Three Pack Goats, Two Alpine Lakes & One Hard-Earned Trout​ Firebox Stove​ Cooked Gourmet Dinner!

What a good goat. Come on boys. Okay boys let's go. We are headed up to do some fishing at a little remote lake near the top of the mountain here. I've got Bill here. I'm hoping he can show the little goats the ropes. Wow we're on top here, at least on the shoulder of the mountain. We are coming up on a really beautiful little site here. That's a beautiful little lake right up here on the edge of the mountain. The goats love these wild roses. They have great big old rose hips on them too. That'd be good survival food if we were starving. What do you think Bill? You like it here? What's up Ricky? Wow this trail is really tight right here. Hey Ricky. As we were making our way past this little spot, a big fish jumped right here by the shore. I was actually able to see it because we're in this big shadow. It was a great big tiger trout. Monster tiger trout. I'm just starting off with a black marabou jig because that's the quickest and easiest. Oh and I got a bite. That was a good solid bite. They're feeding right along this shore so I'm just trying to rest the fly right to where they can get it. So far I'm not having any luck. Okay I just caught a fish on the ledge here so I'm not sure how I'm gonna net it but I'll do my best Oh he just got off. Dang it. I've had a couple of really solid bites but I haven't been able to actually land anything so I think I'm gonna move on to the next lake. Okay Bill let's hit the trail. Let's go find the next lake. Beautiful spot we're at right here on the edge of the mountain. This is a pretty cool trail. Goats notoriously hate water. See how they do. Bill's an old pro. Come on. Old Bill's endurance isn't what it used to be. His packs are virtually empty. I just have blankets in them to fill him up so the only reason I even have the packs on him is trying to build up his endurance a little bit but I didn't know there was going to be this much of a hill and I had no idea how far we were going to be hiking so I probably wouldn't have put him through quite this much had I realized but he's doing a good job. If we need to I'll turn around but I think he's okay so far. Pretty thick old forest. We finally made it to the lake. There's an island right here behind us that I'm gonna fish off of. The goats found wild raspberries that they are very excited about. Apparently they are delicious. I'm not having much luck with fishing. The lake is very shallow and lots of moss. Well this lake was a bit of a bust. It's really shallow and there's a lot of moss in it and for a fly fisherman it's probably perfect but for me I'm struggling a little bit so I think I'm going to try to bushwhack my way back to that first lake that I stopped at. I liked that lake a lot more than this one and if I hurry I might have some time to fish it before I have to head back down the trail and head back to the truck so we'll see how bushwhacking goes. I'm a little worried you know because you never know what you're going to get when you try to bushwhack. Well there are definitely fish here. I can see them jumping. This bushwhack should be interesting. The trail goes way out and around. Really makes it a long trip. This is where we find out why the trail goes so far out and around. If it were easy they wouldn't call it bushwhacking and this has been pretty steep. Lots of deadfall and when the babies get too far away they start to panic so you'll probably hear them yelling here before too long and there seems to be a spring or something because it's mushy wet. Just sloppy wet. So I'm going to see if I can bump over this hill see if I can find another kind of drainage but that way is like huge deadfall. I was hoping I might be able to kind of get on a ridge and make some pretty quick time. This deadfall it's not working out in my favor. Luckily the cows have been busting through here a little bit so they've kind of tore a little bit of a path for me. So far so good. I think I might be able to get down into those woods and it might not be so bad. Good girl Maggie. Come on Bill. Bill's pretty fun to watch. He'll really look at things carefully. This is great training for these little goats. According to my map we've almost made it to the trail which will have saved us a ton of time. Probably two hours. So we've definitely saved us a lot of work. This hasn't been so bad. Kind of a fun adventure actually. Oh there's the trail. We made it. Look at that. Just like that. Man that saved us so much time. So glad I did that. We still have a little uphill in front of us but not nearly as much. Nice we made it. This is a beautiful lake. I'm gonna throw my line in right here. This looks fairly deep and when I was on the other side I did see some fish jump over here. Getting a little bit of a sprinkle from a passing storm and that might be keeping the fish from biting. So I don't know. There's something about barometric pressure and I don't know what. Bill's having fun. That's all that matters. He loves himself a good log. A good stump. The goats are tired I can tell. So is Maggie. So am I heck. That was a lot of hiking. I finally caught a fish but it's foul caught. It's caught behind its front fin so I'm gonna let him go. I just caught a very nice tiger trout. Watch out Bill. Let's see if I can get him out show you without him slipping out of my hands. Very nice. That's dinner. I'm gonna cook him up. I have gourmet plans