Vintage Overland Rig Canyon Exploring, 4 X 4 Truck Camping & Firebox Campfire Stove Cooking

Hello friends, welcome to another Firebox Stove channel video. I am in the high deserts of Utah and I'm exploring a place that I've never been to before. I really have no idea what we'll find. This is a place that I've kind of seen as we've driven past. I actually just pulled right off the interstate. Not even an exit, just a dirt road right off the interstate to get here. Anyway, I've seen it driving past and I've always been very interested because there's some really cool rock formations and it just looks very rugged and rough and interesting. So I'm going to be exploring it, finding a cool place to camp and spending the night and doing some really fun Firebox Stove cooking. I'll be using the new Sumo stand but I do have one announcement to make. I am going to be at the Overland Expo in Southern California. The old Ford has caught someone's eye at the Overland Expo and they've asked me to come display my truck. So we're going to be there. So if you live in the area, come check out the old Ford and I'd love to meet you. So I will be at the Overland Expo in Southern California. Anyway, I do have Ursa with me. Come here Ursa. I don't have Maggie with me. She is with my daughter Emma but I do have Ursa. This was such a gorgeous spot that I thought I should stop and check it out a little more closely. Come on. Good girl. These canyon walls are starting to get really tall around us so they're really pretty but then we also have this bridge here so that's cool. And then if you look this way there's kind of a canyon right there that I kind of wanted to just peek into and just see what was there. Looks interesting and I'm intrigued. And these bridges are very cool. I'm just going to give you a little wider view so you can see this massive wall that we're next to. Very cool. And then it's so cool the way this old tree fell and then kind of got hung up on that rock. It's just kind of suspended up there and it might just end right here. It might just be a little box canyon. Oh yeah it is a box canyon. That's it. That's everything. Well we'll just kind of peek in here and take a look as long as we've come this far. Wow. Can you imagine when water is running off and flowing down this making a big waterfall. What a spot. Holy smokes how cool was that. For dinner tonight I have some lovely southwest style chili that my wife made a couple of nights ago and then I'm going to mix up and bake some fresh cornbread. So I'm going to do that with the firebox five inch classic stove but I'm going to be using some new parts. I'm going to be using the sumo stand that widens the base of the firebox to give you lots of stability and allow you to set up side workstations. So if you watched my last video you'll know what I'm talking about. If you didn't I'm going to zoom in on this and I'll show you what we got going on. All of the new stuff that you see in this video is going to be prototypes so they may not turn out exactly like this with the finished production parts. So I have a top tray and I have a bottom tray and they both fit together perfectly. The bottom tray is a heavier thicker material and the top tray is a lighter weight material and I'll show you why because one you'll be able to use as a griddle and the other one will be used as a heat shield. Down in the bottom we have the sumo stands so let's get those out and I'll show you how they work. We'll open up the firebox okay now the way the sumo stands work is you rotate this little t bracket until you can slide them into position and then you rotate it back up and that locks it into position. So we'll put one of them on each side just like this and then rotate that t bracket until it's upwards and that gives us our super stable sumo stand. So then this tray slides under here in that position and that gives us another level of heat protection. We have the ash pan that gives us a little bit of heat protection from burning our table. Now this is a stainless steel table so I don't really have to worry about that but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a paper towel under here. Paper towel might actually even be curved enough to where it would maybe touch that that heat shield. If you took your ash pan out I think you could slide a stake under there and use it as a broiler. So there would be a lot of ashes and so I don't know how well that would work and I haven't tested that concept just yet so that's something I still need to try. But there is a chance that it could be used as a broiler. We'll do all of our cooking and then we'll lift this up and see if this paper towel got burned at all. I'm going to be using a set of high-low hangover sticks right here and this is where I'm going to bake my