Kiss the Cook

I've had a few culinary adventures up at Camp Steiner.  Let's see if I can remember . . .

Every other Monday Commissary sends us "chicken fillets" for dinner.  These are pre-cooked chicken breast fillets, with about a gallon of pepper on each piece.  I'm supposed to bake them and serve them with county gravy (basically just a white sauce).  I simply can't do this.  So the first time I had them I made Winger's Sticky Fingers recipe (thanks Stephanie!).  Everyone loved that, which only encouraged me. 

The next time we got the chicken fillets we lucked out and they were not coated in pepper.  This time I breaded them and coated them in parmesan cheese before baking.  Then we topped them with a dollop of spaghetti sauce, a sprinkling of mozarella cheese and voila! Chicken Parmesan!  This was hugely popular as well. 

But then we got the peppery stuff again.  So I threw it in a strainer and washed the pepper off.  I had to wonder how many people wash their cooked chicken before serving it up.  Anyway, I made Chicken Supreme out of it (honey, mustard, and curry powder). 

I've also taken to making Beef & Broccoli stir-fry every other Friday night instead of grilling steaks every week. Now my staff thinks I am totally amazing! 

We have orange juice listed on our breakfast menus every day.  At first we only got orange drink mix —think "McDonald's."  So I asked the commissary lady, Julie, if we were supposed to get real juice and she said, "Yes!" 

Yay!!  

The first time I served OJ, I mixed three gallons of it in a big cooler.  Everyone was really excited to have real orange juice, so I mixed the same amount the next day.  They only drank about two-thirds of it that time.  I couldn't fit the leftover juice in the fridge, but it's pretty cool at Steiner so I left the remaining juice in the insulated cooler and then added just a little more to it the next day.  I did this a few times.  Well, one day the juice tasted a little different. I am often the last one to serve myself and start eating, and nobody else had said anything, but I noticed that it was kind of fizzy!  My brain instantly said, "This juice is fermenting." After breakfast was over, one of our older leaders confirmed that thought by saying the juice tasted just like a screwdriver; I don't think he meant a tool.  What kind of a woman serves alcoholic beverages to the staff at a Boy Scouts of America camp?!

Well, nobody seemed more sleepy or any sillier than usual that morning; no one got sick.  So I don't think I got anyone drunk.  But I threw out the last of that juice and now I just mix it one gallon at a time.

Last week I burned myself while I was fixing the Scoutmaster Luncheon.  My arm hit the top oven rack while I was pulling baked potatoes out of the oven.  Owie!  I had to hurry and get the lunch out, so I waited about 15 minutes before running it under cool water.  Then I had to get the staff lunch ready.  So I worked on that a little, but my arm hurt, so I stuck it back in the faucet and Bob went to get our medic, Katy.  She was happy that I'd put my burn right into the cool water.  What she doesn't know . . .

wounded in action

The burn felt all better by evening, so I took off my tough-looking bandaging.  But on Saturday morning I scraped the blister on one of the shelves.  Owie, owie!!!!  So I had Katy bandage it up again.

This past week I was thinking that if I had to have a job, this one is perfect for me.  I really, really enjoy cooking for people. I don't think I'd like running a restaurant—too much pressure and too impersonal.  And I don't think I'd particularly like catering, although that would be better than a restaurant, I think.  Possibly I'd get return customers and it would be a little more personal.  I was explaining this to Michael one day as he was helping Bob and me.  I told him that I really like cooking for a group of people—people who like me, and I like them . . . 

And Michael said, "It sounds like you like to have a family."

Huh!  He's right.  I like feeding my family!

Christmas in July!

For staff night last week we had a Christmas party!  On Friday (the 20th) all the staff drew names so we could help Santa get us some gifts, since this is his off-season.  The plan was that we'd have a Christmas party and gift exchange after dinner on the 25th.  But I have to admit that when I heard "Christmas" I went a little nuts.

First of all I got stuff and made the Bruce North family's traditional Christmas breakfast:  Breakfast Quiche and Blueberry-Stuffed French Toast.  Yum! 

