Bannock and sausage dinner

So after a brief stop by at Cow's ice cream, nothing notable, we continued on back to New Brunswick. We stopped again at Mitch's place for the night, but got home before he did, and so commenced our test oven. We had this idea, as I've mentioned before, and which may come to fruition soon, to cook a leg of lamb in a ground oven, maori-style. The oven is called a Hangi, and this first attempt was a blind stumble towards what we wanted to do. We dug a hole in the beach, the very rocky beach, and filled it with a big fire. We would have to wait for it to burn down to coals in order to start filling and covering it. In the mean time, we decided we should accomplish another longstanding goal, the mythical bannock sausage. Some of you may know of our obsession with bannock, which borders on a diagnosable condition. We frequently make test batches of bannock of all different kinds. Some work out, some not at all. The most successful by far was the BBQ pizza bannock south of Calgary with the South Africans, part of the notorious feedlot dilemma.
This was another resounding success.
Over the open fire pit, we cooked bannock wrapped sausages, smoked frankfurters, and even veggie burgers for Mitch(who only eats seafood). I personally think that is the future of burgers, but we shall see. I almost forgot, but we also did some firetop eel Kabiaki, with the soy glaze. Twas of quality, but unfortunately by the time we got inside after finishing the sausages, was cold. Nevertheless a pleasure.

The bannock dough is so simple to make, and so heartwarmingly rustic, that it suits the sausages perfectly. I can almost say it's like taking corndogs and upping the ante. The best part? You could put anything inside, including cheese, spices,vegetables, anything. So that was done whilst the fire roared down, then we wrapped a whole pumpkin in tin foil, just to see if it would cook through in the oven. The basic procedure involves a hot pit, full of tasty food, then covered with something wet that you don't care about much, before leaving it for a couple hours. Unfortunately for us and our ambition, the pit wasn't nearly hot enough, the cover not nearly thorough enough, and the pumpkin just too damn big. It cooked a bit, like the bottom three inches of a 10 inch pumpking were entirely edible, but the rest was varying degrees of rawness. The reason was research. Research, my friends, coupled with logic, is the way forward. Stupidity is to be left somewhere else. Hopefully somewhere tricky and difficult to find.

Upon actually doing some research on the ancient practice, it became clear that the heat source was never actually the flame. Though we lined the bottom of the pit with rocks, the maori use only rocks as their heat source. Hence why the bottom of our pumpking was cooked and the rest raw. It's like geothermal on the smallest scale possible. What the tradition entails is superheating lavastones, which reach massive heats without cracking, and quickly filling the pit with first stones all around, then a protected basket of food, followed by more heat and a damp burlap sack or other non porous wet thing, covered in dirt. This ensures steam, heat retention, and even cooking. Our pit basically consisted of one big hot rock on the bottom, our food, sticks and wet leaves to cover, and dirt filled on that. Not likely to work it appears. Well, I'll just have to try it again. Soon. In any case, the bannock and sausages were quality, and we topped it off with a little tomato salad. Nice meal, but the pumpkin would have been epic. In case you were wondering, I fed it to the sea. Not the only thing I fed to the sea in those couple days either, read on.