Every year as it starts to get despicably hot, like unfortunately it is right now, my mind begins to dwell on my family's summer get away from our coastal heat and humidity - Colorado. Every year we went it was a different adventure and every year it seemed somehow we came away with a greater knowledge and appreciation of ourselves, our family and low humidity, moderate temperature living.
Now this is not to say that these adventures did not also come with their own ordeals. We often met the unexpected, ran out of essentials or just ran into bad luck. Somehow, the knowledge we gained from one misadventure never seemed to help us to avoid another situation. It was as if each time we went there was some great fateful roll of the dice and we would be coping with a new type event.
Take for example the time my father, my sister and I were out camping. We were definitely into roughing it in that we would go for a week, camping in a tent with sleeping bags and only rudimentary sanitary facilities. Getting to stay at a camp site with a 'hole in the ground' toilet was a luxury. I must mention that my sister and I were still of an age that going for a week without a bath was nothing but a welcome relief. By the end of the trip we would be smelling of camp fire smoke, fish bait and damp sleeping bags, but we loved it.
On this one trip we were at the end of a several day outing that had our camp supplies running a bit low. The next day we would be moving our campsite, so we would be stocking up again at one of the stores that was currently miles away from where we were. It looked to be a meager meal since that day we had not caught any fish. Our provisions were down to a single can of chicken soup, a box of Bisquick and a couple of pieces of bread. As my father was getting ready to heat up the can of soup over our cook stove, I happened to notice the Bisquick package had a recipe for dumplings. Dumplings for me were these heavenly things my great grandmother had made for me along with a fresh helping of homemade chicken soup. They were like little soft sided biscuits floating in a savory broth. I pointed out the recipe to my father, more of as an aside than actually thinking we could make them.
Cooking at 7500 feet of elevation is not an easy proposition. Water will look like it is hot when it is barely even warm. There are whole cookbooks devoted to correct ways to cook at high altitude. We had no such a book and even if we had I doubt we would have paid it much attention. My father thought for some reason that I knew how to go about making dumplings. Eating dumplings was as close as I had ever come, but I liked it that he thought I had a great idea. So we mixed up this jam jar full of Bisquick and water. He kept asking me if he had mixed it correctly and I, savoring the attention kept saying 'yes'. My sister was keeping to herself in the background, either uninterested in our experiment or perhaps just too weak with hunger to comment.
Everything was going great with the soup in the pan steaming, which it unfortunately would do when barely tepid. I was re-reading the Bisquick box which said to put spoonfuls of the batter into boiling water. The soup looked to be boiling so I told my father to put the batter in. I failed to explain the exact way he was to do this so he just dumped the entire jar of batter in at once and began stirring the mixture vigorously. Apparently he and I shared a lack of cooking expertise.
I was a little stunned by his method, but I didn't say anything. After all, the deed had been done and my saying the batter should have been spooned in and not stirred wasn't going to change a thing. The pot that had once contained a meager but perfectly functional chicken soup, now contained a maelstrom of thick white goo. The bits of chicken and carrots just made it look like some sort of raw dough trash. We all took a look at it and decided that we really were not as hungry as we thought we were. There is nothing like the promise of something absolutely awful to staunch even the strongest appetite. I think I ended up eating a piece of bread for dinner that night.
We survived and the next morning we broke camp and high tailed it to the closest store. I thought we had gotten off relatively easy, none of us having to suffer through actually eating the culinary disaster. Little did I know that this would be the start of a lifelong legend.
To this day when we are trying to decide where we might want to go to eat, or if the subject of camping comes up my father will look over at me, wink, and say, "Hey, I know, I think we have some Bisquick..."
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