Outdoor Cooking Fire to Escape the Heat?

[ChanellG]

Sometimes it gets so hot in the summer that the last thing I want to do is to heat up the kitchen to cook some food. Forget about lighting the oven, that's just asking to suffer! Last year I started looking into ways to cook outdoors, but I wanted to set up a sort of campfire, not grill over purchased charcoal in a barbecue grill.

I've seen camping recipes, but I'm more interested in cooking the way people did before they had indoor kitchens. Does anyone know how to make "regular" meals over an actual wood fire?

 

[SatNavSaysStraightOn]

Yep, just get on with it as normal. Seriously. I have lived outdoors extensively having lived in a tent by choice for a year and often gone on bushcraft and survival courses prior to that and it is simply a case of cooking normally. OK, you can't as easily bake items in an oven, but you can use ground ovens if you have the land owners permission to dig and assuming you are not anywhere that is likely to catch fire (ground ovens and peat soil do not mix), but there is also no reason as to why you can't build an outdoor oven in your own garden heated from below. As for cooking on an open fire, well if it is your garden consider something like this

We used them whenever they were available. They swing out so you can light the fire and control the heat, some where very height adjustable like this one

Or even this one, where the fire was lit in a pit that was concrete lined to protect the local soil type from fire (peat with some sandy areas).

We just cooked normally as we would on a stove.

 

[ChanellG]

...but there is also no reason as to why you can't build an outdoor oven in your own garden heated from below

I would actually like to have a solar oven at some point. It gets soooooo hot here by July I am sure it would take no time to roast something in one. As for cooking in my garden, I'd likely use a galvanized tub as a fire pit. It's just something I've been looking into as I was recently in a situation with a lot of wood from cutting a tree during the heat of summer.