Blackstone Camping Recipe while Boondocking in Colorado

What's up guys? Today Aaron and I are making a Blackstone stir-fry and this will be our very first recipe that is true camping style. We are living in our rooftop tent. It's been awesome. We are currently on Twin Lakes in Colorado which is free camping that we found through Campendium and also Friends. It's a very popular like it's in people's top five destinations that they love to camp. So we're going to be doing a little dinner tonight and I wanted to show you some secrets for cooking on a Blackstone with limited ingredients. We we have zero cooking water so like we're truly strapped and I'm going to show you all the ingredients right now. So first of all we have some leftover chicken thighs that was cooked yesterday on our Friend's Trugger. Jeff and Deb they cooked a delicious chicken last night, sent us home with leftovers so we're going to shred that up. If you have fresh chicken you can certainly use that or any other meat or skip the meat. The reason I really love stir-fries is because they're totally customizable. You can dial up the proteins, the vegetables, the carbs, the fats, anything that you want to customize you can and that's why stir-fries are a beautiful thing. I'm using fresh carrots that I just chopped up into these and I got this bag of carrots that has multi-colors and anytime you can cook with colors that's great so you can like eat the rainbow. I also have some fresh jalapenos, some fresh shallots and some fresh green onions. The green onions I'm going to use at the end, the shallots I'm going to use at the beginning and the reason I really love shallots is one because of the flavor but two because of the size. If you've ever cut up fresh onions you know that they reek up your cooler and you most of the time don't use a whole entire onion. This shallot is a whopper shallot, most of them come a little smaller so you cut up and use the whole thing. This was an entire shallot so we have zero leftover to stink up our living area so I really like that. This is the shredded chicken that I've already done. I put it in a container that I anticipate to put leftovers in so you're not wasting dishes. These prep plates are the plates that we're going to be eating on so we're not wasting any plates, we're not wasting any water or nothing and then when it comes to convenience is for rice. We got these pouches of rice because we're not going to be boiling water. One we don't have water to boil and two we don't really have the energy to be pounding on the induction. We don't have a propane cooker. We're very limited in our setup and we're very intentional on how we're cooking so you might be able to cook fresh rice that's great but we're gonna use these packets. I did get a packet that does have like some veggies in it. This I would save for an emergency day where maybe you don't have fresh veggies. I happen to have fresh veggies so I'm going to use plain rice with fresh veggies and the fresh veggies are going to give it a nice firm texture, a nice crunch and it's going to be very good. The final thing, well a couple more things, I have fresh broccoli that I've chopped up into bite-sized pieces. We always carry the same veggies on hand that you could eat raw or cooked. It's really important when you're in a tight space to be able to eat it raw like pea pods, bell peppers, nothing really has changed for us there. There are some vegetables that really are only good cooked. We steer away from those just because we want to be able to just dig in and eat it cold on a rain day. But this is where we're taking a little leap of faith tonight is a little flavor packet. Normally I would never get these. I was always against processed packages of flavor. Well things change when you're living out of a cooler and when you're truly camping and to me this is a really good mix of still home cooking, home cooking, getting your vegetables, getting your protein and then stealing a little shortcut. I did keep this in our cooler because there's buttermilk in here. It's a cream based. I bought this on the shelf at room temp in the store but I stored it in our cooler because it gets to be like over 100 degrees in the truck. So pop anything you can in the cooler that you want to stay fresh. I also don't have anything measured so I have my scale with us here where as I'm cooking I'll be able to just give you some rough ideas of the quantities of everything that I'm putting in in case you want to recreate this and you just really want a little bit of a ballpark on quantities. So let's get the Blackstone fired up. So the first thing I'm going to do is just drizzle down a light layer of cooking oil. Just spread it around. Our Blackstone is really well seasoned which makes it really helpful. If your Blackstone is brand new you got to give it some time, got to give it some cooking on it. I don't know, fry up some bacon, some nice fatty stuff, get it seasoned. A little bit of avocado oil and we're going to start with the shallots. So right now I have my scale. This is some good scale knowledge too. If you tear it out and then you do the negative, I'll show you how they work that. So shallots go on first. We just want to cook those down. I have it sent to ounces so about one and a half ounces of shallots. We're just going to soften those up. It'll probably take a couple minutes and the shallots smell so good. Shallots, if you've never had them, they have a very delicate onion flavor and a lot of people taste a hint of garlic in the flavor as well. It's a really good hybrid flavor. It's good raw. It's good cooked. I love them. Next I'm going to go in with the carrots because the carrots are pretty hard. So I think that they'll really cook the same as the shallots but I do like a little bit of a bite on my veg and that's going to be a personal preference. Maybe you like yours softer. Some people really like mushy broccoli. You know like it's just personal. So zero that out again and let's see how much carrots I have here. And it's the purple, onion, and orange. So about three ounces of carrots and I'm going to put some salt and pepper here. You want to season every layer. We love the grinders, the cracked. We call it cracked. Peppercorn and Himalayan salt. We always use the Himalayan salt. It has a better nutritional value than just regular table salt. And you really want to season every layer as you cook. Don't just season at the end. You want to just really massage every single step of the way. Also you want to know the hot spots on your blackstone. Our hot spot is right about here, the shape of an H. And then