IOLS Cooking

Intro to Outdoor Leadership Skills (IOLS) training will be held in conjunction with the district camporee next weekend. I've cajoled a handful of scouters to present the sessions and now just hope it fits the schedules of enough untrained scouters to make it work. In the spring, there was no demand so I did one-on-one mentoring with a single scoutmaster that really wanted it completed. Maybe this is a sign that everyone is trained! In our troop, all 16 Asst. Scoutmasters have their 'Trained' patch and one is helping with the training. One new dad is attending the training this fall.

This time, for the Cooking portion, I'm excited to try out my new Woody Dutch Oven. This is made in America (actually in Michigan) and is very cool. It is aluminum so it's pretty light and easy to clean. As you can see, it's square rather than round and that makes some foods fit nicely - such as my enchiladas which I made last week. I'm making monkey bread for dessert tonight by using the Woody dutch oven inside our conventional oven.

It also has removable legs that are just metal screws. You can put in legs as long or short as you want, and the four dimples on the lid are specifically for positioning the feet if you stack them - I thought that was excellent thinking.

Finally, the lid and bottom are about the same height. This means you can flip the lid and have two deep rectangular pans if you want to do some stewing or frying or making pancakes.

We try to cover a bunch of different ways to cook in IOLS - open fire, dutch oven, tinfoil, backpacking, even solar one time. It's a fun time to see the options for food on an outing and will hopefully get back to the scouts through modeling and training.

Scout On