Happy Hump day! This past weekend, I spent Sunday with my family celebrating my Dad’s birthday. It was a beautiful sunny day, and he decided he wanted to make a “Poor Man’s supper” and cherry cobbler in an outdoor fashion. If you google the term Poor Man’s supper, it’ll pop up as “Poor Man’s meal” or “Poor man’s dinner”, but it’s all the same concept. The main ingredients are ground beef, potatoes, onions, and maybe some other type of vegetable.
When I was a kid, my dad would take me and my siblings camping for a few days every fall. I loved these times. We’d trek out to Turkey Run, Brown County State Park, or the Shades, set up camp, and enjoy the outdoors for a day or two. We would often have a Poor Man’s Supper on these occasions. We’d make hamburger patties a head of time, slice potatoes and onions, add salt and pepper, then wrap them up in aluminum foil packets and throw them in the cooler. When we were ready to eat, we’d throw the whole thing on the campfire and wait for the meat to cook. These were so delicious, and after we were done eating, we could just throw the aluminum foil away and be done. No mess, no fuss! For Sunday’s dinner, we made use of the charcoal grill.
But the main star of the show at my dad’s dinner was the cherry cobbler. One of these days, if you’re all lucky, I’ll share our family’s recipe on here. We’ve been making this dessert my whole life, and it seriously is one of my favorite things ever. This a really simple recipe that you can substitute in whichever fruit you want and it will taste amazing. The fun part about making this over the weekend with my Dad was the method we used to bake it.
As a kid, my Dad would pull out his huge cast iron pots with lids, and we’d make a three course meal out back in these babies. The idea is to heat charcoal in a normal charcoal grill. Once the coals are hot enough, he would place a handful or two of them underneath the bottom pot, and then about seven or eight on top of the pot.
This would create an oven like atmosphere for the food in the pot. If we were using more than one pot, the second one stacked on top of the first. Now there is heat underneath the second pot that is simultaneously heating the top of the bottom pot. We would then place more hot coals on top of the second pot for an even bake. The most I saw him use were three pots at a time.
It’s a pretty cool idea, right?! I asked my Dad where this method came from. My Dad’s Dad was a boy scout leader in his younger days. When he would take the troup out camping, they would take these kinds of pots out and make meals in them. After my Grandpa stopped being a scout leader, he continued using this method with his own family.
I love that this tradition I grew up with is rooted deeper in our family. Another cool aspect about making our cherry cobbler this way on Sunday was being able to share this tradition with my niece and nephew, who are 3 and 5 years old respectively. They are still pretty young to be able to really appreciate this fully, but they had a really great time watching us make dessert in an outside “oven”.
Ok, so back to the cobbler itself. Again, this is a really simple recipe that made it easy and quick to throw dessert together for 10 people. I know that there is a big divide in what kind of breading constitutes a cobbler, but for the sake of my family recipe, I am defining cobbler as more of bread topping with fruit in the middle. It’s not pie. It’s not cake. And there is no “crumble” on top.
To start, we heated the pot over the hot charcoals. Next we added the sticks of butter to melt in the cast iron pots. This took about 5 minutes. Next, we added the cobbler batter. Don’t worry about the batter sticking to the pot, there are TWO sticks of butter in there.
The last step? To dollop the cherries into the pot. We cheated and used canned cherry pie filling. We tried giving my nephew this responsibility, but his five year old self couldn’t quite control where the cherries went, so “Papa” finished up this step. It was pretty cute though and he had fun helping us bake.
Typically this recipe takes about 45 minutes in the oven to bake. But we doubled the recipe and used charcoal as our heating element. We checked for doneness the same way you would in a regular oven. The ol’ toothpick try! This took almost 2 hours to bake, because our charcoal supply ran a little lower than we anticipated after grilling dinner.
However, we spent those few hours finishing cooking and eating dinner. By the time we were done eating, the cobbler was ready! I had seriously been looking forward to this dessert all week. Not all day. All WEEK. I can’t get enough of this stuff, even if it is hella high in carbs.
Typically the breading gets a little darker on top in the oven, but I think we ran out of heat on top of the pot. It was baked all of the way through though! We all grabbed double portions of this like we were kids again. It was everything we had hoped for, but we weren’t sure who was going to roll us out of the dining room. We forgot how filling this dessert is! There was only one or two portions left out of this big pot. There should have been about half left. Oops. No regrets!
Anyway, I hope I didn’t bore you too much with my nostalgic rambling. Baking is obviously a huge part of my life right now and I wanted to share a very personal and happy memory with you all surrounding that. I hope you all have a wonderful day! -Jen
Jen's Baking Adventures 
This reminds me so much of my childhood. We went camping often and spent lots of time around a campfire. 😊
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I loved it so much as a kid. Great memories! ❣️
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