Campfire Hash Browns

Here’s how I made up a recipe for campfire hash browns. It was a nice day, the kids wanted to do outside stuff, and I wanted to cook.

Step 1: Get a big piece of tinfoil, and put a big pile of potatoes, onions, corn, cheese, and bacon on it. Put a half a stick of butter in the middle and put some paprika and whatever other spices you happen to like on there.

Step 2: Wrap it up, then do that two more times.

Step 3: Put it on a fire that your three kids help you build. If you don’t have three kids, just get any kids to help, they all want to build fires anyway:

Step 4: Move them around so they only burn a little and not all the way. Keep moving them around on occasion for maybe half an hour? Whatever:

Step 5: Open those bad boys up and scrape out the delicious heart attack you’re going to eat along with a can of beans you cooked hobo-style in the can and some hot dogs your kids gleefully set on fire and then ate:

This was so ridiculously good.

What? You want a deeper lesson or something here? Okay, it’s this: learn the basic principles of a category of knowledge (such as the basic principle “butter + potatoes + pretty much anything else will probably be good”) and then experiment. Involve your kids if you have them, or just anyone you like, because learning together is fun. You’ll burn the edges a little, but you can always scrape that off, and there will be something delicious in there. And if that’s not an analogy for all of life, I don’t know what is.