cornbread. I also need my coal rack so this goes down here in this slot. So we'll just have all this set up and ready to go and we will use the air bake pan down here. I'm going to set up another side tray over here and I'm not sure if I'm going to use this one all that much. I have another coal rack that I'll set up over here on this side. I'm going to load this wood in vertically so that it will burn down to hot coals quite fast. Put one egg, put a little bit of this cream in and then I can add more if I need more. Let's start with that much. All right there's our cornbread mix. There we go. Get some air out of the bag and you're supposed to let this cornbread after you mix it up, you're supposed to let it sit for at least a few minutes. I think that some of the ingredients kind of need to hydrate. A little bit more cream, a little bit of salt. I find that mixes are just a little bit bland for my taste. One more mix and then we'll just let that rest. We have a titanium box pot we'll be using tonight. Okay I've just got this pretty big bunch of chili here. I'm just going to snip the corner off this bag, squeeze this chili out. Now I'm going to let that heat up a little more slowly over here on this side rack. We sell these in two sizes. This is the smaller of the two sizes that we offer. Do the trick and we'll probably have hot coals actually pretty darn soon. I'll just go ahead and put that in. Oh yeah that's going to be plenty of cornbread. So I'll go ahead and move some of these down below, get these coals placed and then I'll put it back. That'll just give us a little more room to work and I am going to put some more wood in my fire because I don't want it to go out. I want to continue to produce hot coals before we lose all our heat. We'll get some more chunks of wood in there. We'll go ahead and put our cornbread right there. Let's wrap our four panels around our oven first. I want to create just a little air gap so the air can come up and around. Then I'm going to do another layer of windscreen just to offer a little bit of insulation. That little bracket will just go on the inside of the windscreens and that just keeps this oven lid from falling off so you can lift it up and put it back without having it fall off. Our main fire is almost down to hot coals again. The flame has almost gone out so I'm going to put a couple fire sticks across and let's go ahead and get this chili hot. Once it gets hot it'll be easy to keep it hot. We'll let it have a little bit of flame now and I'll just need to stir it. That chili is hot. That did not take long to heat that up. Let's go ahead and bring it down here. I'm going to knock those coals down just a little bit because I want to fry an egg on there but I'm going to wait just a minute because I want our cornbread to catch up. I can smell the cornbread. It smells really good and when you can start to smell anything you're baking that's a good sign that you're getting close. So let's just... yeah that's still coming out doughy so it needs more time. Kind of make sure while that cornbread finishes up I'm going to go ahead and move my griddle. This is what the firebox was stored in. I'm going to move this up on top so that I can fry my egg. That's the best way to test level is to put an egg on. What I'm going to do to get this egg to sit a little more level. Let's see I'm going to move that one over there. That seems to work. I put just the tiniest little stick in there to make just a little bit of flame to get this egg to... you can see that flame is almost out now but it was just enough to kind of jump start this egg or should I say kick start this egg. I don't know what I should say. A little bit of salt and then let's go ahead and turn it. This egg is going to be nice and tender because it did cook really quite slowly at a low heat. See if I can turn it over without breaking it. You know it did break a little bit darn it. Oh well it should be pretty good. Let's see if we can check on our cornbread. It's been running for about 25 minutes and it's brown around the edges. Let's see how it's doing in the middle. Oh it came out clean. I think our cornbread might be done. Let's go all the way in. Yep it's coming out clean now. So I think the cornbread is done. I think our egg is done. I think everything is coming together just perfectly. So what I'm going to do is set this. I'm going to scoot this back. Go ahead and just take this oven door off and then we're going to go ahead and put our chili on our plate. I know chili should be eaten in a bowl but I just want to plate this up and I'm hoping that we can make it work. Grated cheese here. Put our egg on. Sour cream around the edge. I like sour cream so I'm going to do quite a bit. We'll finish this all off with some fresh cilantro. Pick off quite