Episode 60: River to Table: Josh Galliano on Campfire Cooking

In this episode, I have the pleasure of talking with accomplished chef and St. Louis area resident Josh Galliano. We talk about his path to becoming a chef and the family and cultural influences. He grew up in southern Louisiana near the Mississippi River, where he had regular access to fresh, seasonal products. Mostly, though, we talk about campfire cooking. Galliano prepares memorable meals on sandbars for a local outfitter, Big Muddy Adventures, and just generally loves the outdoors.

We talked about the importance of advance preparation, what foods do and don’t lend themselves well to campfire cooking, essential equipment, and maintaining cleanliness and food safety. We get distracted talking about paw paws, and Galliano offers some tips for breaking out of the hot dog and burger routine. We wrap up with a discussion about river-themed foods, which is the subject of a new cookbook he is working on.

Whether you camp from your car like I often do, or hike or paddle for longer trips, you’ll find Galliano’s thoughts and tips helpful.

Information on how to help St. Louis in the aftermath of the tornado on May 16, 2025

Here’s a couple of recipes we talked about in the episode:

• Homemade granola
• Alton Brown’s catfish ceviche

If you are enjoying the podcast, please consider showing your support by making a one-time contribution or by supporting as a regular contributor through Patreon. Every dollar you contribute makes it possible for me to continue sharing stories about America’s Greatest River.

Don’t want to deal with Patreon? No worries. You can show some love by buying me a coffee (which I drink a lot of!). Just click on the link below.

Tue, May 20, 2025 5:06PM • 1:02:47

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Campfire cooking, Josh Galliano, Mississippi River, seasonal ingredients, culinary tips, Big Muddy Adventures, sustainable cooking, food preparation, outdoor cooking, recipe ideas, cooking equipment, meal planning, food storage, cleanup, cookbook project.

SPEAKERS

Josh Galliano, Speaker 1, Dean Klinkenberg

Josh Galliano 00:00

Yeah, so I think in many ways, you know, it’s kind of take inspiration from what’s coming up, right? And so if it’s growing together, it goes together, which is really great to kind of keep in mind, you know, right now, being that it’s May, we’re still into asparagus season, so a very simple kind of marinated or grilled and seasoned asparagus is fantastic, because you don’t have to really pack much to come with you, and you definitely aren’t packing a lot to go out.

