Camp Cooking In The African Bush

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

For the past two weeks I have been living out of a car. Not just any car, a gold Toyota Corolla packed to the steel frame of its capacity with luggage, camping gear, and food for a two-week journey. Like many people will do this summer, my boyfriend and I are on a road trip, splitting our time between camping and sleeping in modest rented rooms. Unlike most people this summer, our road trip is through the vast desert expanses of Namibia.

Mentally we have been gearing up for this African adventure for the last year. But when it came down to it, we were very little prepared outside of our Lonely Planet guide. One thing we did know, the opportunity to camp, sleeping under the stars and cooking over and open fire under the Namibian sky, could not be passed up.

Unfortunately, a couple thousand other Europeans and South Africans had the same idea and beat us to most of the good rentals by the time we landed in Namibia’s capital of Windhoek. As it worked out, we scored what had to be the last rental car in all of Namibia, the Corolla, and a car full of rented sleeping bags, a tent, a propane stove and box of gear from which we planned to whip up some number of bush feasts.

Unexpectedly, I have learned a few cooking lessons from this time driving through and cooking in the bush, improvising to work with the very basic rented equipment, the limited selection in small town markets, and the mercurial nature of cooking over an open flame. What follows are some cooking lessons from the far Southwest of the African continent, Namibia, home of the driest desert on Earth.

One Good Pot will Get You A Long Way to a Good Dinner
I give my boyfriend, John, full credit for throwing the four-quart cast iron cooking pot into the stack of rented camping equipment. He said, “We might as well!” He could picture me throwing a mess of game stew meat on to a simmer over the fire while we settled in for sundowners and a good evening read by lantern. As it turned out, we used the pot for just about everything. It was sturdy enough to handle frying sweet potatoes, had enough heat retention for slow cooked bush paella, and was big enough to simmer pasta sauce. No matter if the rented metal tong broke and the knives were so dull they could barely cut a slice of Wonderbread. Every dinner and lunch that came out of that one pot was magically delicious.

One Does not Need a Cupboard Full of Ingredients to Make a Good Dinner
Far from home, we did not have a drawer let alone a cupboard full of spices, oils, and condiments with which to cook. We had one black box full of our cheap pots and pans, a few utensils, and one orange cooler with a broken handle to fill with a few provisions from which we planned to cook for two weeks with hopefully minimal waste at the end (In a nation where many still make do with very little to eat, every wasted chicken breast was a disappointment).

Even when we restocked, we resisted the urge to add more to our inventory. We made do with coarse black pepper, sea salt, olive oil, dried rosemary, and a couple of local condiments. To those basics we would restock periodically on fresh vegetables like sweet potatoes, red peppers, garlic, and onion. Even toward the end of the trip, as I pulled browned chicken breasts out of the cast iron pot on the fire (they would be sliced and added back into a pasta sauce later on), John marveled at just how good a chicken breast can taste with little more than salt, pepper, and some good olive oil.

When in Rome, Cook Like the Locals
After gorging ourselves on the local game meats for the first few days of our trip, it was tempting to break things up with something a little different, say a chicken sandwich or pork schnitzel (a former German colony, Namibian food is heavily influenced by that history plus the many German tourists who visit today). Although these alternatives were nice, nothing compared to a simply cooked fillet of kudu or oryx, two common antelopes, with a splash of peri peri, a Mozambiquan spicy sauce than can be found in much of Southern Africa.

Having tasted many restaurant examples of well-cooked game meat, we figured it couldn’t be that hard to do. One night while John made his famous sweet potatoes with garlic and rosemary, I assembled oryx in foil packets. I seasoned each fillet with our trusty salt and pepper, smeared each with a layer of store bought local spicy chutney, and layered on some onion and garlic. I dotted each with butter and threw in a splash of red wine before sealing up the foil packet tightly. A few minutes later the packets emerged from the stove, oryx covered in a spicy, winey, fruit glaze, a gourmet treat in the middle of the wild.

Our trip to Namibia had promised many things--vast wilderness, interesting people, incredible wildlife--and it delivered on all. When it came to camp cooking I expected to get by grilling meats and maybe boiling some pasta. What I didn’t expect was coming away with many delicious homemade campfire meals and some lessons on cooking. On the other side of the world from the place I call home I was reminded that simple seasoning, one good pot, and a few local ingredients is all it takes for a really delicious dinner.

Serves/Makes: 2

• 1 pound oryx fillets
• sea salt
• black pepper
• 1/4 cup spicy fruit chutney
• 1/4 medium onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons red wine