Truck Camper Life Arizona - Making Enchiladas and Staying Warm in The Superstition Mountains!

Good morning, I am no longer in California. I am here at the Lost Dutchman State Park in Arizona. It's about 40 miles east of Phoenix in the Tonto National Forest just at the base of the Superstition Mountains. It's a really beautiful location. I stopped here back in November of 2020 just to camp overnight. I didn't film it and I just thought it was absolutely beautiful and it would make a great pit stop area on my way to my next location. I arrived here yesterday afternoon after about 8 hours on the road. That's a longer stretch than I normally like to do in one day. I usually like to keep it below 6 hours if possible. It's a pretty uneventful drive on Interstate 10 but let me show you a little bit how it looked yesterday getting in here. This is a really beautiful spot and when I stayed here in November of 2020 there were less people here. I'm definitely not alone in this park. Arizona is a very popular destination for snowbirds and van lifers and people seeking warmer climates during the winter months. Believe it or not I lived in Phoenix back in 2006 for about 7 months. I lived in a suburb of Phoenix called Avondale. I was working for a film studio in Phoenix. Believe it or not they had a film studio and at that period of my life I was working in post production in Hollywood and I came out here for a trial run but because of the heat in the summer I just couldn't deal with it and it didn't last very long. As I mentioned this is just a quick pit stop. I arrived late yesterday afternoon and I'll stay again tonight. I wanted to take this opportunity just to kind of get things organized and I thought this would be a beautiful place to do that. I want to organize things before the next leg of my adventure here. So yeah, it's a good spot. There's trails so we'll go for a little hike later and just kick back here around camp but right now I think I want to make some breakfast. Just something easy today. It smells good in here. One of my projects today is to go through my hiking and backpacking gear to see if I need anything. There is an REI on my route to my next spot so if I need anything now is a good time to find out. I may have a backpacking trip coming up. What a beautiful day. It's easy to see why the snowbirds flock here during the winter. The temperature during the day at least right now is in the low 70s here in this area. It can be colder when you get to higher elevations but right here it's very pleasant. Overnight it's in the 40s, in the mid 40s. So it's just very very pleasant. If you watched my last video you saw that I purchased a camp oven for myself and I did a breakfast of some cinnamon rolls which I burned the bottom of and then I also made a pizza in the evening for dinner. So many of you had suggestions for me like raising the rack so that I don't have my food so close to the heat source and therefore hopefully won't burn it and some other suggestions as well. So tonight I'm going to try it again. Hopefully I will dial it in at some point and it will be second nature to me. But tonight we are going to make a chicken enchilada casserole. Everything is pretty much cooked so you're really just warming it up and blending. My mouth is watering. Oh my gosh I must be hungry. Just blending all the flavors together and melting the cheese and getting it nice and warm so hopefully it will turn out well. A lot of you suggested putting the pizza stone at the bottom so I'm going to do that this time and I'm also going to cover it with tin foil in case there's anything dripping it will keep the oven clean. And here are my ingredients. Some corn tortillas, pre-cooked shredded chicken, Monterey Jack cheese, some diced green chilies and I'm going to do a green chili enchilada sauce. Okay we're going to preheat the oven a little bit. Now to assemble the casserole I'm going to pour a little bit of the enchilada sauce on the bottom. Lay in some tortillas, two tortillas, chicken, diced green chili, cheese, another layer. Okay I'm going to go ahead and pop this in the oven. It's good and hot right now. 300 degrees. I definitely could have cooked this outside this evening. There's no wind and it's warm enough so it shouldn't affect the temperature of the oven. However, there are so many people around and I don't really like filming with an audience so I just thought I'd do it inside for privacy reasons. It's been about 10 minutes so I'm going to turn this around to make sure it cooks evenly. Bottoms up. So tasty. I wish you were here to share it with me. If you've never tried the green enchilada sauce I highly recommend it. It's a totally different flavor but so good. Well alright those enchiladas are a hit. It makes me realize how much I've missed being able to make dishes like that here in the camper and now I can. I even have leftovers for dinner tomorrow night. I hope you enjoyed this look around Lost Dutchman State Park. My preferred method of camping is boondocking, dry camping, dispersed camping where it's a little bit more secluded. However, this spot is really beautiful and I know some people don't like dispersed camping and boondocking so this is another option. It's very convenient that I'll be able to dump my tanks tomorrow and fill up with water or dump my trash. This site here is a dry site. I don't have full hookups but they do offer those utilities and facilities here at the campground. They also do have showers available as well which is nice. I'm going to go ahead and call it a night and relax and enjoy the rest of the evening here. Stay tuned for the next adventure. We'll see where I end up next. I thank you all for joining me. I always appreciate your support. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you have not subscribed to the channel, I'd really appreciate if you subscribed. I notice that a lot of people that view my videos are not subscribed. It really helps the channel if you do hit that subscribe button. And yeah, I'll see you all on the next one. Thank you so much for your support. I always enjoy having you along. See you soon. Bye bye.