Every morning at camp I put out some hot water and hot cocoa mix for my 50 or so kids to have before or with breakfast. But the commissary always sends sugar-free cocoa mix (which makes no sense because we also use it for kids who get hypothermic in the lake, and they need sugar as well as heat). So for Christmas I bought two big cans of Stephen's hot cocoa, one of regular milk chocolate and one of mint chocolate truffle.  One of my girls, Tiffany, acutally squealed when she saw the hot cocoa mix. She told me later that it is her family's tradition to have mint hot cocoa for Christmas. Yay! :-)

We had one of our usual camp lunches that day: hamburgers. But Bob (my female assistant) and I had made fudge that morning to have as our lunchtime dessert.  My "kids" were surprised and delighted to have that Christmasy treat in the afternoon.

On Tuesday, the 24th, I baked gingerbread cookies for the staff to decorate, but not just any gingerbread cookies.  No, I made Ninja-bread men!  I put them out on the table a couple hours before dinner, along with some frosting and sprinkles, so the staff could decorate their ninjas and then make them disappear.  My kids loved the ninja cookies!

Then, for dinner, I cooked two turkeys with all the fixin's.  This was a trick because the oven is temperamental—to say the least—and I really had no idea how many potatoes to cook for mashed potatoes; I finally decided on one per person, plus a few more for good measure.  Have you ever tried to mash 60 large potatoes at once?  It took some time.  But the dinner was delicious, and I had a happy group.  To top off the Christmas feast I made good use of some of our banana abundance and made something like banana cream pie.  We had some happy campers!

Then after the feasting Santa Claus came! Our program director happens to know Santa personally, and he made all the arrangements.

Santa knew that Bruce had gone shopping with his family and really wanted these safety glasses he saw, so Santa got them for him!

Santa did some magic, read us a story, and then had each of us sit on his lap to get a gift. 

Santa's laughing at Brandon.  So were we all.



Michael kind of looks like he doesn't trust Santa,
but he got a pretty neat gift!



I told Santa that I am a married woman, but he said it was OK to sit on his lap because he's married, too.  I'm not sure about that reasoning.

I got a very cute clock that says, "Good Food Served Here." :-)

We were all filled up in every way by bedtime.  It was a fun night!

Adventures

Our summer really is like a Disney movie . . . except that our adventures all happen back home in West Valley City (or on the way home) and not up in the mountains.  We haven't had confrontations with bears, made pets of chipmunks, or ridden any deer. 

In the lodge, Bruce sports a golden, rope turban.
(It's a big Turk's-head knot that Michael made.)

Well, OK.  I suppose I almost sort of had an adventure, maybe. But, actually, that was not exactly in the mountains either.

Jessica wasn't feeling well last Monday.  She said her throat hurt and her ear hurt, and the EMTs measured her temperature at 103 point something Monday night.  So right after breakfast on Tuesday I put her in the van and we drove to Park City to see a dr. and find out if she had strep.  She didn't.

I wasn't very excited to drive down that mountain road myself, but I actually liked it better than being the passenger.  For one thing, I take the curves five to ten miles per hour slower than Bruce does; also, I'm in control of the car and from the driver's seat the view/perspective is quite different than from the passenger seat.  It was a pleasant drive. 

My little adventures happened on the way back to camp.  It's too bad we didn't have the camera so that Ryan, who was in the front passenger seat, could take pictures.  The first thing that happened is that we came across the stretch of road that warns us of free-ranging cattle.  Usually we don't see any, but this time there were four cows right in the middle of my lane; well, two cows and two large calves.  I slowed down and honked at them, and finally had to stop.  They just looked at me.  Then one big cow headed off across the road, and the two calves were really close to the van, but not moving, so I tried to slowly get around them.  As I started to move, they decided to move too.  Apparently it was their mama who crossed the street and they decided to follow her.

A few miles later a fawn ran from the center of my lane off into the forest.  I had to slow down a little, but not stop.  And then a few miles later this kamakazi chipmunk dashed across the street in front of me, and then decided to dash back again just as I was arriving.  I'm pretty sure I didn't run over him, but it was close.

That's all the camp adventures.

