Pit Cooking: First attempt - Whole Chicken and Spuds

After reading "Clan of the Cave Bear" I became obsessed with attempting to "pit cook". I thought our cabin at Victoria Lake would be the perfect place to try it out due to the fine rocky beach.

First things first, I dug a hole... I didn't think to take a picture of my hole... DAMN, sorry to disappoint - no hole pics. It was pretty exciting though, at about a foot and half deep by a foot and a half wide? Fun times digging a hole on our beach. It was actually relatively easy considering the nature of the beach. Fine, loose rocks - perfect... no sweat there.

WHOA oops, ACTUALLY "first things first" is not to dig a hole, in fact the first thing to do is to find some big rocks and heat them up in your fire starting in the morning. I asked Jer to pick up some big rocks from a nearby beach (our beach has NO big rocks), and then threw them in our fire in the morning. They were like, football size? (maybe a titch smaller).

Now that the rocks were nicely heating up (all day long), I dug a hole. Later, around early afternoon... I shoveled the hot rocks into the bottom of my hole and proceeded to start a fire on top of the hot rocks in the hole. Okay let's be honest, Jeremy proceeded to start the fire in the hole. He burned yew wood, which apparently makes for "good embers". After my fire burned down to mostly embers (like an hour or so), I added the goods!

So, I double wrapped my whole chicken and russet potatoes in tinfoil, and laid them right on the embers. Then I buried the whole lot with the little beach rocks... and... waited...

In the meantime, we had the best cabin day ever. Sun was shining, friends and parents came for a visit, kids were swimming, and we had cold beers. Good times for sure! One of the cool things about pit cooking is you can do all the work earlier in the day, and literally forget about it! Which I actually did, at first I was like checking the top of my "burial" for heat and not finding any, actually digging down until I did. And then, like totally forgot about it. Around dinner time, while I was preparing "over the campfire spaghetti" (as I was NOT banking on the chicken actually working out), I remembered about the chicken in the ground! Oh ya! Ran over to my chicken grave and the top was HOT!!! A good sign!!!

So dig dig dig, and can I just say everyone was extremely skeptical about this pit cooking thing. But even though it seemed weird, I was pretty sure it would work out! I had done my research after all!

This is my Dad, gf Jenny and myself
"being skeptical"

Aaaannnnd, it's cooked! The chicken and potatoes are PERFECT! Moist, tender and delicious! Nobody can believe it! Haha, especially my Dad! 

Pit Cooking - Second Attempt is coming up. Labour weekend, we're hauling out our frozen turkey and will attempt to pit cook it! Turkey dinner at the cabin... next up!