a bit of this cilantro. I love the way my meals are kept. You know, nice and warm with those hot coals. All right, almost there. Irsa can smell it. Does that smell good Irsy? Let's see if we can get some of this cornbread out. I might have to tip it over to get it out. Let's just go like this. There we go. Oh, look at that cornbread. Holy smokes. Did that turn out perfect or what? All right, so there's a big hunk of cornbread. I'm just going to set right there. We'll do a couple of hunks of them. Oh wow, that cornbread smells really, really nice. Let's go ahead and put a little butter on our cornbread. This is really coming together nicely and this is ready to eat. I cannot believe this. Look at this. Holy smokes, what a beautiful meal. All right, let's give it a try. I'm going to try to get a little egg, a little sour cream, a little cilantro, a little bit of everything. That cheese is all melty. Oh, this is beautiful. Oh yeah, that is lovely. Get some of that cornbread. Wow, that is really nice. Tell you what, that's how you do leftovers right here. Stretchy, melty cheese. Well, this setup kind of shows you how you can use the high-low sticks to create a lower position for the oven so that you can use something, you know, like this bread pan, something that's taller like that. And then tomorrow I'm going to make biscuits and gravy and I'll use the regular hangover sticks. Wow, that is so delicious and I was so hungry. Oh, that cornbread has kind of a sweetness to it and then you get some of that butter in that same bite. Wow, that is just very nice. What a nice dinner. It's such amazing scenery. No, sit down. You stay back. Yes, thank you. Wow, that is so good. Lovely. I'm going to give some to Ursa for some butter. Man, that tastes like cake. That's really so, so good. She's never had cornbread before, but I know she'll like it because it has butter on it. I'll be going to drop it again though. Good girl. It's the last piece, Ursa. Good girl. There you go. Oh, I'm getting cold. That's much better. Very good. Now I'm ready for bed. Go get it. Good girl. Come here. Hey, you got to bring it to me. Come on. Right here. Go get it. Good girl. Come on. Come here. Hey, come here. Hey, hey. Go get it. Good girl. Come on. Come here. Come here. Hey, what about me? Go get it. Good girl. Come here. Come here. Over here. Hey, come here. Come here. Come here. Come here. Oh, so close. Come here. Good girl. Good girl. Yes. Leave it. Leave it. Good girl. Go get it. Good girl. Come on. Come on. No. Hey, where are you going? Come here. Come here. Oh, that's a good dog. Yes, that's a good dog. Good girl. You ready to get down? Good girl. I put blankets in this goat pack and then the dogs curl up in it. Come here, Ursa. Here's your bed. Good girl. Snuggle up. This is such a beautiful rock. Look at that. So cool. Anyway, I'm going to say good night and I'm going to go to bed. It's still pretty early, but I'm tired. I had a long day. As you can see, the sunset is beautiful. We've got some color kind of all over in the sky right now. Very pretty. Even all the way in the direction that sun went down. It's almost too dark to film. Good night, everybody. Good morning. It's about 7 a.m. and I slept really well, but the coolest part of this night was this view. You stay. With the stars shining through, it was very beautiful to just look up at any time. I'm going to get up and make some coffee and then I'm going to cook some breakfast. We got to find our way out of here. Come on. Good girl. Well, let's see what this place looks like in the morning. The sun hasn't quite come up yet. It'll come up over somewhere over there and you can see that one panel on my truck that's coming out here. That's part of a storm shelter that Vanya built for me, but I haven't had the occasion to use the whole shelter aspect. It's like a separate tent that comes out the side of the truck and then we have places to hang lights so I could do my cooking, you know, even if we were in a, you know, pretty bad storm. She is the snoopiest dog I ever met. I did have a wonderful night in the old Ford. Slept really good. Really enjoyed the lovely view of this vertical arch. So nice. I need some coffee and I have something new I want to show you. So I'm going to use my coffee making as the opportunity to do that. Before I show you this prototype, I'm going to have to feed Ursa because she saw her food and she wants her breakfast. Okay, what I have is a little side burner attachment for the wood flame gas burner. So it can go in these diamond holes. This is a prototype so, you know, all the grind marks and all that and these slots will probably be a little bit different. This goes in those diamond shaped holes. Let's see if this is sitting here. That's still going to be pretty high. So I'm going