Monday

It is a hot one in the mountains! High of 90 degrees is projected, and around here that is “Hot Daddy Hot”. The good news is, we love it!

Days like this warm the lake, which is spring fed and can be pretty cold in June. While the weather this year has been very pleasant, it has not warmed the lake to the customary 80 degrees. A few days like this and the lake will be a lot more fun!

I have not spent much time talking about food this year, and since this is a “normal” day at camp, food might be a good subject. The fact is, camp is impacted more by the kitchen than any other single thing we do. We awake to the smell of bacon frying, we smell bread baking later in the morning, then the aroma of savory meats or spices wafts over the campus. The kitchen is in the middle of the camp and we can smell everything that they produce… a fact that delights us all.

We do not eat lunch until 1:20 in the afternoon. You can imagine that the long morning of activities ALWAYS makes us hungry and as the day goes on we think more and more about food! The Greystone bread is as famous as the opening day scones… often served warm from the oven, it is simply delightful… but I think the best thing we do is our salad bar. Three large salad bars allow the entire camp to go through the salad with both hot and cold sections… I typically do a big salad with romaine and spinach leaves, black beans, cottage cheese, olives, marinated mushrooms, humus, pumpkin and flax seeds, and vinegrette. By the time that monster is assembled, who can eat anything else! Thus we plan carefully according to what the main course happens to be. Poppy seed chicken, shepherds pie, or BLT’s will always force the salad to the background. Pizza is even more so!

Tonight we will serve our famous home made pizza. We make AMAZING pizza’s from scratch… tonight the kitchen will make about 350 of them! The preparations began yesterday (with the making of the dough and the sauce) and will finish as the entire kitchen crew gathers to toss the crusts and cook them in our authentic stone deck oven. The pizza’s cook quickly (the oven temperature is very high) but there is no way to cook that many pizza’s on demand; so we put them in warming racks as we cook them through the afternoon. The pizza’s are finished with a drizzle of olive oil, some fresh parmesian cheese, and a few snips of fresh basil. YUM

We are having a great time at camp. Thanks for checking in.