The Chicken Game

Spring is coming! If you’re like me and you grew up in the tropics and snow scares you, then you’re getting itchy to get outside. And go camping. If you need help finding a place to go camping, you just so happen to be on the blog page of a handy dandy travel website. Check out Yosemite! And Grand Canyon! And Sedona! If those exclamation points didn’t excite you enough to dive into trip-planning immediately, I don’t know what to tell you. At any rate, with those shameless plugs out of the way, let me get into what I really want to talk about here.

Eating.

You can pretty much eat dirt while camping and it will taste good. But if you’re doing lazy car camping, you can kick it up a notch. Your main evening campsite activity, aside from drinking yourself into a stupor in front of the fire, should be playing the chicken game. The chicken game is easy and fun, and you will get to eat chicken afterward. Imagine that.

What you need for the chicken game are the following: Tupperware, chicken and a long list of ingredients for the marinade. The object of the game is for the players to guess the ingredients. The preparer of the chicken obviously cannot play but must answer the questions. Here are some hints on which ingredients to use to throw the players off and keep them guessing:

1. some sort of pretentious oil instead of olive oil
2. agave nectar instead of sugar or honey
3. lemongrass instead of scallions (because you know they will peek into the Tupperware and see the green bits)
4. sake instead of regular wine (this way, if they guess wine, you can say mmm … no.)
5. miso paste (that’s not instead of anything, it’s just to be difficult)

You get the idea. Just look for random spices in your pantry. And then throw them in. The best part of the chicken game is that you get to cook your chicken pieces on top of the fire pit until they are golden-brown and succulent and fill your campsite with the irresistible aroma of grilled chicken.

If you’re vegetarian, you can substitute tofu for chicken, but I guarantee that the tofu game is not as fun.

And the next morning, when the sun shines and the birds sing and the raccoons have given up on trying to pry open your cooler, you can nurse your inevitable hangover with leftover chicken, toast that you will make with your incredibly useful camping toaster (no, it’s not a stick) and eggs that you have kept safe with your egg storage container.

There’s nothing like being out in nature.

Photo courtesy of DimsumDarren