When farmers go camping…

Well, the One Straw pork breakfast links were a delicious hit at the Chimacum Grange Pancake Feed this last weekend.

Tasty food, good music and fellowship with other local-food lovers made for a fun event.

And I’ll tell you those same breakfast links and other pork sausages saved the day when the Farmhands got to go camping a couple weeks ago.

Between Farmhand Eli’s 7th birthday (I know, not possible right, just yesterday he was a baby in my front pack at Farmers market) and his first day of 1st grade, we managed to sneak off for a quick camping trip at Sol Duc.

And thanks to our awesome recently hired first One Straw employee ever, BOTH the Farmer parents got to go, too!

Now, thanks to stories from children’s books and shows, the little Farmhands have compiled a list of what is absolutely necessary to make a good camping trip.

And I’m pleased to announce that we managed to check all their boxes. Whew. But some of them were close.

One of the main stumbling blocks was the total ban on campfires.

This was a pretty traumatic announcement, seeing’s how two of the main camping trip requirements are 1) Roasting hot dogs and 2) Roasting marshmallows.

At our house, as you might imagine the term “hot dogs” equates to delicious no-junk One Straw sausages, and I’d planned to cook a bunch ahead using our Campfire Rescue Technique.

And then, no campfires! Since this was my plan for every breakfast and dinner we were there, I had a moment of panic.

But I’m here to tell you that cooking the sausages ahead not only rescues them from campfire cooking woes, but also makes serving protein cooked over a camp stove SO much easier, faster and less messy.

And you know what? I’m going to start doing that whenever I’m serving sausages for company or otherwise want to make life easier. After they’re precooked, you can just quickly heat and you’re ready to go.

Actually, if we hadn’t of done this we wouldn’t have eaten much protein on our trip because there were SO MANY wasps. We didn’t even make the sandwiches we’d planned for lunch because we couldn’t have the meat out long enough to put them together, let alone eat them.

So meal time was a real adventure. 

First we’d serve the Farmhands their pre-cooked pasta and green bean salad, make sure that was all gone, rapidly serve out sausages we’d heated in the pan, and holler GO!

We didn’t even waste time cutting the sausages…just picked them up with our (mostly) clean fingers, took bites, and ate them as fast as possible. Because that’s OK when you’re camping ;)

I timed it. After serving meat, we had about 30 seconds before the first bee showed up. After another 60 seconds there were so many swarming your food that it was unsafe to eat.

Luckily the Farmhands LOVE our sausage and can scarf it down in no time flat. Then they were off to play in the woods again.

Protein managed, despite bees and no campfire. We’re farmers – we’re resourceful. Haha.

As you can see, we also managed to check the box of roasting marshmallows.

Another camping requirement was going for a hike – and stopping to have snack breaks along the way “to keep up our energy” according to Eli.

Since the hike to Sol Duc falls is only .8 miles long, we had to stop about every 500 feet to squeeze in the requisite number of snack breaks.

This one was only about 200 feet from the trailhead, but that log was just calling to be sat upon. It gave our fellow hikers a good laugh.

I’m glad they’re learning that much of the adventure of life is in the journey itself.

Though it’s also nice to occasionally reach your destination, so we had to do a bit of hurrying along.

We did eventually reach the Falls, though Farmhand baby Grace was lulled to sleep by waiting through the constant snack breaks and missed the whole event.

We also checked the boxes of swimming at the Sol Duc Hot Springs pools, climbing on fallen logs, drinking hot chocolate before breakfast, NOT falling into the Devils Club or stinging nettles, reading books, and doing some Math problems (that’s Eli, haha).

And on the way home we checked off one final important box by going fishing.

Cue the Andy Griffith Show theme song…

Last year when they went fishing, they lost three lures in five casts to “rock fish”.

This year they counted our fishing trip a major success because they fished for a good 45 minutes and only lost one lure – on Farmhand Vera’s very last cast – when it looked like the best cast ever because the lure just kept going and going and going.

It's easier to be successful when your goal is "fishing", not "catching".

Luckily, we have all winter to practice our fishing knots before our next camping trip!

Next year we’re planning to go camping earlier in the year in the hopes of avoiding both the end-of-summer starving bees and drought-induced campfire bans.

But either way we’ll be ready with the tested backup plan of campfire-ready One Straw sausages to power our adventures.

Click here now to order the protein to power your next adventure.