A scout night - warts and all

[Cambridgeskip]

So.... this was originally made for Tampa Turtle and his scouts who asked to make contact with us. I've put together a bit of a video of what a typical scout night looks like for us this side of the pond complete with all the mess, all the noise, all the things that didn't go according to plan. A long way from perfect but a lot of fun!

 

The background is that when we were planning the term the PLs said they wanted the annual remembrance night to be themed on rationing. The original idea was for it to be based on what rationing here was like in the 1940s but this morphed into bringing up to date and doing a cook off based on typical rations distributed at refugee camps in Syria. Basically rice, lentils, flour, cooking oil, kidney beans, chick peas and tinned fish.

 

This is how it went! Enjoy

 

[MattR]

Well done. The scouts are having fun. Did the scouts put this all together?

 

I wish we could set up a stove in the middle of our room.

[Cambridgeskip]

Did the scouts put this all together?

 

 

Partly. They originally suggested doing exactly the same thing based on 1940s rationing. It was me that came across the ration challenge here and suggested it to the PLs as an alternative, which they agreed to.

 

This Thursday coming we're doing a backwoods cook out at a nearby campsite. Given recent weather there will be plenty of wet wood around. I'll be interested to see if any of the scouts have had the foresight to dry some kindling at home before hand!

[MattR]

I saw a great demo you might want to try regarding wet kindling. Someone took a bucket filled with kindling and filled that with water and let it soak for awhile. He then took the kindling out of the water and put it on a stand with a candle under it. Lots of smoke for awhile but it eventually lit. Probably a practical skill in your neck of the woods.

[Cambridgeskip]

I saw a great demo you might want to try regarding wet kindling. Someone took a bucket filled with kindling and filled that with water and let it soak for awhile. He then took the kindling out of the water and put it on a stand with a candle under it. Lots of smoke for awhile but it eventually lit. Probably a practical skill in your neck of the woods.

 

As it happens I've not seen that demo done. Although given the climate lighting fires in wet conditions is something that we regularly do. I encourage them to have a fire lighting kit and one of the first things we teach them to do with knives is to strip wet outer layers from fallen twigs to get to the drier part inside.

 

Something that younger scouts seem to have real trouble with is the preparation side of it, getting all those different sized twigs ready before you strike a match!

[blw2]

I enjoyed seeing that.  thanks for posting!

[NJCubScouter]

Cambridgeskip, it's always been my perception that everything sounds more intelligent when spoken with a British accent.  Some of the statements heard in this video challenge that perception, but it's still true.  

[Cambridgeskip]

Cambridgeskip, it's always been my perception that everything sounds more intelligent when spoken with a British accent.  Some of the statements heard in this video challenge that perception, but it's still true.  

 

We do have some very bright kids in the troop, the area of town we draw from has a lot of academic staff at the university who's offspring tend to have a few brains. Some though are perfectly capable of producing a flat bread that looks like some kind of nuclear waste.

[qwazse]

We do have some very bright kids in the troop, the area of town we draw from has a lot of academic staff at the university who's offspring tend to have a few brains. Some though are perfectly capable of producing a flat bread that looks like some kind of nuclear waste.

Pre-requisite for learning to make British sausage?

[NJCubScouter]

Some though are perfectly capable of producing a flat bread that looks like some kind of nuclear waste.

 

I think this is true of youth in general regardless of which side of the Atlantic or which neighborhood you are from.

 

I was more referring to a couple of the kids who seemed so distracted by the chaos going on around them that they momentarily forgot the English (or any other) language.  That also is a universal thing regardless of which side of the ocean you're on.

[Tampa Turtle]

We had a scout that burned Ramen...

[ianwilkins]

We had one try and make Caramel Peas. The little that made it out the pot was ok I guess, if you like caramel shot through with peas, but I think we had to throw the pot away, or clean it with a wire brush fitted to a drill.

[krypton_son]

I remember when I was a kid, we were at a camporee one time and to fulfill some requirements for our cooking merit badge (or maybe for a rank, I don't remember) I had to cook breakfast.  A buddy and I decided we were going to make bacon and eggs.  We made our bacon first (a pretty good amount of it) and then made a big portion of scrambled eggs.  Neither one of us had ever done this before and didn't realize that you had to drain the bacon grease out before making the eggs.  They were probably the greasiest eggs that had ever been made.  When our scoutmaster came over to see it he just smiled and laughed.  We were a bit embarrassed so he decided to cheer us up by eating a big helping of them.  He said that they were the best greasy eggs he had ever had. 

[clemlaw]

We had a scout that burned Ramen...

 

The lore in our troop was that we had a patrol that decided it was too much work to go through the difficult process of cooking their Ramen noodles.  So they just ate them raw.  :-)

 

In my days as a Scout, we learned that to make the pan easier to clean, you should coat the bottom of the pan with soap.  That's good advice, but after one new scout was a little unclear on the concept, we had to clarify the advice slightly:  You should put the soap on the outside of the pan.

 

It turns out that if you cook pork chops in soap, the soap is absorbed, and no amount of scraping will remove it.  Oh well, that's why we have peanut butter in our patrol boxes.  

[Oldscout448]

At my first summer camp there was no dining hall. We cooked by patrols over open fires. So two first year scouts ( yes I was one of them) we're cooking a pound of bacon on a flat griddle, the grease built up untill it spilled over the side into the flames where it burned. We thought that was neat untill the grease fed flame licked the edge of the griddle. KA-WOOF! The griddle,grease and all the bacon was now at the bottom of a three foot column of flame. The bacon was extra crispy that morning, and it took a looooong time the get that griddle clean.

Edited November 27, 2016 by Oldscout448