Dear Fellow Foodies and Avid Campers,
Gourmet Girl Gail here writing from sunny Santa Barbara. Happy Spring! A recent outing to Cava Robles RV Resort in Paso Robles, CA, found me in the grilling mode. Paso can reach temps in the 100s during summer, but this time of year is the perfect weather to explore the area with its more than 200 wineries and wildflower sightings. Here’s a birds-eye view of Cava Robles.
It’s like a city unto itself with pools, a restaurant (closed now due to COVID), a wellness center, hiking trails, dog parks, and much more.
Because of COVID, we pretty much stayed to ourselves on this trip, and it gave me an opportunity to experiment in the cooking realm and adapt our salmon recipe in the Gourmet Girls Go Camping cookbook to a dinner for two. This is my idea of mise en place at the campsite. Mise en place refers to the setup required before cooking, and is often used in professional kitchens to refer to organizing and arranging the ingredients (e.g., cuts of meat, relishes, sauces, par-cooked items, spices, freshly chopped vegetables, and other components) that a cook will require for the menu items that are expected …
I’ve used these foil packs at home in the oven, but they work really well on a grill, and there’s virtually no cleanup. What a dream!
I’ve got several grills: the Volcano we often used during our recipe testing for the cookbook, a Snow Peak grill that’s a work of art, and this simple, inexpensive Weber grill. The grill bag fits perfectly on the Weber.
I hope you’ll try out the salmon recipe in our cookbook for yourselves and let us know what you think. Naturally, hardly any of my blog posts go without mentioning dear Abigail. She’s such a camper! She loves to hunt for rabbits and squirrels. Here she is watching a squirrel video.
Where are they really, she wants to know!
And here she is having enjoyed a joyride in the golf cart we rented to explore Cava Robles. Yes, it’s that big of a park!
Our next trip will be totally off the grid. A very difference experience we’re looking forward to.
In the meantime, travel well, eat well, and stay safe, dear friends!
All our best,
Gail, Denise, and Lindsey