“Cooking on a Stick”

When 11-year-old Jordan Herron has gone camping in the past, his meals were pretty plain. 

Herron said, “We’d roast wieners and have chips, trail mix and cereal. That’s about all.” 

But, the sixth grader at HMS Christian Academy in Dittmer, Mo., has a much bigger menu of campfire cooking to pick from now. Last month, he took part in a “Cooking on a Stick” workshop put on by the Missouri Conservation Commission. 

Herron was one of more than 40 St. Louis area kids and parents who took part in two outdoor sessions in the Rockwood Conservation Area in western St. Louis County. The cooking lessons are part of a popular “Wild Wednesday” series that teach children outdoor skills. 

The kids learned three different ways to cook things over a campfire. Some foods you can cook on a stick. But, other foods you wrap in foil and cook right in the fire. 

And, finally, there are those foods you bake in a cardboard oven.

When the instructor talked about the cardboard oven, 10-year-old Luke Dang immediately asked, “Why doesn’t the cardboard burn?” Dang will be at Sperring Middle School in the Lindbergh School district this fall. 

Volunteer naturalist John Schroeder showed Luke and the others how to coat the inside of the cardboard box with aluminum foil so the heat doesn’t get to the cardboard. Rather, the heat is reflected around the food in the oven to bake it. 

Naturalist Keri Lanning then began cooking foods in all three ways at the same time. 

She helped the kids bake biscuits on a stick. At the same time, cinnamon-flavored apples were frying in a foil pouch in the fire and a special kind of pizza was cooking in the oven. 

Lanning said the oven can be used to bake even more elaborate foods such as chicken, cakes and bread. 

She said you can cook breakfasts, lunches and dinners. And the kids even got recipes for cooking desserts. (For complete list of “Cooking on a Stick” menu ideas, see below.)

Michelle Currie is a 10-year-old who goes to Our Lady of Sorrows School in south St. Louis. She said she came to the outdoor class to get ideas she can use on an upcoming Girl Scout camping trip. 

She said she liked the idea of baking the biscuit dough on a stick over the fire. However, she admitted she didn’t cook it long enough and it was still a little “doughy” on the inside. 

Tabitha Hagood is a 12-year-old student at Cornerstone Christian Academy in St. Clair, Mo. She said she most enjoyed the oven cooking. “That was neat and the pizza was good too,” she said. 

Luke Dang was thinking about how to adapt the cardboard oven to family’s his next camping trip. 

Volunteer Schoeder set up the oven by first taking some hot charcoal embers from the campfire and setting them on stones near the main fire. He put an iron grill over the coals. The unbaked pizzas were put on foil on the grill. Then, the foil-coated cardboard box was put over the whole thing like a hood. 

Dang said his family has a charcoal grill they take on camping trips. “We could put the cardboard hood right on our grill,” he said. 

The outdoor cooking class started with a discussion of fire safety in the woods. Then, the kids scouted around the area for kindling wood. 

Lanning and Schroeder showed how to build the fire to get maximum cooking benefit. 

First, they put some charcoal briquettes in the center and built a teepee of small sticks and rolled paper over the charcoal. After lighting the kindling, they put increasingly larger pieces of wood on top.

After the fire burns for awhile, it’s easy to dig out the charcoal with tongs and use those embers inside the cardboard oven for maximum heat.

After the cooking was done, the kids got to sample the biscuits, fried apples and pizza. 

They also got a lesson on the importance of putting your campfire completely out to avoid forest or grass fires. Schroeder also warned about throwing water directly on stones you might have around your fire. 

“They might be hot and throwing cool water on them might make they explode,” he said.