Dean Klinkenberg 00:46

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river, and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going. Welcome to Episode 60 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. Well, we’re back after an unplanned break. Haven’t been able to get a new episode out for a little bit, for a combination of reasons that really come down to travel, poor planning and some tech challenges. So at least two of the three I think I’ve taken care of. I’ll leave you guessing as to which one is still an issue. Happy to be back, and I’m looking forward to rolling out some new content for you over the next few weeks. I’ve got several interviews planned and ideas for a couple of solo episodes about travel along the Great River Road. Those will be coming up, and hopefully there’ll be a very exciting announcement I’ll be able to make later in June, but in this episode, it’s my pleasure to bring you the conversation I had with Josh Galliano. Josh is an acclaimed chef in the St Louis area, but he grew up down in southern Louisiana, near the Mississippi River, and he has done a number of trips with Big Muddy Adventures in St Louis, where he cooks on a sandbar. He seemed like the perfect person for me to have a conversation with about campfire cooking. So our conversation goes in a couple different directions. I was also just really curious about his path into the professional cooking of being a chef. So we talked about his background and how that all came about. We then get into the nuts and bolts of campfire cooking, and I think you’ll find he’s got a lot of very helpful tips that all of us can use. I’m looking forward to trying them, but all of us could use to bring some freshness, maybe try out some new things when we’re cooking around the campfire. So we talk about the prep work and how he approaches that, some of the essential equipment, some ideas on some cold foods that are easy to make in advance. His thoughts on using seasonal or seasonally available produce and food products. And we also talk about the importance of cleanliness and leaving no trace when you’re out there. We have a little sidebar where we geek a little bit on the idea of pawpaws, and then we finish up just by talking a little bit about his new project. He’s working on a cookbook inspired by his personal experiences as a chef, but also his life living near rivers, particularly the Mississippi. So like I said it, I think there’s some good tips in there. I think you’ll find some useful ideas on how to maybe change your game a little bit when it comes to campfire cooking. Quick little sidebar, I live in St. Louis. You may have heard we had a tornado that ripped its way through the central and northern part of the city. There are 1000s of people that have lost their housing and may not be able to get back in. And there’s a lot of need for assistance of various kinds. In the show notes, I’m going to post a link where you can find out how to help if you’re so inclined, or you can just Google “St. Louis tornado relief work,” something of that kind, and you ought to be able to find something as well. So I hope you’ll find a way to lend a helping hand to my neighbors. I live just a couple of miles away from where the worst of the damage occurred, and because of the way these storms can be so localized, we had no damage in our neighborhood, so we feel very lucky, but but I know we need to reach out and do all we can to help out our neighbors. Thanks to those of you who showed me some love through Patreon. For as little as $1 a month, you can join the Patreon community, and one of the benefits as you get these episodes early. There could be other benefits down the road we’ll see, plus you get to join this community, and it just makes me feel good knowing that you value this podcast and the work that I do about the Mississippi. If Patreon isn’t your thing, then you can buy me a coffee. I drink plenty of that. I drink it every day, and I appreciate any help keeping that coffee habit going. You want to know how to do either one of those, go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and there’ll be instructions on how to join the Patreon community or how to buy me a coffee. And at that same address, MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast you’ll find the list of all 59 previous episodes of this podcast, along with the show notes for each one. I hope you’ll check it out and maybe binge your way through that entire collection of episodes. For those of you astute listeners out there, you may notice a change in the audio quality about two thirds of the way through. I just want to let you know that you are not hallucinating. We did have some difficulties getting this interview completed. We were actually recording this during the tornado, and had to evacuate for a while to safe area in the middle of our interview. And then I lost some of that audio and had to restart. And then we had to evacuate again, so we weren’t able to finish the interview. So the last third or so of this interview, we completed over zoom. So thank you for your patience, Josh Galliano in particular, and thank you to the listeners for your patience with the varying audio quality in this interview. Well, let’s get on with the interview. Josh Galliano grew up near New Orleans along the Mississippi River, where life is a little slower and you can appreciate the good times and, of course, the good food. He attended Louisiana State University where he studied history and political science. Then his path shifted to Le Cordon Bleu London, where he received the Grand Diplome. He immersed in all things culinary during his studies in Europe, exploring green markets and eating at the temples of gastronomy. His adventures culminated by cooking at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003. During that time, he worked at two critically acclaimed restaurants that helped him reach culinary maturity. Angela Hartnett’s Menu and Roussillon. Through countless experiences at some of the world’s great restaurants, including Commander’s Palace and Restaurant Daniel, Josh has honed his skills and palate. Josh later moved to Southern Illinois and quickly went native with many amazing farms, producers, wineries, breweries and restaurants, Josh found his voice through food. The phenomenal community and support of the St Louis metro area has rewarded Josh with a loyal following and awards such as Food & Wine’s People’s Choice Best New Chef Midwest, and multiple nominations for the James Beard, Best Chef in the Midwest award. Josh’s cooking blends locality, technique, creativity and reverence for the ingredients in the food he creates. For eight years, Josh created breads and sweets for Companion Baking. Nowadays, he contributes his skills to community organizations, fundraisers and events like Heartland Conservancy’s Field to Fork. Sometimes you can even find him with Big Muddy adventures cooking on a sandbar. He also moonlights as an author, with articles published in local newspapers, recipes and national publications like Food & Wine, The Midwesterner, Feast magazine, and with his current endeavor, a cookbook. Josh, welcome to the podcast.

Josh Galliano 08:36

Thank you so much. Look. It’s been great to be invited here, but really been a big fan for a long time. So appreciate all the hours that you’ve helped me commute and all the podcasts I’ve been able to listen to.

Dean Klinkenberg 08:48

Well, that’s very generous. Thank you very much. And I’m grateful to have a chance to talk with you and learn more about your background and your connection to the river and how that affects your cooking as well. So let’s kind of start with your path into the world of professional cheffery. I don’t know what the right word phrase there is, but you started off on a very different path, where it didn’t look you didn’t have a culinary career in mind when you began as a history major. What changed?