the forward position is more cool. So if we're cooking something we might pull it forward as a warmer and then continue to high cook in the rear. We'll just give this a couple more minutes. And you can see the chopping skills in here. I was just using a regular steak knife. I don't have a cutting board, my chef's knife, things that I would normally swear by in my RV. I don't have out here. I am just roughing it with what I have and you need to just get comfortable doing that. And when you create a meal like that it's more of a rustic style. You might actually really enjoy it and get to have some different textures, get to have some different visuals, and have fun with it. But I think the big key for Erin and I is we really love fresh veggies. We really love fresh everything and it's just the balance of what do you have that's fresh and what do you have that's a shortcut and learning how to really live in a small space and cook healthy in a way that tastes good and you feel good. And it's just practice, trial and error. So this stuff isn't soft by any means but we still have a lot more to layer in. So I'm gonna do the jalapenos next. I don't have a ton of jalapenos because if you've watched some of my previous things I'm getting the hiccups from jalapenos. I'm starting to become very sensitive but I still love the flavors and Erin loves the flavors so I'm gonna put them in. So let's see what we have for that. Not much, 0.6 ounce. I don't even think that's one jalapeno. It's a very small amount. A little bit of spice though. And then what I'm gonna add in next is the broccoli because this is our last raw ingredient and I really like our meals to be fibrous veggie heavy and protein heavy. So this is very fibrous. The carrots are a little starchy but not terrible and then the rice of course is a carb. So I have a lot of meat and veg here but what I'm trying to do is balance out the rice so that it really is a balanced meal. 9.8 ounces of broccoli and that's very common for what I put into one meal for the two of us. Now the broccoli is gonna need a little bit of moisture here so rather than dousing it in oil I'm just gonna do a little bit of a water saute and the steam of the water is just gonna help cook it. Also at this point you want to season it with salt and pepper again because I added more ingredients. However I'm going to be using this seasoning packet. I haven't even tasted this. I've never tried it before. Before you go dump this on make sure you taste it see how salty it is. Also this is meant for a marinade. I'm not using it as a marinade. I'm using it an actual I'm using it as a sauce. So just put a little bit of a dab and try it so you know what you're putting on your food so you don't like ruin your entire meal. And usually these are gonna be pretty salty so I'm gonna go straight in with this. It tastes really good has a good kick to it but I'm gonna hold off on the salt is my point there because anytime you use processed anything it usually has some preservatives in there and you want to taste it before you season it. I'm also just going to add the chicken in. This is a lot of chicken. I'm going to end up using this entire packet. This was three big thighs boneless skinless smoked. 15 ounces which is just short of a pound but it's cooked so almost a pound of cooked meat. Put the rest of this on and we still have the rice to throw on there guys. So this is going to be a big meal which is why I anticipated leftovers but I'm a big advocate of cook once eat twice at least. If you're going through this and you're cooking something that's really good you're gonna probably want it for lunch tomorrow as well. We do like our broccoli with a bite to it so we didn't have the broccoli on there very long and that's okay. Again if you like your broccoli soft put that on a little bit longer before you add the chicken and the rice. But I'm gonna throw the rice on. The rice is already pre-cooked. In the van this would have been a one skillet meal. On the Blackstone it's just a Blackstone stir-fry and this is how we like to cook. We like to keep it simple, super flavorful. How does it smell Aaron? Smells good. So at first it looks like a lot of chicken. It looks like a ton of broccoli but when you throw everything together you know it really washes it out. To me right now it looks like I could even use a little bit more vegetables in there but nonetheless it's gonna be really good. You can see the broccoli is getting nice and bright green. It's cooking just great. The chicken has been really cooked already so you don't have to worry about that being raw. You just have to worry about it getting hot so it's good to taste. If you were cooking the chicken raw I would have done that after the broccoli. I would have shoved all the vegetables into that cold spot that I pointed out and then cooked the chicken separate to make sure you get all the raw chicken out and then mix it all together. The final step I'm going to put in these green onions which was two sprigs of green onions and I will show you the ounces. Half an ounce. This bag of rice 8.8 ounces. I got the rice at Target and I got the sauce packet at Sprouts so very easy to find. We're just going to toss this all together and that's it. This is basically ready to eat right now and it literally took 10 minutes of cook time and that is exactly what you want because you never know when a windstorm or a rainstorm is going to come through. It's been raining on us all the time so you want to keep your meals predictable, keep them easy, keep them flavorful. I would take a bite just to make sure your salt level is good if you need to adjust it, make it spicier. We usually like to do a cracked on top to serve it and that's it. So let's dish this up and give it a taste and do that and then also get ducks for leftovers. That's going to be good tomorrow. This is the type of stuff that just like gets better when it sits. I'm just getting overexcited about leftovers. The best part about the Blackstone is the easy cleanup. I mean there's very little dishes. We wait for this to get a little bit cooler so that it's just slightly warm and then we spray it with water and wipe it down with a towel and that's it. And look at all that for tomorrow. It's beautiful. So we're going to dig in and we're going to enjoy the view. It's a little bit hazy tonight but we are still in a really beautiful spot and cook your meals at home. It'll taste better, you'll save money, you'll be healthier. Not that dining out isn't fun but for every day you just got to get in the habit of cooking and loving what you're making. Bon Appetit!