I absolutely love to cook, bake and be creative in the kitchen. What I love even more is the fun and challenging adventure of cooking a huge meal off grid. Prior to having our little nugget two years ago, we had a family tradition of cooking our Thanksgiving meal off grid in our wall tent at hunting camp way up in the mountains.

Doing that with a toddler in the single digit temperatures of Montana does not sound like fun to us so we decided to host our off-grid Thanksgiving meal at our new homestead. While a bunch of my prep work was done in our house with electricity, the baking was done outside and off grid. How did we manage this? Dutch ovens and a turkey fryer!

Frying the turkey and a dutch oven triple stack of stuffing on the bottom and two veggie side dishes on top.

We’re total geeks when it comes to dutch ovens and have quite the collection that we’ve been building over the years. We have six dutch ovens, two of which are lighter weight aluminum that we can easily pack in our raft for multi-day river trips. Having this many comes in handy when you want to cook a huge meal off grid! Here’s our triple stack with a pumpkin pie, apple pie and sweet potato rolls.

The turkey turned out quite delicious and it only took about 45 minutes to cook a 12 pound bird-unbelievable! Deep fat frying it may sound greasy and unhealthy but it wasn’t at all. The outer skin on the turkey quickly fried and sealed all the moisture in the bird. The meat was tender, juicy and not greasy at all!

Remember those sweet potato rolls I mentioned earlier? This was a new recipe I wanted to try from the recent issue of Mary Jane’s Farm magazine. They turned out so delicious and I just love the golden color. They rose quite high in the dutch oven and were a bit close to the lid so a few tops are dark but they were still quite delicious!

To serve up our dutch oven Thanksgiving, we laid a 1″x10″ wood board on our kitchen counter top and lined up all the dutch ovens for a buffet style Thanksgiving meal. Luckily we remembered to line our dutch ovens with parchment paper so clean up was unbelievably easy!

We’re writing a post with tips on how to cook off grid in dutch ovens and how to bake a pie in a dutch oven so stay tuned!

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