Josh Galliano 09:17

Well, like many people in college, I needed to make money, but also I’d say like I was pretty, kind of lost in a few ways, like plenty of my friends had talents, and they had just natural ability and skills and many different things, and I never felt like I had that. But after realizing I’m not a front of the house person and I don’t need to wait tables, cooking felt like that natural place for me. Cooking was not maybe a talent, but it’s something that I honed and I got better at, and I knew I could do better than other people. So when I started off in Baton Rouge, cooking was at a bigger chain restaurant called Macaroni Grill, and that taught me a lot about speed. Taught me a lot about spec recipes and making sure everything was consistent. But what really was propelling for me as far as culinary was, I had a great mentor on the culinary side and and I had some good mentors on the political science side that also loved food. So the things kind of combined together when I was in grad school, because the catering company allowed me to have flexible hours. I could do different food when I was available. You know, it wasn’t just, hey, dinner starts at five, you need to be there. So I was really kind of lucky in that sense. And my mentor was really awesome as far as really showing me a lot more food than just standard stuff that was going on. She was worldly. She traveled a lot. Loved going to other countries. Her cookbook collection was phenomenal. And, you know, we got to kind of pick and choose what we wanted to cook sometimes.

Dean Klinkenberg 10:38

In a previous conversation, we talked a little bit about how you grew up in the river parishes and what your food experiences were like when you were growing up. So tell us a little bit about that.

Josh Galliano 10:50

Sure, the river parishes part that I grew up in, so it was called German Coast. Later on in the ’80s and ’90s, it was called Cancer Alley, and it was a great place to grow up, because we’re 20 minutes away from New Orleans. We’re, like, 45 minutes away from Baton Rouge. But it was still rural, you know, like we we still had the boundary of the Mississippi River on kind of our south side. We had different fields growing Creole tomatoes or satsumas on, you know, either side of where we were growing up. So it was, it was definitely more rural, but maybe not like farmland rural. Still, a lot of what everybody called sportsman’s paradise. There was a lot of fishing, there was a lot of hunting, and we didn’t necessarily do a lot of the hunting, but, you know, we did a lot of other stuff that, you know, we were able to kind of learn from our neighbors, like how to cook, you know. So growing up, we had, my mom’s side of the family is from small town, Mississippi, so we had a lot of good kind of traditional Southern food. And then my dad’s side of the family was New Orleans Italian, so we had that kind of Creole Italian mix that isn’t anything like other parts of like regional Italian cooking, or even stuff that you’d see like in Boston, Little Italy. We were Sicilian immigrants, so it was a little bit different, very poor. And that poverty driven nature meant that we were taking my ancestors, not me, were taking a lot of jobs that nobody else wanted – agriculture jobs, selling vegetables, selling oysters, door to door. I mean, these were kind of the things that were abundant in New Orleans during that time, but now not necessarily where everybody wants to do it. So they filled that gap.

Dean Klinkenberg 12:25

It’s interesting. You mentioned oysters. So would oysters have been at that time, kind of considered, like poor people’s food, or you can contrast that today.

Josh Galliano 12:32

Well, it definitely was. I mean, when you kind of look towards some of the I’m kind of a, I don’t know, cookbook geek, you know, and I do like looking at the history of things, oysters were definitely kind of like a poor person food and readily available. I mean, you look at some of the writings about the different markets around, like New York City, and, you know, there was tons of big game markets, and there was all these kind of seafood markets, and oysters were just readily available. Like, we did a great job almost wiping them out, you know, in different areas. And so like with New Orleans, that industry was predominantly Croatian to begin with, and then and Yugoslavian. And then the Sicilians came in and kind of helped also, but they weren’t the ones who were doing the harvesting. They were more the ones doing the selling. And there was a lot of Sicilians around, like the French market farmers market that was down there. So they really were the ones who were kind of pushing it as a commodity, but they weren’t the ones that were maybe doing the actual harvesting. When it came to the vegetables and different fruits. Yeah, there was a lot of Italians out in the fields. I mean, in many cases, you’d see advertisements, especially in like the Delta area, for Italians to come in and and be the replacement for the labor that was going up with the big migration going up towards Chicago. So, I mean, we were taking the jobs that nobody else wanted and making sure that the food that we cooked was still as tasty as possible, even no matter how poor we were.

Dean Klinkenberg 13:52

So did you have any particular like family recipes that really stood out for you?

Speaker 1 13:58

Oh, absolutely. I mean, my aunt Mary was the matriarch of the family recipes. She kept it all and, I mean, she was phenomenal. You know, if we knew that she was cooking for a family event, we were going no matter what. So, like her stuffed artichokes were phenomenal. And I forgot the connection. But we had somehow we married into the Manuel’s Hot Tamale family at some point with a cousin, so she got that recipe, and so we had the Hot Tamale recipe that would, you know, wind up for different kind of events. Take your pick. We had great food all the time, but probably the one that we all look forward to because it was so time consuming and onerous, was the stuffed artichokes, because she did it and nobody else wanted to put the time into it.

