What a gorgeous day we had yesterday – Spring was finally here, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the winds had eased a little. It never quite got warm, hitting about 10°C at best, but it was perfect conditions for the beach cooking that we had planned for the Scouts.
We prepared some of the food before we got to the beach and once the Scouts arrived we soon had a few camp fires going well. They did seem to neglect the importance of collecting wood to keep a steady supply of fuel for them though. They were also quite pessimistic about the actual cooking saying that things never work when they try cooking on the beach – they hadn’t tried cooking on the beach with us before though.
The plan was to cook pizza wraps. We had tortilla wraps onto which we squirted tomato ketchup or BBQ sauce. We then topped this with a selection of toppings that we had already chopped or grated, including cheese, red and green peppers, ham, mushrooms, sweetcorn and pineapple. We then folded the wrap up, wrapped it in foil and placed it in the embers / flames of the fire for a minute or two.
The Scouts were impressed, the result was described as ‘Lush’, ‘Yummy’ and the ‘best pizza ever’ – and to think they had very little confidence to start with. They were actually very nice. The wraps charred just a little whilst the fillings melted and cooked and it all had a very slight ‘cooked on a fire’ kind of smoky taste – much better than similar pizza wraps cooked in a microwave and the Scouts had fun making and eating them as the sun set over the sea.
We tried popcorn too but that didn’t really work so well – we did tell them that it was an experiment and we didn’t expect it to work, so we resorted instead to ‘Smores’ for pudding which obviously went down a treat too. Trouble is I ended up eating with them despite already having had dinner so managed to consume close to 6,000 calories yesterday – once I start eating I just can’t stop. At least I burnt some of it off during the day thanks to a 36 mile cycle, a 4 mile run and spending the morning gardening in the sunshine.