On my dinner fail

So, I'm full-time, stay-at-home momming it up these days.  This is mostly good.  I'm reading a lot.  I've stalled a little in my home organization project, but the general direction is still good.  And, I'm cooking.  I actually really like cooking when I have the time for it.  So, I've been planning meals and browsing cookbooks and creating a food board on Pinterest.

For last night I had planned a fun summer cookout: a weenie roast.  After a work-from-home day for Blake, it seemed like a great idea to get us all out of the house.  After a quick pass by our storage unit to get the camp chairs and firewood and outdoor kitchen box, we headed to the closest state park for our outside dinner.

Day use fees at the state park are twice what they are at the national forest we usually go to. Fail one.

The campground inside the state park, the one where they have fire rings, is not included in the day use fee.  It's an extra $20.  Not worth it.  Fail two.

We head for the picnic area, which was actually very nice.  They don't have fire rings there, just little grills on stands, more ideally suited for charcoal briquettes.  But, we have wood.  We try to make the best of it and build a little fire for roasting in the grill thing.  It should work, in theory.  The wood we have is dense and oddly stringy.  It doesn't chip or split off nicely as we whack at it with the hatchet.  It comes off in these stringy but stiff clumps.  After about half an hour of that, we decide to just start the fire with what we've got--some kindling and a pretty big log.  The fire starts nicely, and the log catches.  But, the space isn't quite right and the kindling to log ratio was a little off, and we can see this just isn't going to work.  The little pile of coals we have is just not quite big or hot enough to roast two little hot dogs and some marshmallows.  Fail three.

We douse our little fire, clean up the coals, and leave a partially burned log for someone else to enjoy in the "hot coals" bin.  We discuss going back home and making our dinner on the gas grills in our complex.  We're both too tired and hungry at this point for that to sound appealing.   We hit a Carl's Jr on the way home and got BOGO Western burgers thanks a fundraising coupon we bought from an adorable little salesman in the Ralph's parking lot last week.  So, there was that.

Bonnie seemed to enjoy being outside and didn't put up any kind of fuss that we were super late getting her dinner too.

Better luck next time.  Tonight's dinner is a potato leek frittata using a recipe we've made before in the comfort and familiarity of our own kitchen.  And, we'll get to use our awesome new skillet.