Dean Klinkenberg 13:58

Good to have that person around. So at some point, then you decided you weren’t going to stick in that career path, and you decided to go for a culinary career. What did it take for you to make that leap and get into the Cordon Bleu in London?

Speaker 1 14:57

The application process was actually pretty easy. You know, during that time, when we talking like late ’90s, we had the beginnings of the internet. So, you know, I could figure some things out. But the part that I wanted to really do was have a Michelin star experience, as far as work experience, and I didn’t want to repeat coursework that I already done at LSU. So I didn’t want to go to Culinary Institute of America or Johnson and Wales, because there was a possibility that had I’d have to repeat classes for an associate’s degree. But with Le Cordon Bleu, it was, it was all culinary. So I liked how it was focused. You know, it wasn’t kind of this all expansive degree. And then the other parts that worked out was that I found scholarships, and those scholarships I found because of the internet, and so I got a scholarship from International Association of Culinary Professionals and the James Beard organization, and that took care of about a third of my tuition. There was still the whole part of like you have to live and find a place to live, and that’s where going in as a student really worked out. So they stamped your visa to be able to legally work 20 hours a week when you go in as a student. And the first restaurant that I worked at Roussillon on basically had apartments above the restaurant, so I got to live in one of the communal kind of flats that was above the restaurant, which was fantastic. It’s probably where my coffee problem started off, because I had instant access to the espresso machine. But it was a phenomenal experience, really was.

Dean Klinkenberg 14:59

Is it? Is it possible to be a professional chef without going through one of those schools?

Speaker 1 16:28

I think that a lot of people like to call it the school of hard knocks. I know I do, but there’s always that possibility, but I think it probably takes a lot more, as far as from the individual and internally. You know that motivation to continue on and to find the right places to go, in many cases, you or I, if we were trying to start today, we’d have a lot more success, because there’s a lot more great restaurants. But you know, mid 90s or so, if you were in a town that didn’t have a great restaurant, it would probably take you a lot harder amount of work as well as dedication to get past whatever you were doing every day for a job and learn more and more to where you could become a good chef.

Dean Klinkenberg 17:10

All right, I’m always curious about that. So, so you got this great culinary training, and then somehow you ended up cooking on a sandbar with Big Muddy Adventures. So tell me how that came about.

Speaker 1 17:23

Big Muddy Adventures. Well, I first met Big Muddy Mike back in 2012. We were, I was doing a dinner that Gerard Kraft helped put together called Magnificent Missouri. And it was a four part dinner series, and I had the first part, it was indigenous foods. And so I was loving that idea. You know, you kind of combined a lot of stuff for me, and it involved cooking at the Audubon Center, the Riverlands Bird Migration Center. So it was beautiful setting, beautiful idea, as far as, like, how to shape the food, but I knew I couldn’t be authentic, and I knew that it would have to be something approachable and be more of telling a story. So as I’m prepping and getting everything ready at the Audubon Center, here comes a guy in like, this three piece red, yellow plaid suit, and he starts telling me about how he has this business where he, you know, does canoe trips on the Mississippi River. And the whole time, I was just like, You’re crazy. You are nuts. Like my mom told me not to get on the river. And I, what do you do? You know? And so he told me a little bit about it, but I didn’t really think much more about it for a while, until Mike’s business partner Roo said, Hey, we want to do these kind of like dinner series with chefs out on the river. Would you be interested? And so I think it was March 2016 went out to Pelican Island, had a meal out there. I didn’t know what to expect. Got home super late, but had a blast. It was just phenomenal. And the whole time, you know, I’m sitting there, like touching the water in the canoe, like I’m not supposed to be here. Luckily, you know, whenever I do those kind of crazy things, my mom and wife don’t really know how crazy it is until after the fact, but it’s been a lot of fun, that’s for sure.

Dean Klinkenberg 19:03

So I so you really hadn’t been out on the river very much until that time.