On the way home yesterday we were driving down Parley's Canyon, had just passed a sign that said "Salt Lake City, 21 miles" when our van started driving really rough and loud. It was a shaky, shaky ride at about 85 mph.  It sounded and felt like something with the back tire and I kept looking out the window to see if I could figure out what it was, but no.  Bruce slowed down to about 75 for a curve when there was a terrible noise like something had fallen off the car.  I looked out, wondering if the hubcap had come off and hit another car or something.  Bruce pulled right to the side of the freeway and we got out to look at the tire, and this is what we saw:

The tread was torn off at least 1/3 of the tire, and the steel-belting was poking out of it. But it still held air, so we crept to the next exit—which, fortunately, was only 1/2 mile away—so Bruce could change the tire.  I, being very helpful, stood out in the sun and took pictures.  We were back on the road again after about 30 minutes.  Not bad!

Bruce has an audience and a photographer as he jacks up the van.

Bruce works on the tire.

Jason works on the tire.

At home the first thing I did was go to see if the girls' carpet was all dry.  This is what I saw:

what's the damage?

Melanie had been talking to our insurance company and they came out and took out the carpet pad, and cut up the walls to see what damage there was.  It looks like they'll re-do the girl's room while we are gone.  Since the insurance company and the contractor both only work Monday through Friday, I gave Melanie the go-ahead to pick out carpet and paint for me (with neutral colors being the only guideline).

So that's all of our adventures for the week.  Fun, huh?  I wonder what will happen next Saturday?

Last Week

We've pretty much settled into a routine at camp.  I get up around 5:45 most mornings to start breakfast; they ring the bell at 7:25 and, theoretically, breakfast starts just after 7:30. (We have to hear a long speech and list of instructions before every meal.  This kind of irritates me because I try really hard to have dinner on the serving table on time, and then it just sits there during all the talk.)  Then everyone heads off to their particular areas to work until lunch time —12:15, and then again until dinner at 6:00. I have to start preparing meals one to one-and-a-half hours before the meal.  After dinner is open time for scouts to work on their merit badges, so I don't see my family again until at least 8:30. Bruce and I usually roll into bed between 10:30 and 11:30, depending on how long it takes our cabin-living family to get ready to sleep.

Theater

Last week our little girls got together with Stephen Eborn's little girls (who have also been staying up at camp) and they wrote, practiced, and performed a play: The Princess and the Pea.  Due to other excitements I haven't gotten to see their play yet (although I've been promised a command performance), but I did overhear them at one of their practices saying that someone could squirt ketchup on her shirt for blood.  I told them I didn't think ketchup on shirts was a good idea, and then I wondered —what part of The Princess and the Pea  includes gushing blood?

rehearsal

Inspection

Last Tuesday was a little different because our camp was going to have an inspection.  Some uppity-ups in the BSA came to see what was good, that the camp was really good enough to work with, and what needed fixing. The lady who inspected the kitchen was really impressed that I could work in that kitchen with those tiny fridges.  We talked a little bit, and then she asked the hard question.  I've had some of my teachers at school ask me this question, and it always puzzles me; I never know how to answer it:

"What is the hardest part about this job?"

That question always stumps me.  The job isn't hard; I don't really think anything I do is hard.  There's always a learning curve, but then I figure it out and it's not hard.  So I didn't know how to answer her. 
A few hours after they left, and my brain was working again, I realized I should have said that the whole commissary thing was the hardest part.  Oh well.

Bug Trouble

Last week we had a little epidemic; everyone had sore throats and coughs; some had low temps and a few had fevers.  The EMT's were a little freaked out, but I kept thinking that it was just like the first few weeks of school.  You get a bunch of people together, and they share their germs, and everyone is sick for a little while, and then everything is fine again.

Lindsey got a little, tiny bugbite last week; she doesn't know what bit her.  But her hand kept swelling, so we drove down the mountain, through Kamas, and into Park City to take her to the ER.  They said that it was probably not the bugbite causing the pain and swelling, but an infection that entered into the little hole. They gave us a prescription and sent us on our way.  Unfortunately all pharmacies were closed by the time we were done, so Bruce and I drove down the mountain and stopped at a pharmacy in Kamas (closed), another in Park City (also closed), and to a grocery store before we were able to fill her prescription (at 9:45 p.m.).  Her hand is looking normal now.

