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54 IDAHO FALLS MAGAZINE APRIL 2023 "Alfresco" may be an Italian phrase meaning to dine out- doors, but we Americans have embraced the concept whole- heartedly and in typical American fashion, super-sized and over-commercialized it. Fortunately, when it comes to alfresco you can do as little or as much as you like. ere is no right or wrong answer. It's whatever makes you happy and fills your belly. Some of my fondest memories as a child were of eating cold home-fried chicken at the beach in the summer with my family. Every piece of chicken that I eat to this day is measured against the standard of how good that chicken tasted, at least in my memory. For me, the whole concept of alfresco helped to focus my in- terest in the outdoors as I grew up. When I was a young boy, I attended an outdoor expo. ere were booths and displays about everything related to the outdoors. One booth that really intrigued me was handing out samples of a new type of food that was a spin-off of our fledgling space program. It was called "freeze-dried food." Just add hot water and voila, chili as good as out of a can. It weighed hardly anything, and its only drawback was its cost. But I was hooked. Growing up in scouting, I attended endless campouts and suffered through untold iterations of SPAM with macaroni and cheese, but occasionally a leader would get a deal on some freeze-dried meals. e beef stroganoff may not have been as good as Mom's, but it only took a minute to make, and you could enjoy it around the campfire in the Great Outdoors. e older I got and the more I hiked and camped, I learned to travel and pack light with freeze-dried meals when we needed them and how to splurge and feast when we could bear the weight. Refrigeration is always an issue for certain foods. Finding foods that you can take anywhere is a big deal. I remember as a kid, camping with my family one time and being really excited because we bought some canned bacon at Kmart that had been imported from Romania. When that bacon hit the frying pan huge billows of rancid black smoke ensued. Whatever the Roma- nians called bacon certainly seems not to be the same as ours. Canadian bacon is also different, but in a good way. A few years back I got to sample another variety of Eastern European bacon. I was hiking in Slovakia and had a chance to expe- rience Slanina, which while appearing raw, I was assured was somehow safe and edible. It is cold-cured, like the salmon that we call lox. I love bacon probably more than the next guy, but hacking a greasy chunk off a slab of seemingly raw bacon and trying to gag it down pushed even my porcine epicurean comfort limits. Over time, I was introduced to the art of Dutch-oven cooking. Done properly to excess, Dutch oven cooking allows you to cook multi-course meals that are always crowd-pleasers. Because cast iron Dutch ovens aren't the lightest things, river raers and horse packers are the out- door folks that really make use of them. Aluminum versions of Dutch ovens do exist for backpackers, but they don't impart the same robust outdoor flavor as a cast iron Dutch oven with a well-seasoned patina from past feasts. Cooking outdoors can be as simple or complicated as you want. One time as an experiment, I cooked a can of beef stew over a safety flare, e flare did the job of heating the stew just fine, but it did impart more sulfur flavor than most peo- ple's palate would enjoy. With the creation of multi-burner propane grills and griddles, tailgaters have taken the concept of dining Alfresco to limits that only we Americans could shamelessly imagine. at's one of the beauties of Ameri- ca, the right to cook and dine whatever and wherever you choose! Photo Credit: Jake Losinksi Alfresco By Gregg Losinski OUT THERE