I gotta admit after been cooking on my small woodstove a few food-related things have escaped my pyromaniac wrath. Most of the time rendering the food absolutely useless. But few times, magic happens. When I retreat to the outdoors. cooking is simply my favorite part. To be cooking in nature on an open fire there's plenty of room for experimentation.

This one was all about making a simple but delicious salad through red peppers and eggplants. (YEP, that's it - in nature, it's rare to have the full arsenal of a kitchen!)

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The smoked & burned red pepper

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It's absolutely amazing how tasty these things can become. Even better, it is almost borderline impossible to fuck up. Since well, you just have to burn them until they are completely black. As the picture above indicates, you simply make a fire with wood and put your peppers on top of it. No-fuss needed, just throw those bad boys on it!

Don't worry, it will look awful in the beginning and you might be sure that they almost certainly will be destroyed. But the magic happens only if you man up your courage for a while and let these red peppers burn into pitch black. (more than on the picture above).

OH NO YOU DESTROYED IT... OR DID YOU?

By now your pepper should look like this, a black burned crust all around. Now you just start peeling that black off. It would come off like a separate layer of the pepper itself.

Look at this, like a phoenix born from the ashes, eh?

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Alright, maybe I am getting a bit too poetic here considering its just a burned pepper. By now you should be able to feel how soft the un-burned part of the pepper is. Just peel it all off and they should look like this in the end:

It doesn't have to be perfect. You could rinse the rest of the black off in some water but where's the cool in that? Right now they are full of taste from the smoke and flames of the fire.

From now on you can eat them however you want. you could potentially eat them just like this. Or you could cut it down to a "salad".

Mixing it like this with other vegetables, eat on bread or some meat and it's absolutely delicious!

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In the name of pyromaniac worship, why stop at the pepper?

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You can do this with most vegetables that have a somewhat protective thick skin around them. I found especially eggplants to work out quite well. I also tried carrots, they didn't work out too well. :(

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The benefit of burning your food

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It just tastes amazing. the smoked taste together with the sweetness of the pepper is above anything. When you make this after putting up camp in nature it tastes even better. There's just something about the smell food gets from an open fire. After finding out these vegetables could take this amount of punishment they are almost always in my bike-bags while I am touring, ready to be burned for my satisfaction.

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Do you also love the outdoors?

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I started a recent community called "outdoors" where we start stacking up people who loves to share their stories in the wild. The group is still new but we are slowly getting people joining in!

If you love the outdoors click here and join us!