19:08

Well, a little bit. So the where I grew up, of small town called Montz, and so we’re right by the Bonnet Carre Spillway. So in a way, we’re always kind of encircled by it. And so when, like the floods are coming in, they open the locks. That’s a great time to go crawfishing. And so we go crawfishing in the spot that’s in between the river and the levee. And I always forget the name. It’s got a French name. Basically. It’s like, derriere, the batture. Yeah, batture. And so we would go crawfishing down there when the river would flood. And so you got a picture like this, Lord of the Flies kind of moment, with a bunch of kids, one four wheeler, and a bunch of crawfish nets and a shotgun, usually, and we would just go behind and set our nets and just keep going the length of the levee until we got to the spillway, and then come on back and do our nets all over again. We get about 50 pounds of crawfish or so from that, and then we’d have a boil. So we kind of dabbled a little bit in the river, but the we knew not to mess around with river. The spot where I grew up, had a terrible ferry crash back in ’76 and we didn’t have, like, a permanent bridge. The Hale Boggs Bridge, I think I want to say ’81 maybe it was a few years later, so we still had to take the ferry if we wanted to get to the other side of the parish. So it was definitely like, we knew, don’t mess with the river. It’s dangerous. You know, there’s always tons of traffic. You just don’t go there. The undertow will take you. You know, any kind of tall tale, or real tale was said to keep us out of the river?

Dean Klinkenberg 20:40

Yeah, it’s one of those things that’s so different between the upper and lower parts of the Mississippi. There’s such a different attitude and I think greater fear the further south you go, especially south of the Ohio River. But, yeah, very interesting. All right, so one of the things that I was really interested in talking with you about, because you’ve had these great experiences cooking with Big Muddy Adventures preparing these meals on sand bars. I thought it’d be fun just to kind of go through some of the practical tips you might be able to offer people who are campfire cooking. And I thought we’d just kind of start with really with some of the basics on this, and kind of go through a whole bunch of practical tips for folks, and this might end up being mostly for me, because I can use all the tips I can get for this. But let’s kind of start with the planning phase of this, when you’re thinking, when you know you’re going to be camping and cooking as part of that, what’s your process? What do you how do you approach, sort of planning for the food you’re going to prepare?

Speaker 1 21:39

I would say we can talk about some journal tips. But I also kind of think it’s a little fun to geek out a little bit on, like the French Corridor, Big Muddy trips that I’ve done, because it’s kind of like three dimensional chess, if you will. You know, like something out of Star Trek’s, you know, a Holodeck, and you’re sitting there and saying, okay with the French Corridor, we wanted to pay homage to, like, the Lewis and Clark, Corps of Discovery. And then I wanted to throw on to it, like more about our forged items and our locally sourced items. And then the other part of it is sustenance. You have to make sure that people get fed. So maybe taking kind of from the last to the first, the sustenance part for me, when I’m planning these trips, is insurance policies. I need to make sure people get fed. I am cooking for more than just me. I’m cooking for, you know, maybe 20 people or so. And when that’s going on, I don’t want to take chances. I hate the idea that I can’t do a particular dish that I wanted to do or or had planned to do. So I it’s not so much that I’m cooking everything ahead of time and I’m just reheating it, but I’m taking different steps to make sure that what I want to do can happen. So maybe, as an example, Saturday morning, traditionally, when we do the French Corridor trip, I do pawpaw pancakes. Pawpaws are fantastic, but I’m generally not like processing the pawpaw on the beach, you know? I mean, it’s such a fleeting time period that they’re good and ripe that I have to go to our we have a creek that runs on the south end of our property, and I pick them when I know they’re ripe, which could be the week of could be two weeks before, I don’t know. So I have to make sure that they’re ready when I need them. So I do all that kind of processing at home. But then to make the pancake part of it, I might measure out all my ingredients into a Ziploc bag to make the pancakes, and then just mix in the dry stuff with the wet stuff on the beach. And then, of course, cook them when we’re on the sandbar. You know, could you do it other ways? Absolutely. But at the same time, I also like to kind of tell a story and teach when I’m doing that. So not everybody’s had experience with pawpaws. I usually tell them, like, look, this is a cool fruit. Most people don’t know about it. We can’t even really commercially harvest it yet. We’re trying, but we’re not there yet. So here taste them. I want you to taste it in its pure form. And every now and then, if I have an abundance of pawpaws, I’ll bring a few whole ones so that they can see this is weird looking, and it’s cool, and you have to do a little manipulation to make it work, but that’s all a part of the story. And it’s all a part of the experience, right? Like, everything cooks really nicely over wood fire, but it tastes better over a wood fire. I don’t know why. So then, like, the next parts of it is, you know, we wanted to tell a story, and Big Money Mike said, I want to do it based off of Lewis and Clark. Can you do beaver tail? I’m like, No, I’m not doing beaver tail one. I’m not even sure I can source it legally, but I’m not doing no, like, we’ll do something else, you know. So with that being said, I kind of chose different ideas, and once again, kind of like the Magnificent Missouri dinner where it was about Indigenous People’s foods. I wanted to honor that, you know. So the Corps of Discovery also ate and killed a ton of game meat, you know. And so I always try to have some venison. And I’m not a big hunter, but I help a lot of folks with butchering their deer, and they’re very nice, and let me keep some of it. So I use. They have something like that as part of the planning. And, you know, they’re they’re going to keep the backstraps, so I have to take the lesser, nice cuts of meat that takes longer to cook. So I do that kind of cooking ahead of time, but maybe finish it on the campfire with different toppings or different ingredients into it. So like, one year, it was tomato and pepper braised venison. So we had a ton of tomatoes from our garden. We had a lot of peppers from our garden. We braced all that down with the venison ahead of time. But then finishing it was I cooked some rice grits on the campfire, which doesn’t take too long, but it was easy enough to do, and all you have to worry about is bringing water. So it really helps out to be able to do some cooking on the campfire, but then other cooking kind of done ahead of time, so you’re not worried about too much stress of balancing it out.