You can't really see the swelling in this picture. The little red circle surrounds the original bugbite.  Lindsey drew circles with pen to outline the swelling as it grew.  By the time we went to the ER, the swelling filled the green circle.

Fridays

Every Friday we have a Scoutmaster luncheon; we serve them steaks and baked potatoes.  This gives the camp directors a chance to talk with them about Camp Steiner and find out what they like and what they think should be improved.  It's a good idea.

The trouble is that the Scoutmaster luncheon is at 11:30, and our lunch is at 12:15.  This means I have to prepare two entirely different lunches right on top of each other on Fridays.  Cook the baked potatoes, the steaks, and whatever else I'm going to serve, serve it up, and while the Scoutmasters eat I cook the staff lunch.  When the Scoutmasters are done with their lunch we rush out, clean up and set out the staff lunch.  The first week this was a huge mess; I made home-made chicken noodle soup and rolls for the staff (bad idea), so the kitchen was a disaster all through both lunches.  This past week I made hoagie sandwiches for the staff; that worked much better.  Even so, I was in the kitchen on Friday from 5:45 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. straight, Then I had to be back by 4:30 so I could make dinner.  It's a long day.

Saturday morning we send the scouts home, clean up the camp and then go home ourselves to take care of the disasters around here.

And that's how our weeks go.

Weekends

So we spend Sunday evening 6:00-ish  through Saturday morning 10:30-ish at Camp Steiner, making the two-hour journey in our big ol' van each time.  Our weekend at home is about 28 hours long.  Since we've just been camping for an entire week we come home and do laundry. A lot of laundry.

Our first weekend home was stressful, partly because we'd just spent about eleven days at Steiner and had extra laundry to do and partly because after eleven days at camp we realized there were several things we needed to buy to get us through the summer.  So we started some laundry and Bruce and I went shopping, leaving the kids with instructions to keep an eye on the laundry and keep it moving.
The kids did keep an eye on the laundry—in kid fashion—while the shopping trip took much, much longer than we'd hoped.  At 10 p.m. we still had about three-quarters of the laundry left to do, church the next morning, lunch/dinner to figure out for Sunday, and the van to be packed up.  I woke up at 6 a.m. Sunday and started doing laundry, went to church for an hour and then back home to work some more.  We managed to leave the house around 5:15 or so.

Last weekend I had a mild tantrum and made it pretty clear that I did  not want a repeat of the previous weekend, with me doing 90% of everything to get ready.  Last weekend went much, much smoother.  The kids did all the laundry, helped pack the van and we still left the valley around 5:00 p.m.  But I was much happier.

This weekend Bruce had to come home early because he had a class to teach on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.  We left camp around 8:30 p.m. and got home at about 10:30.  We were all feeling pretty happy and ready for our break—a much easier break this time because of the four to five extra hours to get our work done on Saturday.  I imagined this leisurely day of doing the laundry and getting the house clean early—maybe even by noon—and then relaxing.  Writing my blog, going shopping, seeing a movie . . .  Yay!

Here's what really happened:  When we got home at 10:30 the first thing I noticed  was that the house was pretty stinky; my first thought was that the cat had pooped somewhere.  I checked for cat poo or vomit, but there was none to be found. Then I got a holler from downstairs, "Our bedroom floor is all wet!"

Sure enough, the girls' bedroom must have had a great flood sometime during the past week.  The floor looked dry, but when I stepped on it water squirted up between my toes.  We decided the best thing to do at 11 p.m. was to haul their mattresses upstairs, let them sleep in the living room, and clean up in the morning.

When I pressed my feet down, water droplets shot up a couple inches. 
You can't see that, but you can see how wet the floor was.

So I went outside to unpack some things that needed freezing and discovered that our garage freezer and refrigerator had shut off.  Everything in the freezers—three turkeys and a few roasts—was thawed, although still cold; fortunately the refrigerator was empty. Now any good housewife would have probably started cooking that meat to save it.  I brought it into the house and hid it away in the inside freezer.  Hopefully none of us will die of food-poisoning later.

