Sandra picks up the bag of onions. “How many do we need?”, Albert flips through the book. “Hold on. Uhm, just one onion. And we need four potatoes per person, so that makes sixteen. And all of the bell peppers. You get all that, and I’ll get started on the bacon and chicken.”
Sandra nods and goes to the toolbox to find a vegetable knife and a cutting board. It isn’t easy to find an even surface on the home build table, but they make do. She starts by cutting one end of the onion and proceeds to peel it carefully. She makes sure to get all the nasty onion skin off as well. Then she places the onion on the board with the cut end down, and slices it in half, before flipping it and cutting it in hundreds of tiny onion pieces.
Next, she grabs the bag of potatoes and counts out the sixteen they need, into a washing bowl. Jack joins her with the pale of water and pours over the potatoes, to ease the peeling process. Sandra sits down and starts peeling away while she hums the potato-peeling-song.
Albert has found his own chopping board, a sharp knife, and the box with all the meat products. He starts with the chicken breasts. Slices it carefully in long, slim strips. Then he cuts them into squares, the size of playing dice. When he is done with all the chicken, he dumps it in a plastic bowl and sets it aside. He then pulls out the bacon and cuts that in thin pieces as well. When it is all nice and sliced, he dumps it in the same bowl as the chicken.
After he finished the meats, he washes the cutting board and knife carefully, before starting on the bell peppers. He doesn’t know what else to do, and Sandra is still slaving away at the potatoes.
Sandra is making great progress, but potatoes are a long process. The peeling feels like it takes forever, but when that is done things pick up. It only takes a few minutes to cut the potatoes in small bits.
While the two are working on the food, Jack and Sam are trying to make a fire. At first, they are both chopping wood. They will need quite a lot for the fire to go for as long as it takes to cook proper food. After a while, Sam set aside his axe and takes out his knife. He collects a few of the firewood pieces and sits by the campfire pit. He starts to carefully cut small wood shavings of the firewood. They will need a good handful of these to get the fire going. While he cuts away, Jack keeps at it with the big axe. He cops more wood than he can carry, but he is sure they will get it all burned before they go to bed, even if they don’t need all of it for the cooking fire. When he has a good pile of wood, he starts bringing it to the fire pit, where he stacks it neatly in the corner. He then goes off into the forest to find some suitable kindling. Sam starts building the fire in a neat little pile, with a solid base and smaller sticks on top. After a short while Jack return with a handful of tiny sticks and some dried grass and moss. He carefully sets the grass and moss in the middle of the fire that Sam build. They then stack small sticks on top and builds around it with slightly larger pieces of wood.
Eventually Jack looks at Sam. “I think we are ready, don’t you?”. Sam nods. “Yeah, you do the honours”. Jack pulls out his fire steel and strikes a few sparks down on the bonfire. They land in the dry moss in the middle. Jack gently squeezes the moss to close a bit around the tiny fragile ember and blows on it ever so gently. After a second a small line of smoke rises from the embers, and shortly after a flame jumps up from the moss. It quickly catches the grass and the smallest of the sticks. Jack gently manipulates the kindling, to make sure it all catches fire, and after just a few minutes they have a big, nice fire going. They both make sure to feed it regularly with increasingly large sticks and logs, to get it to a good cooking state.
While the fire grows steadily, they all pitch in on getting the last of the food ready. They then gather at the firepit to look at the fire eating away at the wood, while they wait for it to die down to a manageable size. They spend the time talking about their day and share stories. After fifteen minutes the fire is about the right size for cooking and Jack places the Dutch oven directly in the fire.
They fetch the food from the table and start throwing it in the big cast iron pot, starting with the bacon and chicken. When that is browned, they add the onions and then about a liter of cooking cream and just as much water. When the stew is nearing a boil, they add the potatoes and the peppers, along with plenty of seasoning. Sam stirs the whole thing for about a minute. Then he places the lid on top, and they leave it sitting there.
While the stew is stewing, Sandra mixes up a batch of simple bread dough. It is mostly water, flower, and oil. When the stew has been simmering for about half an hour, Jack fetches the frying pan and put it over the fire next to the iron pot. Sandra starts frying the dough in small flat portions on the pan to make a stack of small bread loafs. Albert is grabbing the plates and cutlery from the toolbox and setting the table neatly. Or at least as neatly as he can, on the uneven tabletop. Sandra puts all the fresh bread loafs in a bowl and sets it on the table.
When the food is ready, they each grab a plate and fills it with stew from the pot, still sitting in the fire. It is too heavy to move, and the food stays hot longer on the fire anyways. When they all have a full plate, they sit at the table and pass the bread bowl around. Sandra looks around at them all. “Good work team. Dig in!”.