Dean Klinkenberg 25:47

So it sounds like part of that equation too, is that there are some things that really take longer times to cook and maybe a little more effort to prepare where you don’t have the space or the ideal conditions of a kitchen to process. So those, those things will be done in advance.

Speaker 1 26:07

Exactly. And, you know, the other beautiful thing is, now that we’re getting into being outdoors in the season for being outdoors, it’s actually great for not cooking, you know. So a lot of times when we do, kind of, like the one night, uh, adventures, I’m not preparing a lot of like hot food, like you’ve already been attacked by mosquitoes, or you’ve already been paddling it’s warm outside. So I try to focus more on salads, cooling kind of foods. One of my favorites is always like a feta pepper and watermelon salad with kind of a Laotian cilantro sauce, very much not typical river food, but at the same time, like, it’s really awesome when you’re sitting there coming off the river and you just want a bite to eat, that’s refreshing.

Dean Klinkenberg 26:47

It probably is typical river food if you’re along the Mekong, though, right,

Speaker 1 26:50

exactly. And, I mean, that’s, that’s the other fun thing is, like, you know, we try to tell stories about the food, and we try to tell stories about, like, maybe where it came from, or the inspiration. And there’s a lot of connections, you know, between, like, the river delta down where I grew up at, and me Mekong Delta. I mean, we’ve got a ton of Vietnamese immigrants into South Louisiana. And so that food definitely has influenced what I like to eat and what I like to cook. And so sometimes it shows up just kind of like what you’re saying, you know, like, it’s a good time of year for it, and all those ingredients are readily available in our area, so might as well just put it together.

Dean Klinkenberg 27:25

So as you’re as you’re sort of planning and getting these things together. So what are some of your tips and tricks for how to sort of properly store some of those foods, especially if you’re going to be out on a trip for two or three days?

Speaker 1 27:39

So that’s a great question, because in so many ways, like it’s probably the least thought about in my world, I tend to pack two coolers, so I label everything as far as what day it’s going to be used, and I try to basically reverse pack so that the stuff that’s going to be in there the longest is at the bottom, closer to the cold ice, and the stuff that’s going to be used immediately is right on top. And then, if I know that it’s a two cooler kind of trip, one cooler is never opened until I need it. You know, I don’t want to have to sit there and just kind of keep opening, keep opening, and I’m trying to make sure, like, for things that could possibly be cross contamination, I don’t have much of it, kind of like what you’re saying about some things that take longer to cook. Cook it ahead of time. Well, if it’s cooked, that’s less chance for a cross contamination possibility. And if it’s uncooked, then I’m making sure it’s sealed in a way that I don’t have a chance of it kind of leaking out, or anything happening to where it’s infecting and, you know, making a problem for other foods.

Dean Klinkenberg 28:42

Do you have a preferred kind of cooler?

