Four meals to cook while camping
You know you’re at the beach, soaking up the sunlight (with sun block on your face I hope) and having water fights with your siblings, friends or cousins in the water. Then of course you get dehydrated and hungry. You get out the water, dry yourself with a towel or just wait five minutes, the Qatar sun will just dry you in a matter of minutes, then go to the kitchen area of the camping site to get water and see what’s cooking.
When you’re at home, you have a proper kitchen with a sink and cabinets full of spices, but when you’re at a desert, you have a sandpit, charcoal, aluminum foil and minimal use of kitchen pots and pans. Let’s check out how you can cook rice and meat in the desert!
Here are four meals to cook while camping:
Matchbous with any meat you want:
Matchbous is essentially a Qatari dish composed of rice and any meat of your choice. There is no one way to make matchbous, you can play around with the spices you want, the dosage of each spice and what meat you prefer, chicken, lamb, fish?!
First, you dig a small pit, you can place bricks around the sand pit for safety. Then, you fill up that pit with charcoal and light them up. Watch out for the wind direction, you don’t want the smoke blowing towards your resting camping site and you surely don’t want children around you while building this pit.
Your pit oven should look like something like this: (but you can place the rocks or bricks around the sand pit if you’d like) if you don’t have any at your reach, it’s OK but be careful of charcoal escaping the pit.
Then what you can do is start with the meat, say you want lamb, have the lamb marinated (preferably overnight) then wrap that piece of lamb with aluminum foil and place it on the hot charcoal in the pit. Perhaps cook it for about 45 minutes but of course keep flipping it so the sides don’t get burned.
After you finish with the meat, you can go ahead and do the rice by placing a large pot on the pit. If the charcoal cools down, just blow it using a cardboard paper, nothing fancy.
In the big pot like this one:
Follow these steps:
As we mentioned earlier, there is no one specific way to make matchbous so here is one recipe among many you can come across.
- Put a stick of butter in the hot pot or you can use vegetable oil if you’d like.
- Wait for it to melt or heat up and then add chopped onions
- Stir until it caramelizes and turns golden colour
- Add minced garlic or ginger garlic paste if you’d like more flavour
- Spices:
Black lemon
Saffron powder
Coriander powder
Matchbous pre-mix (you can find in stores)
Ginger powder
Turmeric powder
Tomatoe paste
Salt and pepper to your taste
Once you mixed all the spices and onions together, you can go ahead and add and mix in the basmati rice then add water but not too much, you don't want to dilute the flavour. Add rice according to how you see fit with the number of people eating. Then cover the rice so it can cook, but watch out don’t burn it. After the rice and meat are ready, bring a big dish to pour them in, rice first then meat on top! Then bil A’fyeh which is something Qataris say when you eat which kind of means “cheers” in a way or “bon appetite” in French.
You can also BBQ on a grill while camping:
You can also cook the following dishes on the sand pit like the one shown above, or you can just bring your grill from home and use that.
Chicken:
When planning a trip to the beach, you can buy raw chicken marinated already from your butcher shop or you can buy plain chicken and marinate it however you want the flavour to taste like. Refrigerate it overnight so the chicken can soak up all the flavour you added.
Here is one recipe you can use to marinate your chicken with:
Cut your chicken to bite-sized pieces and add these ingredients to them.
Salt and pepper
Paprika
Olive oil
Fresh lemon or lime juice whichever you prefer
That is one of the simplest chicken recipes you can do, you can be more creative with spices. Once you reach your camping site, just place the chicken cubes on BBQ skewers to grill the chicken.
Beef:
Same with the chicken, you can do with beef cubes.
Here is one recipe you can follow:
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
Minced garlic
Cumin
Coriander
Paprika
To give it more flavor, in between each beef cube on a skewer, you can place onions and chopped bell peppers!!
Shrimp:
A great recipe for grilled shrimp with rich flavour and so simple to make.
Here is one recipe you can follow:
Salt and pepper
Paprika
Garlic paste or minced garlic clove (whichever you prefer)
After you have your shrimp marinated, just place them on a skewer and on the grill and they’ll be ready to be devoured in no time.
When BBQing different meat on skewers, you can accommodate them with salads, tahina and garlic sauces and endless choices of appetizers. Cook safely, enjoy the company and the weather and please clean up after you’re done! Happy camping, QL wishes you a hearty meal in the middle of Qatar’s cold desert.
To learn more about how you can stay safe, please check out our article Camping Safely in the Winter Deserts of Qatar.
What would you cook in a desert? Let us know in the comments below.
Make sure to check out our social media to keep track of the latest content.
Instagram - @qatarliving
Twitter - @qatarliving
Facebook - Qatar Living