After we got the kids situated, and the meat in the freezer, I got on facebook to whine about it a little.

beds in the living room
:-/

Saturday morning I hid in my room for about an hour longer than I should have; I did not want to face the day. I might not have gotten up at all had I not had a phone call from my good friend Scerinda. She'd seen my cry out on facebook and offered to do some of my laundry, lent me a wet/dry vac, and brought us dinner that evening when she brought the clean laundry back. Wow.  I also got a fb message from Nancy Bradbury who brought me another wet/dry vac, a carpet fan, and took away some of my laundry. And Brittany Jenkins also did some of my laundry.  Melanie brought me her carpet cleaner, too.

While bringing the beds upstairs, we shattered a light fixture.

taking furniture out to the garage . . .

. . . and there it all is

We spent about 2 1/2 hours taking furniture and stuff out of the girls' room and putting it into the garage, then another 4 hours vacuuming water out of their carpet.  Did I ever mention that I hate carpet? A tiled floor would never have had this problem. (We blew the fuse in their room too.  I should have known better than to plug  in three carpet cleaners in the same room.) We emptied at least 50 gallons of water out of the various machines we were using.

cleaning up the water . . .
. . . sort of

But, while Lindsey, Jason and I sucked water out of the basement, the other kids kept the rest of the house reasonably clean, and our good friends did a lot of our laundry.  Things could have been much worse. And after all the excitement of the day, Lindsey sprung for a movie for the whole family; we watched Brave.  :-) Thanks, Lindsey!

Now it's Sunday.  We've been to church; I'm fixing dinner; we're going to get packed up and be on our way again.  The funny thing is, that as anxious as we are to come home on the weekends, I find that I can hardly wait to go back to camp each week.  I want to go home.

Days at Camp Steiner

I'm out of time this weekend, so this will be mainly pictorial:

Every day the staff meets at the flags for a flag ceremony, cheers, songs, and grace before meals.

Bruce teaches the parts of a rifle (.22) up on his range.

Last weekend I forgot to take my contact lens case up with me.  I stored my lenses in two spoons overnight, then Stephen kindly bought me a new case the next day.

All my kids have been out shooting on the range several times.  The little girls love it!

Every Wednesday evening we have staff night, which means the staff gets to do whatever they want (instead of hanging out with the scouts) that night.  On July 4 we had "Hawaiian Days" —very patriotic!  The girls dyed coffee-filters and made flowers to decorate the dining hall.

Bruce sings about shooting rifles.

Jessica shoots.



This lovely view can be seen from the firebowl—where we have campfire songs and skits with all our guest scouts.  After I'd been sitting in front of it for a couple hours it finally dawned on me that this is the scene Camp Steiner uses for their logo (I have a dog-tag with this exact picture on it).  It's a beautiful place.



Kitchen, Pantry, and Commissary

grafitti done by the previous cook
I think her naming of the kitchen shows a total lack of creativity.

I have a decent little kitchen at Camp Steiner; it's pretty well stocked with pans, utensils and serving dishes.  I took up a lot of my own spices, my two favorite knives and my mortar and pestle.  I have two ovens—one big enough to fit four large cookie sheets (half-sheet-cake size) and a smaller one that will fit two of those same pans.  There's a four-burner stove above the smaller oven, and a flat grill over the big oven.  I have three big, deep sinks and the hot water gets hot enough to burn your hand if you don't remember to turn on the cold along with it.

Rachel is standing next to my range so you have an idea of the size of it.
My work-table is in front of the ovens.

There's no electricity up at camp, so all of my equipment runs on propane.  At first I was having trouble with the big oven, but now it's working fine.  I have one little hanging light in the middle of the kitchen that works with three mantles like the ones in those old Coleman lanterns.  It doesn't give off much light.  I get up around 5:30 to 6:00 every morning to start breakfast; since the kitchen window and door face east-ish I get a little bit of light in through them in the morning, but when it's time to work on dinner the kitchen is getting pretty dark.  I can still see in there, but not well enough to be cooking.  Stephen remedied this by stringing up some work lights and leaving a gasoline generator and a heavy-duty extension cord outside my kitchen door; now I start the generator when it's dark and plug in my lights, and voila! It's lovely in there.

