Food: Turkey in a Trashcan (!)

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Turkey in a Trashcan (!)
Thursday, August 18, 2005

I promised myself that I would post an entry or two this summer about campfire cooking, since I've been doing that for quite a while now. In fact, I just got back from a Girl Scout campout a few days ago, and for the very first time in my life, I ate turkey cooked in a trashcan! I've heard of this delicacy for years and years, but since I generally work with younger girls, I considered it too complicated and risky to try on my own with them. This weekend, however, the campout catered to teens, and since they are a capable and experienced bunch of campers, we decided to give it a try.

In case you don't already know how to pull this off, here are the directions. You'll need the turkey (unstuffed, thawed, washed, and seasoned to taste), a spit that you can stick in the ground pointing straight up, a clean galvanized trash can, charcoal, and matches. You'll also want equipment to move the hot charcoal around safely, a big platter or tray to put your masterpiece on, and some really good gloves for handling very hot items.

Put the spit upright into the ground and put the turkey on it. We put the big cavity down over the spit and it worked very nicely. Put the trashcan upside down over top of the turkey, and mound up charcoal around the bottom and on the top of the can. Light it and cook the bird for sixty to ninty minutes. Our turkeys were fourteen pound birds, and we cooked them for ninty minutes. They ended up just a tad overdone. Thankfully, the extreme heat of that setup with the trashcan and the charcoal sears the turkey, and it turned out juicy and delicious even though it was a bit on the done side. It's really hard to check on the cooking! I suppose that with practice, one could get it down to a science, though.

Now, let me describe this campfire-cooked feast to you. You tell me if it doesn't sound more like a holiday meal than a campfire-cooked mess. We had our turkey-juicy and moist. It was a little bit hard to cut the bird with our small knife, so next time, we will be sure to bring a carving knife! But the meat just fell right off of the bones and it steamed and sent the most incredible fragrance into the camp atmosphere. Right beside the turkey, we had a whole pile of baked potatoes. We had wrapped them in foil and baked them to perfection in the coals around the trashcan while the turkey baked. There was also purple sweet corn. Yes, you read that right! One of our illustrious leaders had a mess of purple sweet corn (I suspect it's the same stuff that eventually dries into the colorful cobs that you see in the fall). We cut it off of the cobs, mixed in some butter, salt and pepper, and foil packed it on top of the coals on top of our turkey trashcan. There was salad, too. Needless to say, there were absolutely no leftovers from that meal!

For dessert, we made dump cake. What, you've never had dump cake? It's absolutely delicious. And it's easy to make, too! You'll need one of those heavy cast iron dutch ovens. Put in a box of cake mix and two sticks of butter. Mix in a can of pie filling (apple and cherry are great, but do whatever you'd like!). Stir the whole thing up a bit and close up the pot. Set the dutch oven on a bed of hot coals and shovel some coals onto the lid. It'll need about forty-five to sixty minutes to cook, so it's a good idea to start it right when you're sitting down to enjoy the main part of the meal. When it's all cooked, you'll be treated to a heavy, cake-y dessert that is much like a soft, gooey crisp. It's a great way to end a great meal.

And we managed all of this in the rain!!

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