Dave Landers

Last weekend, I was able to cook for our Order of the Arrow Lodge’s Fall Ordeal weekend. This is a weekend where we do service for the scout camp, and induct new members who have been elected by their troops.

We had about 100 scouts to feed – 3 meals on Saturday plus Breakfast on Sunday.

The kicker is that we were at the Cub camp (Camp Nicol), which doesn’t have a kitchen. The main dining hall is over at one of the Boy Scout camps. During summer camp, they shuttle meals from there to the cup camp. Our weekends are usually held near the main dining hall (I got to cook there last fall). But it was closed for some water treatment work, and the Cub camp needed our service.

There is a nice dining area, and a prep kitchen, so we had refrigerators, freezers, a warming oven, and a nice big 3-bay sink for washing up. And there is a big covered patio out back. So we brought up our stoves, a big 4′ griddle, and a bunch of Dutch Ovens (to add to those we borrowed from the camp), and mostly cooked outside on the patio.

Friday night, everyone else brought a sack dinner, but being the cooks, we made chicken fajitas and a peach pie for ourselves. Then, we got busy baking 6 of Lawrence’s famous Tropical Carrot Cakes so they could cool and get frosted for Sat dinner. We had 6 of our 14″ Dutch Ovens going and burned up about 20# of charcoal. The aroma of those cakes drove everyone crazy, especially when we brought them into the dining area to cool!

Saturday morning was easy – pancakes and bacon for breakfast, then grilled ham and cheese with chicken noodle soup for lunch.

For dinner, we filled 20 12″ Dutch Ovens and used up another 20 or 30# of charcoal. We did “Trail Driver’s Goulash” (a recipe from this year’s summer camp cookbook). It was a pretty basic recipe, but went over pretty well.

The dish is 2# hamburger, browned with a large onion and 3 stalks of celery, chopped. In the Dutch, mix that with 2 cans tomato soup, 2 cans water, 2 cans of beans, and about 16oz cooked pasta (we used penne). A tablespoon or so of chili powder, some salt and pepper and it’s ready to cook for about 45 or 50 minutes. Cover with shredded cheese and let it melt and you’re done.
So it’s an easy dish, but multiply that by 20, and put it in heavy cast iron pots and we had some work to do.

We stacked the ovens 3-high, and rotated them 3 or 4 times over the hour it cooked. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew grilled up a pile of garlic bread and mixed up a salad, etc.

It was a fun weekend and the meals worked out well. And we proved that we can cook for 100 just as well as we can cook for 10 on a campout.

Sometimes life comes at you all at once. My last week has been like that. Not enough time between events (good and bad) to really process everything.

Late last week, I learned that my good friend dIon in Australia was not doing well. He had been fighting melanoma since May, and the cancer was now definitely winning. We heard that dIon was still fighting and still spewing his usual humor and sarcasm.

Somehow, I was able to set that somewhat aside and get on with my weekend. I helped cook for a 110 people at one of our Order of the Arrow (Boy Scout) service weekends. The guys were fixing up our Cub Scout camp while we cooked for them. We did dinner in 20 Dutch Ovens (plus 6 for the cakes). It was a lot of fun and a big success. Pictures will follow.

After getting back home on Sunday, I took a well-needed nap and avoided the computer because I just couldn’t bring myself to open my email.

Sunday night, we had to call 911 for my Father in Law (my in-laws live next door to us). He had been living with Parkinson’s disease for something like 15 years. We spent basically all night in the ER… he was not expected to live out the day.

This same week last year we were with my Mother in Law in the ICU. She has made an amazing recovery this year, thankfully.

Monday morning, I checked my email (the hospital has wireless everywhere), and discovered dIon was still hanging in there, and was enjoying being read letters from his friends. I was able to choke out a final letter while sitting in the family room down the hall.

My Father in Law passed away peacefully on Tuesday. David Camp was a Presbyterian minister, an Army Chaplain (Korea and Viet Nam), a devoted Kiwanian, and among many other endeavors he was pretty decent at stained glass art. It was frustrating for him to have Parkinson’s take each of these things away, one by one, but he handled it with grace. The family has not quite got our heads around this yet, but on the whole we know he is in a better place and no longer limited by this stupid disease.

On Wednesday, I learned that dIon also passed away. Due to the oddities of time zones around a spinning globe, he actually passed on Thursday. Typical of dIon to mess with my head like that. He was an amazing fellow: a businessman, a technologist, a gifted software developer, a wonderfully artistic photographer, a very funny guy, and it was my privilege to call him my friend.

I’m not whining about any of this. Life hands us the bad and the good. But it sure would have been nice to be able to process each of these one at a time.