pop quiz, hotshot

Tonight I scrambled an egg for the first time in my life!

I was making a flat noodle thing fake pad thai thing and the recipe was all 'scramble an egg'. SO I DID.

this is exciting as due to childhood raw egg allergy and my mum nearly killing me with her bad cooking flapjacks when I was little, after that my mum (and then later me) wasn't taking any chances and so no eggs for me!

i always forget how much I hate camping. and people younger than me. and lots of other things. but! Went to a Waffle House yesterday which made up for a lot.

in key west. Having fun, mostly. more later, rather spend time in a futile effort to catch up on lj.

ETA: also, I hate cocoa beach - I was wearing my prescription sunnies and got hit by a huge wave and tangled in seaweed and freaked out and lost my sunnies. Spent the next hour looking for them, no luck :( I liked those sunnies...today I bought dorky clipons at walgreens(cheaper than wrapparounds) and some headholdyonnie things. I want to be able to see on the rides at disneyworld!

Years ago when I went to the US as a summer camp counselor, I received a crash course in preparing campfire food, american style. One of the things we would get the campers to make(cause we were all about the campers learning skills! like not catching on fire! or melting their rain ponchos!) was called 'Pot of Gold' - it's genius was in it's simplicity, you got your dinner kit from the kitchen after filling out the forms: pot, cutting knife, cheese, tin of tomato soup and tube of dough. That's right, dough in a tube. It was amazing stuff, you'd just get the kids to chop up some squares of cheese, chop off a bit of dough, roll the cheese into the centre and drop the ball into the soup to cook. Insanely delicious and so easy!

When I got home to Australia, with our desperate lack of dough in a tube, I had to create my own version:

1 tin Campbells tomato soup
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons butter
1 cup milk
200 grams cheese

Cut the cheese into squares. Mix the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl and then melt the butter(don't bother melting it if it's a soft margarine) and add it and the milk. Mix all together with a fork or moosh with your hands. Create balls from the dough and roll the squares of cheese into them. Put the soup in a saucepan as per normal, when it reaches almost boiling add the dumplings. Cook for approx 5-8 minutes.

Variation that I prefer after having too many dumpling dissolve into mush on me(a good tasting mush, though!) - it's more of a bake but still yum:

Same as above, but forget about rolling into balls - moosh the cheese in with everything else, put in the saucepan, cook for about 5 minutes, then place entire thing into a baking tray and put in the oven for about 10 minutes or until the delicious smell makes you take it out and start to eat it.

I make this version with shredded light cheese, skim milk and light margarine, as you don't need to achieve dumpling consistency. It tastes just as good, and makes me feel better about eating so much of it :)