Hobo Dinners

Way back a hundred years ago, I was a camp counselor for a summer at a YMCA camp.  I'll just be frank and say it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad experience.  I might be exaggerating on the hundred year part, but I don't think I could exaggerate how much fun I did not have.  Might it have been that I made $75 a week to live in a rustic wood 'cabin' with 12 fourth-grade girls?  Or the huge kidney infection I couldn't kick?  Or the communal showers?  Or the pincher beetles?  I could go on, but I'll spare you the misery.

The one good thing that came from my camp counselor experience was hobo dinners.  Not that I enjoyed making these in the pouring rain with manic mosquitoes for said fourth-graders, but still.  Hobo dinners are great camp food, and just summer-evening-outside kinda food.  I'm sure there are a dozen ways to make them, but this is how we roll here.

Tear off two sheets of about 18 inches of foil for each hobo dinner you want to make.  Don't scrimp here.  You must use two sheets for every dinner or it will burn.  I always use one non-stick and one heavy duty piece of foil for each dinner at our place, because I don't like scraping stuck-on-potatoes.

  
Speaking of...  Scrub up some potatoes. Pick good ones, because they're the backbone of this meal.

You're going to want to cut them into thin slices.  I like to use our 'whack chop' for this.

But be careful!  Don't, whatever you do, forgo that tophat piece that protects your fingers from the blade or you'll end up with a cleft in your thumb like our son Izaak.

Use the tophat thingy, and don't worry about the last little piece of potato.  

 

Arrange some potatoes on each of the nonstick foil pieces.  You might choose to lightly sprinkle them with olive oil and salt, particularly if you aren't using nonstick foil.

Then top with ground beef.  I use the leanest they have, which kind of defeats the whole olive oil part, but I just can't bring myself to buy the 85% lean.  I just can't.

I like to sprinkle it all with season salt, then top it with some onions.

Fold it like a baby now. Twice--once with the nonstick, and then again with the heavy duty. 

Send it outside.  In my world, this is now man's work.  It involves flame, which means my husband will participate in the cooking. 

The heat and the oil do lovely things to the potatoes and onions.  When your man brings it in from the grill (or over to the picnic table), bust out the ketchup and go to town.  It's simple, and tastes almost as summer as sweet corn and peaches.  Almost.

 

 Enjoy!