future I will probably only put in as much as can fit without having to stack one on top of another.

After cooking twenty minutes I rearranged the pieces. By this point there was already a lot of liquid in the bottom and the pieces were basically being cooked by boiling. I also added the two bay leaves at this point.

Next time I want to roast chicken, I think I will remove the skin so that it doesn't cook down to so much liquid. And I will try to elevate the chicken on a rack so that the the meat doesn't sit in the liquid.

Here is a shot of the leeks and garlic that I had prepared. I added it after 25 minutes of cook time, as seen in the next photo.

After 40 minutes of cooking they were looking pretty good, but there was still too much liquid, so I removed the chicken, poured out the liquid, and put the chicken back in. The liquid looked like some really good chicken broth, so I saved it for later.

I let it cook for a total of an hour and fifteen minutes. The final product is seen above.

Like I say, it turned out pretty good, but wasn't really what I was shooting for from the beginning. Oh well, live and learn.

Moss Style Potatoes - My First Dish

2008-03-14T21:00:00.003-05:00

Well it was time to try my first recipe in my new Dutch oven. I decided that I should probably try something that I liked and new how to cook very well indoors. Moss Style Potatoes was the answer. Basically, they are a form of Greek Style Potatoes but with no lemon. So I was set. I washed my pot with nothing but water, lit some charcoal, and started preparing the recipe.

I have included the ingredients that I used below. The brand names are my personal preference, but I'm sure others would work just as well. Also, I have not included measurements. Frankly, it just depends on how may potatoes you have and your preferences. In the instructions below I will make some basic recommendations.

7-14 potatoes, peeled and cut into bite size chunks
Jane’s Crazy mixed-up salt
Jane’s Crazy mixed-up pepper
Cavender’s Greek seasoning powder
Olive oil
Thyme – I used the dried kind from a jar
Garlic – Either freshly minced or pressed or the pre-minced kind in a jar
Fresh Leek

When I cook this in the house I normally use only 5 potatoes, but I tried 7 in the Dutch oven. I believe that in this size oven you could easily double that with no trouble.

Peel your potatoes. Rinse and dry them and then cut into large bite size pieces. Put them in a large bowl.
Using one hand to continuously churn the potatoes, begin adding ingredients to the bowl with the other hand.
First drizzle in enough olive oil to thoroughly coat the potatoes.
Add garlic. For 7 potatoes I would use a whole bulb/head of garlic or about 3 tablespoons of minced garlic. Adjust from there based on how many potatoes you are cooking.
Put in the Thyme. I just sort of crush the little pieces in my hand and sprinkle in enough so there is a little bit on all of the potatoes. Maybe a teaspoons worth.
Add a ridiculous amount of the Greek seasoning. You will think you are putting in too much…you are not.
Also add quite a bit of salt. Either Jane’s or as I was out of it at this time I used regular Morton’s sea salt.
I put in some pepper to taste, Jane’s is pretty good. I usually don’t use much.
Often I add some chopped up Leek, but I didn’t have any this time, so I didn’t.
Mix it all together good and you are ready to cook.

I put my oven on top of about 10 smallish briquettes and let it preheat for a few moments. Then I dumped in the potatoes and spread them out evenly. I put the lid on and added 18 small briquettes to the top.

I rotated the pot and lid a quarter turn every fifteen minutes to try and ensure even heating.

I first opened the oven to stir the potatoes after about 35 minutes. They were already getting pretty soft, much quicker than in the oven at home. Maybe because the steam is kept inside the Dutch oven so well.

Then I opened to stir the potatoes again after about 50 minutes of cook time. They were actually done at this point, but I let them cook a full hour before removing, just because that is how long I normally cook them.

At an hour I decided to take them off.

THEY WERE VERY GOOD.

Next time I cook them I think I will make sure to get some leek. Also, I do like to take a slice off of the end of a lemon and squeeze it hard to spray the potatoes on my plate with a little lemon juice even though I do not cook it into the meal.

I was also impressed with how the food did not stick to the pot. Excellent! Cleanup was also not too bad. I was able to heat some water in the pot and lightly scrub it with a nylon pad and it looked like new. I coated it with oil and put it away. I can’t wait to fire it up again.

As an experiment, I also cut up a few potatoes and coated them with olive oil and threw them in the refrigerator to see if the oil would keep them from turning brown. It seems to work pretty well for up to about 24 hours. Then they start to have a little bit of discoloration. So, it may be possible with this recipe, to prepare it at home, throw it in a cooler and prepare it at camp the first night with no trouble.

Introduction

2008-03-14T20:00:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone. I just got the bug to learn how to cook in a Dutch oven, though I’m not sure why really. I have been involved with my son’s Scout pack for a couple years and seen Dutch ovens in use, but was always turned off by them. After all, they are big, heavy, dirty, and hard to clean and maintain. Then I went to a Scout training class called BALOO, where we cooked some dump cake type deserts in Dutch ovens. Needless to say, my opinion began to change.

But, it wasn’t until I received a $50 Bass Pro Shops gift card for Christmas that I ever considered actually buying a Dutch oven and trying it for myself. I looked through their catalog over and over and could not find a single thing that I wanted, at least not for $50. Then one day a few weeks ago a light bulb went off in my brain, I had to get a Dutch oven and learn how to cook on it. Then I could be the hero at the campouts. Yeah, that might just work.

So I started researching Dutch ovens and how to cook in them. I read every major website on the subject and tried to figure out what kind of oven to buy. This decision was made easier in that Bass Pro Shops only carries Lodge brand ovens. So, I went with the old standard, a Lodge 12”, normal depth, pre-seasoned Dutch oven. It was $59 plus shipping, so I went over my $50 but not badly. It was delivered within a couple of days, on March 11, 2008. It was very fast shipping. The oven was in very good shape. The coating seemed very tenaciously applied, with the exception of a couple of small spots around the lid edge that had scraped off. It wasn’t bad at all, and I figured it would bake back on with time and use. I was ready to cook, but what…