for this tiger trout. Bill the goat and the tiger trout. What do you think Bill? No he doesn't like it. Okay I just caught another tiger. I've already got plenty for dinner so I'll just let this guy go. Beautiful tiger. Yeah these guys are super aggressive. See you later buddy. Okay Maggie let's go. Okay Bill let's go. Come on boys. Let's head back to the truck. Let's go. He's gonna run right into the camera. Okay come on let's go. There you go. Keep coming Bill. All right let's go. Time to head on down off this mountain. All right we made it back to the truck. The steak got a little bit freezer burned so I thought it'd be perfect for a topper for Maggie's kibble. Okay there you go. Okay you can chew it. Nobody's gonna take it from me. I was just skinning this trout and thought I should show you just how beautiful this meat is. Look how pink it is and it's super oily so it's gonna be delicious. Anytime a trout has a lot of fat in it it just melts in your mouth. It just makes it that much more delicious. So and my hands are just oily you know. I don't know if I've ever had a trout be have this much fat content. Look at these beautiful ingredients I have. An heirloom tomato, a beautiful pear, lemon, shallots, my fresh caught trout, and almonds. Let's do a little prep first. I just want to cut up these almonds and my shallots. Let's set up the five inch firebox with the sumo system starting with the sumo hard case. Firebox out. You see the fire sticks actually hold the whole thing closed with these ends. You slide the fire sticks out and then you open it like a book and when you open it there's a bend right here that forces this ash pan off. So it just comes off into your hand and then when you open the firebox the fire grate drops down into place and that holds it in its open position. So it's pretty much ready to go. If you didn't want to run more than one burner you could just cook with it just like that no problem at all. But I want to run two burners so that I can keep something warm while I'm cooking. So I'm going to go ahead and set it up with the sumo system. So we'll just put these leg extensions on. That just widens our stance and gives us a whole bunch of stability. We could all use a little more stability these days right? And then your ash pan slides into position under there and then the top part of your hard case becomes a heat shield. Now I have a stainless steel table so I don't really need the heat shield so much but it's nice to have there anyway. It'll prevent me from having a hot spot in the middle of my table there. Since I'm not going to need a whole lot of heat for this meal I'm going to set this burner up in a little bit of a lower position. This is the second position down and I will use the diffuser plate since I am going to be cooking with the eight inch fry pan. Now I'm going to set this up on the fire sticks but I'm going to use the shorter notch so that the fire sticks are set just a little bit higher. And the reason I'm going to do that is because I'm also going to set up a box pot for warming on this side and so I'll use the high low fire sticks and by putting these up just a little bit higher it makes the box pot surface the top of the box pot really close to the same height as your cooking surface. This is the titanium diffuser plate. Let's start with butter. This is about a half a cube of butter. I'm going to go ahead and add it all. Put in our shallots and our almonds because I want them cooked about the same amount. Just look at that beautiful heirloom tomato. Look at the inside of that thing. What a beauty. Put those in. I don't want a lot of cooking from my tomato just a little bit of cooking. Let's add some kosher salt and pay special attention to those tomatoes. Let's slice our beautiful pear. Those are starting to be about perfect as far as what I was hoping for. Let's go ahead and add our pears and then I'm not going to cook these pears long. I'm just going to go ahead and kind of stir them up and then they will continue to cook because I'm going to keep them warm in the box pot. Now this side burner bracket was actually designed for the freestyle but I found out that it works in these tie-shaped holes in the very bottom of the firebox which gives me a nice low position which is perfect for the high low fire sticks. Let's transfer our beautiful sauce into the box pot. See how that fits in there just underneath the fry pan. You can see I've got that flame set pretty low so that should just keep my sauce warm. Put a splash of water in. Pre-cooked long grain white rice. Let's do a bed of that and then that's where we're going to cook our trout. Perfect fit. Hate to cover up such a thing of beauty. You can see the ember glow diffuser plate just glowing red under there. That's why we make it out of titanium and it will cup just a little bit with that much heat but it doesn't affect its use. Let's check on our trout. Oh wow I just want to turn it over. I don't know if it'll make a big difference because I think it's probably cooking fairly evenly anyway but no yeah it'll make a difference. Bill the beast. He is so huge. He's got to be 200 pounds. He's a very big goat. Then we have these little guys. I have no idea how much they weigh. They're probably still, I don't know, maybe they're 60 pounds. Ricky a little less. He was stunted as a child. Huh Maggie? Little Ricky. Well let's check on that trout. See if we can get the bones out. Holy smokes. That's the problem