Campfire dough

One thing I love about camping is the cooking outside. We mostly cook our dinner on the campfire, but for breakfast we have a camping stove.
On our last trip, I prepared dough for campfire breadsticks. I accidentally made way too much so we had leftover dough in the morning - it worked out perfectly as a sort of camping pancake :D

1 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tbsp olive oil
1/3 cup water

Mix all the ingredients and store in a plastic bag until it's time to wrap it around a stick or to fry it as a pancake.

Puff pastry pockets

I was browsing recipes with figs and puff pastry and found this one. It was surprisingly fast and because it included cheese it was much to my liking :)

Ingredients:
1 puff pastry sheet
frozen figs
2 tbsp honey
1/4 cup water
brie
1 egg, beaten

Heat figs, honey and water on the stove and let simmer until the liquid is thick enough to cover the back of a spoon. Remove from heat.
Cut puff pastry sheet into squares and line a muffin pan. Place some brie and a bit of the fig sauce into the puff pastry cups.
Fold the edges towards the middle to create little pockets.
Brush with egg.
Bake at 350 F (180 °C) until golden brown.
I served them with roasted Macadamia nuts :)

I thought that the liquid from the fig sauce was making these delicious pockets a bit soggy, although not excessively so. There were other interesting-looking recipes that included pre-baking the puff pastry. Definitely something I want to try out! :)

Pelmeni

This Russian national dish is easy to make, albeit I suspect no one would call it quick, but everyone likes it.

For the dough I used this recipe from a German website. Then I made a beef filling and a vegetarian filling.

Dough
400 g flour
2 eggs
150 ml warm water
1/2 tsp salt
Add the salt to the flour then add warm water to the flour and begin mixing. Then add the eggs and knead until all ingredients are well combined. Cover with a wet cloth and let the dough sit for 20-30 min.

Beef filling
1 lb ground beef
1.5-2 onions, blended
2 tbsp soft butter
salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, parsley
Combine all ingredients. Done.

Potato filling
boiled potatoes
milk
butter
1/2 onion
salt, pepper
Cut the onion in little pieces and fry until golden/translucent. Mash potatoes with a bit of the water they were boiled in, add milk, butter, onion, salt and pepper.

To form the Pelmeni separate the dough in half and make about 1.5-2 inch thick rolls. Then cut 1.5-2 inch pieces off, roll them into balls, use flour to dust the table and roll the dough balls out into very flat circles.
Then place filling onto a circle, fold it in half making sure to pinch the outer line of the half circle together. Then fold the edges together. (See picture)
Cook for about 10 minutes. Serve with butter and or sour cream.

Tortillas

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to learn how to make tortillas. It was a great experience and made me want to try it at home, too.
I had some left over white corn meal and eagerly mixed the 4 needed ingredients together. The result couldn't have been more different. My white corn meal was very coarse and instead of a nice dough I had a kind of mush and it was impossible to shape it into anything. Not quite willing to give it up I used a spoon to pour the mixture onto the frying pan and made a couple of sad looking, hard oval shaped ..things. I am resolved to try again with yellow corn flour some day.

yellow corn flour
water
olive oil
salt
Maria from Bolivia showed us how to mix yellow corn flour with water, add a little bit of olive oil and salt until the texture of the dough is just right and can be formed to tortillas. We made our hands wet so that the dough wouldn't stick to our hands (which it shouldn't do too much either way). First we made little balls out of the dough, then formed them into little sombrero shapes using the thumb and index finger, finally flattening out the sombrero into a nice round shape, about 1/4 inch thick.
Then we fried the tortillas in a dry frying pan and ate them with beans, salad, guacamole, cheese, and salsa.