Get ready for a little of what could by called 'repartee,' - a word familiar to the 'upper crust set,' even though society page citizens dine on 'finger' sandwiches that have the crust carefully removed- from a tell it like it is "crusty" couple that define themselves as the, "last of the frontier people." The dictionary defines the noun repartee as - banter, badinage, bantering, raillery, witticisms, ripostes, sallies, quips, joking, jesting. Just what you might expect from a 'Golden Age Passport' duo, with opinions of their own, that have been sharing a one-person only kitchen the past six years 'full timing' inside a 328 square feet class A motor home, crisscrossing America from Alaska to Florida in search of fresh ingredients that did not come to the table via the supermarket from Peru.
Thanks to repartee, Bobby and Barry Murray have an unusual way of looking at circumstances and situations. Together for nine years, they claim to still be on a honeymoon ("one part honey, to three parts of setting moon dust - only found just over the horizon!") publishing, as they go, online magazines, as www.RVTravelMagazine.com.
They have found, following the, mantra of, "snow birders go south when below 60°; north, or into the mountains, when over 70°," the answer to elbow room problems was for a combination living/dining room to magically expand outdoors under a canopy, stretching clear to the ocean surf, or a forest trees. As nomad Bobby calls it, "Changing the wallpaper." That, and modular (a dictionary word, again, for, "storable in RV bins") Camp Chef kitchen designed to be used outdoors, has saved the marriage from "excessive opionin-ation!"
A little about Camp Chef RV Camping Pro Staff, Bobby Murray.
Bobby Murray grew up on a hard scramble 'stump ranch' in the costal mountains of Western Washington. Number 12 out of 15 children, mostly boys, her farm chores were to collect free-range chickens eggs, or pick garden vegetables at just the right moment, to help feeding her hard to please big appetite brothers. Something she cooked didn't turn out just right; well she could expect to, "have a knot jerked into her tail." If that is hard to visualize, than try this: an eight-year old scrambling to keep up with wood-fired range cooked toast her father dealt out at the table, as if a deck of cards.
When old enough to escape her professional, but unpaid cooks position, Bobby talked a conventional husband into following her dream of taking the kids across America in a pre-home schooling adventure of learning history from highways wayside markers. She built out a 1949, bug-eyed, Griffin "chip and nut van," with bunk beds, and away they went. When they would run out of money, Bobby would pick up a temporary job cooking in a Chinese, Mexican, fish and chips, Elks club, cowboy/oilfield cafe, to fill the tank a few times over with $0.28 gasoline, and away they would go.
Adventurous -and bold- enough to answer Barry Murray's macho Internet plea from Alaska for a, "good looking mail-order bride who didn't mind doing dishes." Bobby took the challenge and did him 'one better' by writing up her first bush Alaska experience for Barry's www.AlaskaTravelMagazine.com with an article on how-to-do sourdough that pops up on page one of search engine queries. Bobby's free "Alaska Sourdough Recipes," have been downloaded 100,000 plus times, and she is still getting e-mail from all over the world with pictures of yet another "perfect sourdough loaf," such as you can't find in grocery stores.
Bobby was introduced to the Camp Chef system by buying a 2-burner propane stove wide enough to heat up a portable griddle large enough to hold impromptu AlaskaTravelMagazine.com sourdough 'flapjack' breakfasts in RV campgrounds in Apache Junction, Arizona, Big Bend National Park, Texas, and Silk Hope, North Carolina. These fit in very well into a motor home society where dinner party socializing has been replaced by pot luck, state pride, cook off's.
Some background on the other Murray of the Camp Chef RV Camping Pro Staff team, Barry Murray.
Barry Murray was born in Oregon, before escaping to Alaska to, "get away from civilization." He is best know as the old-fashioned diamond-hitch packer (LIFE Magazine, September 3, 1971) who took his family, children 8, 10, 12 years-old, horseback from Mexico to Canada, before the Sierra Club pressured the U.S. Forest Service to 'outlaw' horses on the 2,500 mile long trail he had pioneered.
Barry feels in his online book of the experience, www.SearchForAShadowOfThePast.com, that the jealousy of backpackers on weekend adventures from big cities, not being able, due to weight, to dine on Dutch oven meals, was the demise of a 'historically registered' way of life. Particularly when it came to Old West things as, "doubled smoked" bacon, which was how Murray found Camp Chef's Ultimate Roaster in the first place.
In an upcoming article Murray is working on for us, he will explain the importance of double smoking for preservation, and recreating a frontier taste unknown to meat departments in Anchorage supermarkets. He has found the problem to be in finding flitches of old-fashioned smoked bacon, to smoke himself a second time, to accompany his wife's sourdough breakfasts. Check in here occasionally, and on the Murray's column on www.MotorHomeTraveler.com, to find the double-smoke answer.
Murray's 'professional' culinary experience came about by being stranded in an Eskimo village at the mouth of the Yukon River, just as the snow was about to fly, with only $26 in his pocket. He signed on as a sea cook on a six weeks cruise on a converted WWII LSI cannery ship (see the article Chilkoot To The Sea on www.AlaskaTravelMagazine.com) to Seattle.
The downside of this adventure, that involved cooking hundreds of pounds of live Alaskan King Crab, was the knowledge that to be the ultimate gourmet, one has to travel to a harvest. This is why much of www.RVTravelMagazine.com deals with finding a source of Dungeness crab, and Oregon oysters (which the Murray's featured before Rachel Ray) in their publications, and ours.
Thanks Murray's -which we feel equally talented in perusing the ultimate in culinary taste- for inviting Camp Chef along in your pursuit of 'Old West' flavors. We promise not to embarrass Barry by mentioning that prior to his 'rural Alaska' days he had been a Contributing Photographer to the elite San Francisco Magazine, known for his unique coverage of the very best restaurants in the Bay Area, and the recipes featured in the column, "Dining In." An interest in things gourmet in life has many turnings.
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