Pudgy Pies---A Culinary Delight just Found.

I have been camping (real camping) for 65 years or so, 48 of them with my first wife, and 44 of them with our ratty-assed kids and while I thought I knew just about everything about camping, but one thing managed to get by me. It is the frickin' Pudgy Pie. It is true we tended to do things on the cheap, and on the lighter side even though we spent years camping and actually living in a tepee. We did not have many "contraptions" but we did have cast iron pots and pans that could do up a nice beaver stew---even though that is not something to brag about.

In camping, we did meet others, who like us, spent much time carousing the backwoods of the west and they too never had a bloody Pudgy Pie maker. I wouldn't say we were more sophisticated, actually we were very primitive in that being in a tepee required a certain attention to history and tradition. A fresh road killed deer or even a rabbit was all well and good---except in the hot summer when the microbes would get a real jump on us and those legs started sticking out.

In the winter or fall, or say weather below 60 degrees, many good thing can be found on the ribbon of death. Even got a nice Porcupine once that didn't offer much table fare but did give us a handy supply of quills that could be traded for other swag at a rendezvous. Found a good Musk Rat in good fur right in the middle of our little town here--smack in front of the bank is a $10 pleu.

Pudgy Pies? Well, the other day we were camping on Madeline Island and low and behold everybody there among the 12 of us, except us, had Pudgy Pie irons. With great glee that hauled out these rather heavy devices that consisted of a cast iron cups on the end of two steel handles. They looked more like some weapon form the Crusaders, or maybe Roman times and were used to kill Christians. They were club-like and weigh in at 10 pounds per unit.

The idea was to take two pieces of store-bought white bread (the good organic stiff didn't seem to fly), put one in each side of this iron and then fill the sucker with all the good things found in the camp cookies larder. This would include meat of one's choice if you were of the omnivore persuasion, vegetables, spices and cheese. Close the contraption up and then hold it in the fire like a marshmallow cooker. After maybe 10 minutes, roll it over and hit the other side. Bingo, flop it open and here is this sandwich type thing all steaming and looking good. Where the hell have I been hiding?

So the grand-kid shows up, and he is a bit of a pyro to say the least, and fire is his middle name. So, like, I head over to the Fleet Farm and there on the big wall are Pudgy Pie Irons hanging like they have been there since the freaking Romans invented them. Damn, how could I have missed one of modern man's greatest inventions?