to change out these hangover sticks. Put this hose in. Snap this into position and there we have a little side burner. It's a great fit for the box pot or a small like 750 milliliter pot that can kind of sit out here on the edge. I'm going to cover my coffee. Try to keep it warmer. I've been adding cream and salt. These are all my spices, but at the top I have kosher salt. So a pretty good pinch of kosher salt. A little stir. That's good. It is a cold morning, but the sun is coming up. It won't be long now. Oh yeah, it doesn't go too far in. Come on. Oh good girl. There's a lot of different kinds of trees here too. We've got pinion pines. I think some of these are cedars and some of them are junipers, but then across the way we have probably lodgepole pines or white pines and then here really old dry dead wood. It's very very straight and there are no pines over here. I mean other than the pinion pines, but this looks more like a lodgepole pine. With how straight, you know, that trunk is. So pretty interesting. Let's rearrange things and get things ready to make biscuits and gravy. I'm going to go ahead and take these hangover sticks off. I'm going to take my gas burner off. Let's go ahead and break it down and I'll put it away. I'm going to use these hangover, the high low hangover sticks over here. So this will be an extension of my top burner because these are at the same height as when you have your fire sticks across. That's all at the same level. So I won't put those there yet because I need to start a fire, but I will put these regular hangover sticks over here in this position because we're going to be creating an oven over here to bake our biscuits. So you got to get everything set up before you build your fire. I'm going to put some pretty chunky wood in. Once again I'm going to put it in vertically so that it will burn into hot coals very fast. Ursa's having a lot of fun out here, snooping and snooping, exploring all the places. She never stops. Huh Ursa? There's always something else to see. Well you can see the sun came out. It's warming up now, which is nice. I'm sure I'm jumping the gun here, but I'm going to go ahead and try to cook my sausage over this flame even though that's so much heat. I'm sure I'll have to be lifting my pan a lot, but let's go ahead and give it a try and see how it goes. I'm just going to flop that whole thing on there just like that. There we go. Like I say, I think I'm going to have to keep a pretty good hold of it and keep it moved off of the heat quite a bit because that's a whole lot of BTUs right there. All right, I'd say that sausage is done. I'm going to just move my sausage down here where it'll stay hot just on the radiant heat of the stove. There's definitely some heat there. About that much milk, and of course, since we have it, I'm going to put some cream in there as well. Just make this gravy really rich, and then I'm going to set this up here where it can be slowly warming up. I need to lift off my fire sticks here for a minute so that I can get these hot coals, and they are beautiful hot coals. It'll give us plenty of heat for our oven. We'll put our airbake pan in its position there. Nice big biscuits here. Sounds like we have some ravens coming to visit. Here we have our oven lid. It goes on right here. I'm going to set my milk up here for the time being. I'm going to put my griddle back up here. Get some butter melting, and we've got some flour here. A little more butter, and let's start working this roux. Go ahead and get a little more of this flour in here. You can see how nice it is to cook over hot coals. It's just such a nice simmer temperature. It's just really a joy to work with. We just need this roux to cook just a little bit more, and go ahead and pull that off the heat. Put our fire sticks back up here, and there should be just enough heat left in those hot coals to get our milk simmered up. What's that saying? A watch pot never boils. So I'm just going to walk away and let it work, let it simmer. Come over here and play with Irsa a little bit. Irsa, come up here. Come on. Come on. Jump up. Jump up. Whoa. She is quite a jumper. She really likes to jump up on things, jump down from things. She'll hardly even go downstairs. She'll take a few steps downstairs, and then she'll just jump. She's a funny dog. She can smell that breakfast cooking, so she doesn't want to stay around over here. It's getting a little bit windy. A little bit of cloud cover. We almost have breakfast ready, so good girl. Good girl. Good dog. Let's see if that milk is getting warm. Oh yeah, it's getting warm. That breeze certainly is not helping. Let's get some of this roux in here, and we'll start making our gravy. Oh yeah, that might be enough roux right there and get that to melt in. Because