365 Days of Bliss – Camping with Friends
It’s Juli here with a little update and some picture from our Camping with Gator Friends trip. Each year, twice a year, we get together with 3 other families and camp. These families are all friends from college and between us we have kids ranging from 4 to 12 years in age. There are 8 adults and 8 kids and it just seems to work out beautifully! This trip we camped at Ft. DeSoto just south of St. Petersburg Beach in Florida. This is a place my husband’s family has been camping at for years and I’m so glad that I’m now sharing that tradition with my daughters and our friends. It amazes me how it can be months or even a year since we’ve seen one of the families (we aren’t always all available to go on each trip) yet within minutes of everyone unloading from the car we are all (including the kids) talking and enjoying each other’s company.
As you can imagine trying to organize 4 different families to coordinate one trip can be, well….interesting. However, we’ve got it pretty well figured out now that we’ve been doing this for 3 years. Two families that come from Orlando share a campsite – one is family with 3 kids and the other a family with one kid. My family shares a site with the other family from Tampa and between us we have 3 kids, plus my oldest daughter’s best friend. Each site coordinates their own supplies and food while working within a menu we all agree upon. We even plan to share side dishes and desserts to make it easier for all of us. Now that my oldest DD is almost 13, she and her friend help with one of our family’s cooking rotations.
On this trip our co-campers the Krenicky’s were assigned to cooking breakfast for both Saturday and Sunday mornings. The Krenicky’s daughter, Olivia attends an after school cooking class and in that class she learned how to make doughnuts out of Grands biscuits. Mrs. Krenicky decided to give making doughnuts while camping a try…mmmmm…I”m so glad she did!! Don’t these look good?
The recipe is really all too simple and we’ve already come up with ideas for toppings for next time. First you get a large stock pot and put in on the camp stove. Fill with oil and allow to heat. Then you take a can of buttermilk (don’t use the butter ones – we tried this and it was okay, but not really all that tasty) Grands biscuits. Open the can and take out one biscuit. Use your finger to make a hole in the middle of the biscuit (you could also use a small doughnut hole cutter, but we were camping so fingers worked best!). Carefully drop the biscuit in the oil and let it fry. Okay so at this point we learned pretty quick that the camp stove is tricky and you needed to keep the fire pretty low or your doughnut outside was cooked in 1 minute and inside you had goo…but once we worked that part out it was smooth sailing! We also learned not to use a plastic catering spoon to try to fish out the doughnuts. A metal marshmallow roasting stick works beautifully though. Once the doughnuts are cooked (about 4-5 min) then we drained on paper towel and sprinkled with sugar.
Next time I’m bringing some powdered sugar mixed with cinnamon to toss these babies in. The kids are trying to figure out how to smuggle in some chocolate frosting to smear on top (or dip in). We also made smaller doughnut holes and those were delightful too. While doing this outside certainly helped with the frying oil smell and the clean up (which wasn’t as bad as I had imagined) you could do this inside your house pretty easily and this would be a great surprise for any Sunday (or Monday or Wednesday) breakfast.
Sometime roughing it isn’t so rough…but that’s what keeps it fun and keeps us coming back for more. I can’t wait until our Spring trip!