Jamie, Steiny, and Alex help with clean-up by lights from the generator.

I have five tiny propane refrigerators in my work space (four in the kitchen and one in the pantry). I can put a half-sheet-cake size pan into the fridges, but if I do I can't close the doors.  This is kind of a problem when I'm making food for fifty-ish people (I've never gotten an exact head-count of the people I cook for).
Two of the kitchen refrigerators work fine—except for they freeze all vegetables; but they are great for everything else. The pantry fridge keeps vegges just fine.  I use the other two refrigerators as big coolers to thaw stuff out or to keep things like margarine and butter; they don't make things cold, but they keep cold things cool enough (like your chest cooler that you'd take camping, only bigger). The fridges work well enough, I suppose, as long as I never put anything hot in them.  I did that once and instead of cooling the hot stuff, the fridge itself got warm.

Ryan is standing next to one of my refrigerators
so you have an idea of the size of it.

Every day I have to record the temperatures of my refrigerators and freezers.  This is kind of pointless because, for example, I'll look into one freezer and the thermometer says -10 degrees but I can also see that it did not freeze the tray of ice cubes that has been in it all night long.  The refrigerator might say 20 degrees, but nothing in it is frozen.  There's something not quite right with this picture.

My pantry holds a chest freezer, one of my five refrigerators (the one that works the best), and has shelves along the two long walls.  I guess (without measuring) that I have a total of 24-feet long, by 2-feet deep, by 8-feet high worth of shelves.  I have to keep everything from toilet paper to our extra dishes and utensils (disposable) to our non-refrigerated food on these shelves. (I'd estimate that at least 120 cubic feet of my shelf space is filled just with cookies and Little Debbie snacks!)

into the dining hall, taken from the kitchen

When I first signed on as cook I thought I'd get to plan the menus and shopping lists for our camp.  Not so.  The menu is already planned and I get whatever Commissary sends me.  Most of the food is pre-prepared, and I just heat it up.  It's like eating at Denny's every day. :-/   Now that I know what they are sending me each week, I'm trying to figure out how to re-make it into something that's actually yummy.

There is no phone at Steiner so even though Commissary is only 26 miles away from us (at the camps at East Fork of the Bear) there is no communication between me and them.  This is a HUGE problem for me.  See, at East Fork of the Bear they have a storage area that's about as big as our whole lodge (kitchen, bathroom, pantry and dining-hall).  Their storage place has walk-in refrigerators and freezers (they have electricity) and lots of shelves to hold tons of food.  That's because they actually feed everyone who shows up to their camps—staff and scout troops alike, and they order the food for us, too.

So every Monday, Wednesday and Friday they bring a truckload of food to my back door and dump it on me.  I am probably the only person in the world who would get upset at having a big shipment of food brought to me three times a week but, yeah, it does frustrate me.

Occasionally (rarely) Commissary will forget to send me something that I need. Like when we were supposed to have chicken-patty sandwiches for lunch and they sent buns, tomatoes, lettuce, and a gallon of mayonnaise, but no chicken patties.  Of course I didn't realize this until an hour before lunch time, so I had to get creative.  But the biggest problem stems from the lack of communication between the commissary and me.

Here's what happens:  Our menu says that I should serve apples, oranges and bananas with every meal.  So Commissary very kindly sends me an entire case of apples, a case of oranges and a case of bananas every other day.  I do serve the fruit with every meal, but you know that saying about leading a horse to water?  I can't make them eat three pieces of fruit with breakfast, lunch and dinner every day!  And that's just the fruit.

If I have green beans on the menu, they send me two number 10 cans of green beans; well I already have seven #10 cans of green beans on my shelves and the kids don't like them that much.  They send us a 10-pound bag of salad mix for each time we're supposed to have salad (ten pounds of salad four times a week?); I get one or two 5-pound containers of sour cream in almost every shipment, ten pounds of baby carrots and two to four heads of celery every-other-day, three gallons of mayonnaise and two gallons of mustard in two weeks . . . 
We just don't eat that much, and I don't have the space to keep it!  I can't tell them what we need, or how much we actually eat, except for in notes that I send with the delivery drivers. I've tried sending stuff back with them, but the drivers don't like that.  On my last shipment the delivery man flat-out refused to take anything back, even though I still had two unopened cases of apples sitting in plain sight.

