About

Cooking skills are fast disappearing in an age when preprocessed and precooked food products increasingly dominate the options found at the grocery store. The many positive attributes associated with skillful cookery are languishing and becoming lost. Beyond its obvious value of providing sustenance, cooking teaches thoughtfulness, cooperation, and gratitude. It emphasizes the need for careful planning, while requiring thoroughness, cleanliness, and caution in execution. It values creativity, patience, and resourcefulness. And, in the end, it rewards its apprentices with an amazing bounty that brings people together in an atmosphere of friendship.

Cooking in the camp kitchen is undoubtedly one of the most challenging situations to cook in but it is also one of the most rewarding. I’ve been a youth leader and an outdoor skills trainer and facilitator for more than 20 years and after a hard day of hiking, canoeing, swimming, and working in the outdoors, nothing beats sitting down at the picnic table to a nice, hot meal followed by a relaxing campfire of songs, stories, and s’mores!

Sadly, most people today don’t have any idea how to prepare a meal using individual ingredients, let alone outdoors away from the microwave. We’re hoping to change that and not only get people cooking in their own kitchens but get them cooking outdoors!

“There’s something liberating about cooking and eating outdoors. Away from the constraints of the table, we’re a little more sensual in our appreciation. We revel in the smell of the campfire, the charring of the meat on the grill. There’s a different spirit-more primal, more immediate, and ultimately more satisfying.” – Chef Charlie Palmer