Barry and Steven 2013 - Meals

  
 Preparing three bannocks.

Baking the bannocks.  Using medium heat takes about 20 minutes to bake, doing one side then the other.  In cold weather I place the pan in Dutch oven on the wood stove.
 







  
Dutch oven for baking the cinnamon bannock.  Hot coals at medium heat are used underneath and on top of the oven.  (Make sure to scrape away old coals where the oven is to sit.  I once used nice dead coals.  *GRIN*  I use a cast aluminum oven that is lighter than traditional cast iron.  I now consider the Dutch oven indispensable.  Great for frying fish.  I also use it to make cinnamon bannock on the wood stove but have to flip the bannock to bake both sides.

Butter, the special ingredient in a cinnamon bannock.  Canned butter no longer available in Canada.  This is my only extra-expense food item, ordered from U.S.A.  All other foods used are off-the-shelf grocery store products.  For my first three months in the spring I use ordinary 1lb Canadian butter blocks.


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Light up your pipe again, old chum, and sit awhile with me;
I've got to watch the bannock bake -- how restful is the air!


(That bannock's raising nicely, pal; just jab it with your knife.)
Fine specimens of manhood they would reckon us out there.
It's the tracking and the packing and the poling in the sun;
It's the sleeping in the open, it's the rugged, unfaked food;
It's the snow-shoe and the paddle, and the campfire and the gun,
And when I think of what I was, I know that it is good.

Ah, yes, it's good! I'll bet that there's no doctor like the Wild:
(Just turn that bannock over there; it's getting nicely brown.)

(Just turn that bannock over there, that's propped against the log.)

Heigh ho! I'm tired; the bannock's cooked; it's time we both turned in.
The morning mist is coral-kissed, the morning sky is gold.
The camp-fire's a confessional -- what funny yarns we spin!

 
- From "While the Bannock Bakes" by Robert Service