This isn't just a problem for me, I think it's a problem for the camp because Stephen never gets to see or handle the money for the food stuff.  It just works like some kind of balance-transfer thing; Steiner gets charged for all the food we "eat" whether we really use it or not, just because it's delivered to us.  And I bet they'll use this year's food budget to figure out next year's budget. This means money that could go to fixing up the camp, or to programs is being wasted on our ridiculous food budget.

Now if I could have things my own way we would eat better (real, tasty food), we'd have more variety in our diet, and I know I could stay within the budget (I do know the grand-total food budget); I'd probably save them money.  And I'd keep an inventory of what's left at the end of the season so someone would have an idea what to bring up at the start of the next year. And I wouldn't leave things like sugar and mustard-packets in cardboard boxes during our closed part of the year for little critters to chew up and nest in.  (Well, I'll take care of that anyway.)

They ring this bell five times to call everyone for meals—
—you can hear it throughout the entire camp. 
If you really want to irritate the cook, ring the bell early.

For now I struggle along with too much food in too little space, and I do my best to take what they give me and make it into something better.  (When I do this everyone is amazed at what a great cook I am.  Just imagine what they'd think if I really got to cook! ;-) )

Welcome to Summer Camp!

Well it's been a while since we left for Camp Steiner, but I'll try to recount what we've been up to.

We had intended to leave on Thursday, June 21, but on the 19th we got a call from Steve, the program director, who said that if we wanted to have our pick of cabins we should get there on Wednesday morning as other senior staff members would be showing up that day.  So after staying up until about 2:30 packing the van, we—well, I—got up at 5:30 to put the last-minute stuff into the van and we finally left around 8:00 or so.

I had hoped to leave a clean house behind us, but instead it looked like someone had ransacked the house and we fled for our lives.  >sigh< Oh well.

on our way

Camp Steiner is in the Uinta Mountains, at an elevation of 10,441 feet.  I did  not like the last part of the drive up the mountain.  I remember going camping when I was little and my mom would be saying, "Orlin! Slow down!"  While she did not like the winding mountain roads, I thought they were great.  Now that I sit up front and see the roads and not just the scenery I find I've turned into my mom.  I don't like it so much myself (not a roller-coaster girl).  I have found that if I can get the kids to sing with me, or if I watch the scenery and not the road I do much better.  And after making the trip four times now, I think there's some hope that I'll get somewhat used to it by the end of summer.

I don't like these signs.

Anyway, by the time we got there I was pretty exhausted, had a headache (probably from lack of sleep—and the altitude), was hungry, and just pretty darn all-around cranky.  Steve met us and showed us the cabins we got to choose from and I was not feeling so happy about it.  Then he proudly showed me the lodge where I'd be cooking for everyone, and it was dirty and I was thoroughly disgusted. I wondered why on earth this sounded like such a great thing to do in the first place. (Actually, the lodge and kitchen are pretty nice—for a scout camp lodge that is closed-up for eight to nine months of the year, it's really nice.  And it has a bathroom with running water, a bathtub & shower, and a flushing toilet! But remember, I was very, very tired.)

After we grabbed a bite to eat I jumped right into cleaning everything in that kitchen and bathroom.  Working settled my mind a little, and at least made me feel like I could safely prepare food, and use the bathroom without contracting a disease. 

Now, we thought that we would have to take care of our own food for at least two days and maybe through Sunday night, when the rest of the staff would be arriving.  So I brought food for my family for two days; home-made chili on the menu for Wednesday night.  Then Steve told me that more of the staff would be arriving that evening and it would be nice to put a pot of chili on the stove for them to have as they arrived.  Well there were some #10 cans of chili in the pantry, so I added one to the stuff I made, and hardly anyone ate at all—most of them had eaten before they came up.  >sigh<  We had chili for three meals that weekend. (And guess what?  Commissary brought chili for Monday's lunch!)

I did not sleep well on Wednesday night, and I woke up thinking that we were in for a very bad summer, and why did I agree to do this?

