Last Feast/Camp Fire/Clean-Up

This year was great. Really great. I want to give my Week 5 post some thought and time to compose, so in the meantime, I'll leave you with a brief post about our last meal (with plenty of pics), the epic last campfire, and a little bit on our camp breakdown.

Last Feast:

So very good. And so much WORK! Cadie and I were inspired by the native foods workshop we attended in May (you can read about it here: http://tinyurl.com/4yz2vhc).

Most all of the dishes were native to our area (at least in part) and there were a few foods traditional to our feast that we wanted to include. I hope I don't forget anything, but I believe we prepared/ate the following foods: Roasted turkey with gravy, glazed ham, fry bread, nopales, salsa, guacamole, quinoa salad, stinging nettle stew with sunflower seeds, native greens salad with pinyon (pine) nuts, wiiwish (acorn mush- a traditional Cahuilla and Serrano staple food), sourdough biscuits, beans, deviled eggs, chia seed lemonade, prickly pear lemonade, sycamore tea, pineapple upside down cakes, and a blueberry & black cherry cobbler. Whew... It was the bomb. Here are some pics (click to enlarge)!

We had around twenty visitors- friends, family, former students, etc... There were about 50 people there, and it really made the last dinner together feel like a celebration.

After dinner, everbody helped to clean up, and we walked down to the far campfire (there were two for some reason this year) to share our best and worst moments and coolest artifacts of the field season. I won't share any responses here, but I will tell you they were salty, hilarious, and wonderful. The good and the bad...

We all slept in an extra hour (I didn't have to get up until 5 a.m., greeeat), and Cadie and I made sourdough pancakes, bacon, and fruit salad.

After breakfast we packed up five weeks and what seemed like 17 tons of STUFF. Tables, lanterns, papers, a BBQ, kitchen everything, tents, chairs, propane tanks, refrigerators and a freezer (for reals), ice chests, trash bins, compost buckets, pots, pans, plates, cups, food, projectors, artifacts, mortars, and so so so much more. It was a ton of work, but there were a many hands helping, and I was out before noon. Sigh... I think I'll save my closing remarks for another post... I'm just not quite ready for it to all be over. Not yet...