these coals are losing some of their heat, I'm going to move my fire sticks. I'm going to put this other set of fire sticks through these diamond holes. They're quite a ways further down, and that'll make it so I can move my milk. I'm just going to lift these fire sticks out of the way, and I'll be able to put my milk right down into the firebox much closer to those hot coals. Let's add our salt and pepper and give that a little stir, and that gravy is thickening up very well. I think we can go ahead and put our sausage back in. It'll cool it down so it doesn't break, and I believe our breakfast is almost ready. Let's cover this gravy up. Let's just give it a little taste, see how we are for salt. Perfect. Very good. Wow, it's going to be good. I'm excited. Back up. Let's have a look at our biscuits, and they look like they're brown on the bottom, and they're probably done. Yeah, I think they're done. They bounced back, so they're a little browner on this side. The biscuits actually slid, and they were overhanging that back edge, which is kind of surprising, but that's why they're a little darker on that one little strip there. Let's go ahead and leave them for now. See if our gravy, our gravy is perfect now. Let's take that out before it gets too hot. I'm going to set it down there, and I am going to go ahead and take our oven lid off, because I do believe those biscuits are fully cooked. Let's get our plate, and we'll put it up on top. Nice hot plate. Oh yeah, they are definitely done. Look at those beauties. Very nice. Yeah, just nice and flaky. I'm going to put that brown side up, just so I can crunch through it with my fork. Big old chunks of sausage. We'll get some of this crunchy biscuit. Oh yeah, that's the good stuff. Now, these are as good as it gets. Biscuits and gravy does not get any better than this, mostly because of the fact that I used all that cream. So these are just rich. Absolutely delightful. Here's a little piece of sausage you want. Come here. Jump up. Come here. Okay. Jump up. Come here. Up. Good girl. She's such a cutie. All right. Well, I'm going to finish my breakfast. I'm going to pack all this stuff up and break everything down, and we'll try to head out. Such a hearty breakfast. I almost can't believe I finished it. Well, I'm about to finish it. Wow. You want some roo? That was her name at first, Ursa Roo. I mean, it still kind of is, but my wife still calls her Roo. But it didn't stick as well. We just had to switch it to Ursa. At least I did. My wife likes Roo better. But anyway, time to get to work, clean this place up. I just realized that we need to show the results for the heat test on this paper towel we have down here. So I'm going to lift everything off. Let's take a look. So you can see here, the hot coal must have fallen there and burned that spot. And then this is golden brown right here. So that's from the side coal tray, the heat of that coal tray. Everything under the stove itself is completely fine. So that's our results. Now it looks like we're going back down. Well, it looks like we're finally out of the canyon. It might be easy going for a little while now. That's nice. Oh, look, there's a little old cabin over there. That thing looks as old as the hills. Oh, yeah. Let's go check it out. Okay, come on. Let's go take a look. There's a little tree growing on it way up at the top. I was pretty surprised about that. That would have been some of the very first settlers or pioneers to ever come into this area. Man, it's tiny. Just one room. Wow, what a location though. I mean, it would be hard to live here. But look at these cliffs over here around the side. Look at that. Whoever built this cabin here had an eye for beauty. Look at that. Just built with the stuff they found right here on this land. It's probably going to be too dark inside to do much video work, but I'll try. All right. Well, it looks just like you'd expect it to look, except for there's a bunch of... Maybe that's where the stove pipe ran through and that's all creosote. Either that or it's back lawn. It's got to be creosote, I would think. Oh, but it's in a few places. It seems to have something to do with the rodent waste. Something of that nature. The roof is all just cedar poles and mud. Amazing. Simple shelter. And then the door. You can't really see the door. There we go. Just planks of wood. That's probably been replaced once or twice. Hard to know. Anyway, well, that was pretty cool. Well, I think we're kind of out of the really beautiful canyon, you know, sandstone rock formation kind of area, and I'm hoping I can get back to the interstate now. But I'm going to go ahead and say goodbye now because the rest of this doesn't look nearly as interesting as the stuff we just made it through. So thank you everyone. Bye-bye.