with catching bigger fish is they take longer. Sure looks like they ought to come out huh? Oh yeah we got it now. Good to go. A little tight up there where the meat is thickest but it's still coming apart so let's go ahead and get it done. Beautiful, beautiful trout. All right let's see if we can just lift the skeleton off of these fillets of meat. Sounds like I have a Bigfoot over there trying to communicate with me. Isn't that what Bigfoot do? They knock. Let's hit it with just a little bit of lemon right on the meat. Just a little bit. I can see one bone that I'll catch right there and then we'll hit it with some salt and pepper. Salt right there on the meat. Pepper. This is a lemon butter sauce so we'll want to go ahead and get the sauce kind of spread out on our trout. Not just into the rice but we're trying to flavor the actual trout and then I'm just going to go ahead and unload the box pot in there. There's a lovely pear. All that tomato. See if we can find some more of that pear. The pear smells just so wonderful. Put some of these pieces of trout up here. Let's go ahead and try this. Holy smokes what a feast. I think the acidity of the tomatoes is going to work with the lemon and with the pears but let's try it. Yeah that's good. Those tomatoes are hot. Got to be careful. Okay I want to try some of this pear with a little piece of trout. That's very nice. Just a little touch of sweetness and then the aroma. It's all very good. Very enjoyable. There's a nice big piece of pear. That pear texture. Oh wow that was good. You know I don't know. I haven't eaten a lot of pear that's been cooked and that's hot but that was really good. Like that pear texture hot was good. This is darn good. I'm not going to complain. I actually wasn't planning on using the heirloom tomato. That was kind of part of my backup meal just in case I didn't catch any trout. I was going to make Navajo tacos. I was going to use that heirloom tomato in that but when I saw it I'm like oh that sounds really good and I'm glad I did. It is good. But those pears and the almonds are stealing the show. They are really good. The pears are so sweet. I think cooking them made them more sweet. Get up get up there. I'm going to untie the goats and then generally they just kind of sleep underneath the truck. Good morning. I had a little bit of a rough night and I ended up sleeping in quite a bit. I let the goats off their leads and they were just running around the truck and they were making all kinds of noise and Bill was chasing the babies and trying to show them who was boss. And so finally I put them into the truck just hoping they would just go to sleep. They had a really big day you know but they were up and turning around and I could hear every time they got up it woke me up and so finally this morning at about six o'clock in the morning I was worried about Bill being in there too long because he barely fits right. So I wanted to get Bill out and make sure he was okay and so I got him out. I tied him up and then I went back to bed and I slept like a baby. It was so nice. So a little bit of a rough night a little bit of a late start but I'm going to make some breakfast. But before I do I'm going to tell you about a pickle I got myself into just right up the road and I'll show you. So this road you can see kind of does an s-turn right here with two trees that you have to fit through and so it's even worse than that because there's this big hole right here. I was coming from this direction and couldn't turn you know I swung out as far as I could and you can see these trees are all nicked up from everybody else having the same problem. And then I, you know, trying to straighten it out to go between these two trees but then your one side the goats are freaking out because I left. Anyway the the whole vehicle ends up on an angle so that's why my awning was rubbing against this tree and then my front bumper was pushing against this tree and once again you can see it's nicked up from other people doing the same thing. And then I had to just jam my front end into this pine tree and you can see my tire tracks here and my tire tracks actually go up and my tire was pushing this log just trying to make it. I had to go back and forth it was about a 500 point turn. The damage on my truck is actually quite minimal. I've got a break here in my bumper skin. You can see it's cracked a couple places but it doesn't go all the way through so everything's still held into place. And then around this side my awning got bent. So if you sight down it it's not bent drastically but it is bent just a little bit and this cover is scratched up and a little bit torn you know right there because it was rubbing against a tree for that whole distance and I'm actually lucky that the damage wasn't worse. Alright let's see if you can guess what I'm going to make for breakfast. I've got an orchard fresh peach, half a lemon, cream cheese frosting, canned cinnamon rolls, blueberries, cream, eggs, and I'm gonna do it in the bread pan. I'm gonna make bread pudding but this super dessert but lots of eggs so I can justify it. I do want this to be a hearty breakfast as well as be really really yummy. Quite a bit of cream then add some kosher salt. Nice big pinch. When you're at a high elevation these cinnamon rolls pop extra loud and extra hard like I've had them jump right out of my hands and had cinnamon rolls on the ground because they just explode. There's less barometric