Finding The Lost Treasure of Thanksgiving

Finding The Lost Treasure of Thanksgiving

We thought the ultimate test for our CampChef Ultimate Roaster would be to make a complete roast turkey feast while dry camping in our RV without electricity or at-site water.

Our 72 year-old friend and partner from Alaska recently bought an RV to fulfill a life-long dream of exploring for buried treasure of the Old West. He was holed up at the Lost Dutchman State Park in Arizona, complaining about the heat, and that snow birding is almost as isolated as batching it on his placer claims way up the creek at Ophir.

Our form of "tundra telegraph" had been to keep in touch via cell phone, even way out in the desert, thanks to his taking our advice on our RVTravelMagazine.com and buy a cell phone booster through our reader reward discount. Hearing a little a little nostalgia in his voice for family gatherings at Thanksgiving, we decided to drive 350 miles to spread a feast for him, a niece, her fiance, and grandnieces he had not seen for some years.

Knowing that we would be dry camping, with no plug-in electricity (other than that converted by generator or solar panels) we studied the videos on the CampChef web site about roasting a turkey in our Ultimate Roaster and felt confident that we had the 6 and 4 of how to do it.

We set up our outdoor kitchen under an ancient saguaro cactus knowing that in its whole 250-year existence it had never seen the like of what we were doing.

Following the instructions we injected our turkey, (but with our own concoction of butter, turkey broth and spices) inverted the bird on the convection cone and kicked back to enjoy a glass of wine with our guest while the Ultimate Roaster did the work. WOW!!! When that bird came out of the roaster it was done to perfection. Our guest and we had never had a juicier or more flavorful turkey! They will be talking about this Thanksgiving feast for a lifetime.

The rest of our menu consisted of the usual accompaniments (usual that is if you are in a house with a full kitchen) of mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, candied sweet potatoes, fresh cranberry/orange sauce with Grand Marnier, green beans and a special Granny Macioce's sausage and mozzarella cheese stuffing. Thank you John Macioce for giving us your family recipe. (Next year, if we are in the same area again for Thanksgiving, we would like to experiment with a turkey done in the Southwestern style. Perhaps if you know of a good recipe for this, please let us know.)

Our guest had brought steaks as their part of the feast and charcoal for the BBQ pit. We suggested that they cook them on our CampChef Pro BBQ and after the perfect do on the meat they were sold on the unit and spoke about getting the whole outdoor kitchen for their patio. They were fascinated with the dual-use of the roaster to smoke ribs, fish and chicken.

So the bottom line thinking here is that the next Holiday feast you cook, take the family to a special spot and show them and the "ancient ones" something new by cooking it all on your CampChef outdoor kitchen. Maybe you too can find this type of "lost treasure" as we did.

P.S. It was great not having a TV to compete with our visiting and everyone went for a hike to see if they would be the lucky ones to stumble upon the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine and of course to walk off some of the calories.