Thursday and Friday we all worked on setting up tents, and getting the camp cleaned up and ready for the rest of the staff to come and set things up. Well, everyone else did; I mostly worked in the kitchen.  We all got a whirlwind tour of the entire camp on —Friday? —the commissary arrived some time Friday with our food for the weekend (which was a little weird, since no one was supposed to be there until Sunday night,  but I'll tell more about the commissary later).

Thursday —or maybe Friday evening (after a while all the days blended together) we all went canoeing —even me!  

And one night when Bruce went to clean the staff showers he found a nest between the walls.  The big surprise was that the nest had five newly-hatched birds in it!

shower wall

shower surprise!

All the staff left on Saturday morning. That meant my family got  to have the place to ourselves for about 36 hours!  :-) So we went on a hike, and then we went back down the mountain to Kamas to buy milkshakes. 

When we got back one of the staff members had already arrived.  :-/ (He's a nice kid, but I had hoped to have a little more private, family time.) We shared dinner with him, visited a bit, and then went to bed. 

our home away from home

By the way, Michael, Jason, Lindsey and Brandon are sleeping in tents, while Bruce, the rest of the kids and I are sleeping in our little two-room cabin.  Our cabin has a small couch, a futon, and a queen-size bed! Yay!  The floor slopes down where two of the walls meet; you could easily roll a ball right down to that corner.  The bed is in that corner; Bruce sleeps next to the wall (we sleep with our heads up, not down).  By morning Bruce has rolled into the wall and I have rolled into him.  Cozy!

Now I have this stupid problem of having to get up to use the bathroom two to three times a night.  Usually it takes me about fifteen minutes to realize that that's why I woke up.  It takes me another ten minutes to get up and walk through the door from my bedroom to the bathroom. At camp I also have to find my socks, shoes and a flashlight, and walk the equivalent of going about halfway around the block to get to the bathroom in the lodge.  (The first night my flashlight died, and I still didn't know my way around camp; it was a long trip.  But the stars were amazing!)  One morning, around 5:30 or so, I saw a big deer on my way back from the bathroom.  We just stood there and looked at each other for a few minutes before she walked away.  I wished I'd had my camera with me, but who takes their camera to go to the bathroom?  (Actually I've started, but nothing picture-worthy has happened since then.)

Saturday night/Sunday morning I woke up around 1:00 a.m. for one of my usual potty trips, but when I finally hauled myself out of bed I was so dizzy that I couldn't stand up!  Now here was a terrible dilemma:  my bladder was in severe pain—I was going to burst if I didn't go pee, but I was going to fall down if I even stood up. There was no way I could walk all the way to the bathroom and back. I laid back down to consider this problem (as well as I could with my sick head —and now stomach, too), and finally decided that Bruce would have to make the trip with me.  So I woke him up, but I still couldn't stand up.  He rigged up a chamber-pot of sorts for me.  Embarrassing!  But I was really sick.

Sunday I stayed in bed until almost 11:00 a.m. when I finally decided that I could risk the walk to the lodge.  I was still dizzy and a little nauseous, but I had to eat something.  By then Steve and Stephen had arrived and they said I had altitude sickness. "Drink lots of water and it will pass."  I got busy making banana muffins (remember the commissary) which helped me feel a little better; having something to focus on made me feel better.  By evening I almost felt normal again.  The staff all arrived around 6:00 p.m.—all fifty-ish of them.  These are the kids I'll be cooking for all summer long. 

The next week was our prep time to clean up trails, cut down and haul off dead trees (just the ones that looked like they'd fall down and kill someone—in fact, a tree did fall down on one of our tents that week; fortunately no one was in it at the time!), set up the rifle and archery ranges, and generally get the camp ready for the 12-year old scouts who'll be visiting us every week this summer.

I mostly work in the kitchen and lodge. The kids thank me profusely for every meal, which is kind of embarrassing (commissary again; I promise I'll tell you).  I like them.  The kids, I mean.

By the end of the week (June 30) I was more than ready to go home for my 24-hour break.  If you can call doing 12 to 15 loads of laundry in 24 hours a break.  But I was very happy to sleep in my own bed for a night.

And that is the first installment of Our Summer at Camp Steiner.