pressure holding it in so it just really has a lot of bang. Let's see what happens. I try to I really try to hold on to them a lot more carefully. There all right these are the flaky cinnamon rolls. I don't think that they're gonna cook in such a way that I'll be able to appreciate the flaky aspect. Okay so two of those let's get some cream cheese chunks into our mix. Now these I don't really have to worry about them dissolving because cream cheese is pretty tough but I do have to worry about them getting stuck to each other and ending up in just one big blob which wouldn't be terrible but this is a big chunk but what the heck. Just shake this pretty hard to get those eggs broken up. This is a quart freezer bag so it's a little bit tougher than just a sandwich bag. Let's pour that into our pan and I'm going to add half of this peach. Trying to stay in frame here. I thought it would be ripe enough it should peel pretty easy. Yeah you see the peelings coming right off which is always nice. All right that should be plenty of peach in there. The firebox is already set up how I need it to be for this low oven. Go ahead and turn the gas on. So that's the airbake pan. Our beautiful bread pudding goes on top just like that. We'll wrap it first with four segments maintaining that air gap in the back. Then I'll wrap it with my six segments which brings it a little further forward. Slide our little keeper bracket into those little slots and it goes in front of the windscreen panels and it just holds the whole oven lid in place. Let's go ahead and get a pot of water on for my coffee. I'm going to use our 750 milliliter bushcraft pot with gas. That's quite a bit of Okay sounds like somebody might come down this road. It'll be the first person. Yep sure enough. Howdy. Stay mate. A couple people. Howdy hey. I just let them know where the good fishing was and where I found it. It's funny when the goats get tangled up because they end up getting tangled up in the trees around them. They just hold still and they just wait. They're very very patient. They just chew their cud. Let me show you Hector right now. He's stuck. How'd you get wrapped up in that Hector? Let's see how he's just standing there waiting so patiently. I'll throw in some cream and it is coffee time. That's good. I'm transferring my coffee. I put it back in the pot to get it a little bit hotter because I'm moving it around so much I don't want it to just cool off. I'm putting it into my insulated coffee mug so that I can drink it with my bread pudding. That will stay nice and hot for me. Let's go ahead and put this stuff away. Wipe it clean and then my backpacker's mug slides right in there and then this whole assembly slides into my box pot. It started raining and the goats are freaking out so I'm going to get them undercover. My alarm's going off for my bread pudding. I had kind of hoped that it would be just a short little storm but it's going and going so I just covered my cooking project with my tire table case. So I'm gonna have to get serious about tying up a quick shelter. I'm officially soaked. I should have set this up. You know, I saw it coming. I just thought it would be a little, you know, passing sprinkle like it was yesterday but we've had hail, it's windy now, and the rain is coming down pretty hard so I'm gonna try to keep working on this shelter and see if I can't get it set up. All right, that's gonna work. Sweet and simple and be easy to take down too. So let's check our bread pudding because I'm betting it's getting close. It's been running a really long time and it's still doughy on top. I'm afraid we're getting too brown on the bottom. I've got my spatula here. Put it together. Work on it out here. Flop that over. Oh, look at that. It's turning out beautifully. All right, another 10 minutes and I think it'll be done. That rain made everything so beautiful. Everything's all wet now and it's nice light. Really nice. Very peaceful. Let's get this out. Oh, it's beautiful. Golden brown and I'll plate it up. This is a fresh batch of cream cheese frosting that my daughter Emma made for me the night before last. Very nice. I'll just get all of it out on here. Let's hit it with a little bit of lemon juice just to brighten up the flavor and then I do have my little zester here. This is a bar zester, so for making drinks I guess, but it's perfect as a little backpacking zester. I'm just gonna push those into that cream cheese frosting. Cream is my new butter. Just a very, very light sprinkling of kosher salt. Breakfast is served and I still have some hot coffee. Oh man, I love my job. Really soft and there's no toughness at all. Wow, very creamy. Oh and there's a big bunch of cream cheese and some of that peach. It worked out perfectly. The peaches are almost all on the bottom which was the top and then there's the layer of cream cheese and there is and then the quiche part is on top but it's all very creamy because there was so much cream in it. So nice. Very good. This is my older insulated coffee mug. So it's got all this tape on it and stuff because we always mix up each other's coffee at work and I'll like take a big drink of it and then realize I just drank Vanya's coffee. So it's kind of messy looking. My nicer new one that I was using in my videos. I lost it. So here we go. Well I'm all packed up and ready to go so I'm just gonna load up Maggie. Good girl. Thank you very much folks. Really appreciate you watching. Take care.