Dutch Oven Cooking

I managed to do another Bushcraft lesson with the school today. 

This was with Year 1, my younger daughters class. I did a similar lesson in the summer with my eldest.



The plan behind this lesson was to cook a pumpkin the class had for Halloween. Between the teacher and myself we sorted out a sort of plan for the afternoon.

To make sure there was enough to keep them entertained I also harvested lots of willow sticks to make camp bread on as well.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post I sorted my dutch oven for this so I was looking froward to cooking on it. I'm not going to lie it took me a while to get the temperature right, it was very easy to get it too hot!

I used the tripod to adjust it until it was right. My brother made me this about 7 years ago and I've not really used it properly before, it's a great bot of kit. While I set the kids to mixing the dough I fried off the ingredients for the soup.

The children had already prepared the veg in class and had great fun chopping them up. They also spent the afternoon yesterday using this as something to write about, they all wrote a list of ingredients and cooking instructions. The teacher said she struggled to stop them writing about it!

It was great to get them out cooking. Most of them tried the soup as well which was great! It was a cold day and a few times a couple of them asked to go in to warm up.

The best bit was at the end though, as I walked back through the school one of the lads came running out to say thank you. he then gave me a huge hug and the rest of the class came running out and did the same! In the end I was being hugged by 23 kids! A lovely feeling! I think they loved the session!

I'm a firm believer that kids of this age (6) need less school and more scouts! Although in this case it was more scout like activities! I wish they could spend more time outside at school.