Speaker 1 28:46

The ones that I can afford. I have an Arctic and I have a Moose Jaw, and I’m sure I’ve got some Igloos from, you know, old times. But it goes hand in hand with like, trying to make sure that everything stays cold. Make sure you get a good cooler that’s rated to stay cold for a long time. I mean, we used to have a Coleman one. It kind of looked nice and everything, but it was not good enough for multi day trips. The other thing that I do that maybe is a little outside of other people’s abilities, Cryovac your ice. It’ll stay longer, especially if you if you have, like, a ice crusher as part of your refrigerator. Crushed ice will compact very well, and it maintains its frozen nature for longer if you have it under vacuum. So it’s a trick that we’ve done in restaurants. It’s a little harder with like a food saver at home, but since it’s ice, it’ll still do it. It’s just not as maybe crushed and as compact as other parts?

Dean Klinkenberg 29:42

Well, that’s a great tip. Probably a lot of people have food compactors or something at home now, but you could just take a hammer or something and crush the ice that way into smaller bits. Are there certain kinds of foods that are more amenable for campfire cooking and certain foods you would never consider doing for campfire cooking?

Speaker 1 30:03

So I. But personally, I don’t want to have to boil water when I’m camping. I think it’s a waste of fuel. I also think that it’s one of those things you could do it at home, where you can, you know, make sure you have enough water, because water is so important when you’re on a trip, we always bank for one gallon per person per day, and that’s not for all the cooking. I don’t want to take away their water. I want to make sure that they have water for drinking and we have water for proper cleaning, not the other stuff of cooking, you know. So I stay away from dry pastas. I stay away from any kind of rice that needs more, you know, dry rice that you have to cook. So that’s my only really big rule of thumb, as far as things that are better cooking, maybe some raw fish. Fish is fantastic, and in so many ways a little wasteful, but really fun. I’d like to do the cedar plank cooking with salmon over the fires. And the reason why it’s wasteful is we leave no trace, and we leave no trace by burning the cedar planks afterwards. So it’s not cost effective, but it’s, it’s fun, and it’s a great show for everybody. You know, they see exactly where their fish is coming from and how we’re cooking it. So those are some big ones that I really love. And you know, we also are always worried about sustenance, and not so much like the sustenance, like, can you make it through these three days? But sustenance in the sense of, I don’t want you to be hungry while you’re paddling for three hours, and then we have to inadvertently stop so you can get a snack out of your bag. So because I worked at Companion, we had energy bites, and we had these really fantastic granola bars, which I’m sure the recipes somewhere online from Josh Allen, definitely worth making. And so I would buy them from Companion and bring them along, because they’re fantastic. Little like, pass outs for each day. So as we are loading into the boats on Friday, I usually pass out granola bars and say, save it. Eat it. You’ll enjoy it. But that doesn’t require refrigeration. It doesn’t require me to really do a whole lot other than cut it ahead of time. So it’s a great kind of like little gimme. You get sustenance, you get great taste, and at the same time, you don’t have to worry about, like, anything else, no cutting boards, nothing.

Dean Klinkenberg 32:12

That’s a good idea. I like that. I know I’ve been on canoe trips where it’s more commercial, commercially made granola bars or whatever that people keep in their their dry bag under their feet or something, but having something homemade like that, or freshly made that would be preferable. Okay, so equipment? What? What is the sort of mandatory kind of equipment you feel like you have to have with you to cook, alright?

Josh Galliano 32:40

Some of the things that I always want to bring grill grates. You know, the little folding grill is great for me, because, one, I need coffee in the morning, and so I can pop my little percolator on top of there. You know, I’m going to set pans on top of that. Or I can just grill directly on especially, sausages are great, you know, I usually start off everybody with a homemade andouille on the first night, and you can just put them right on the grill so, you know, I don’t have to worry about another pan at that point, which is really great. And then the second tool that I always kind of really rely on is fold up tables, or the roll up tables really. And I know there’s different manufacturers for those, but those are quintessential for me, because I need a decent amount of space for kind of preparing and also serving the food. So the I think the tables are maybe two by three, I think so, you know, those are great. They roll up. They’re very handy, easy to carry, not super heavy. So it’s not like we’re packing out a ton of weight. But those are the two main things that I generally always have when I’m on a camping cooking trip.

Dean Klinkenberg 33:45

I think that’s the part that I often forget about. You know, when I’m going to be out, a lot of times I’m just car camping, but I’ve been on canoe camping trips too, but is making sure there’s that little extra space to work with, to prep food on, to cut dice things up a little bit. So that sounds like a really great solution to have something that’s not heavy.

Speaker 1 34:07

And I think there’s so many options out there now, like you can find one that fits for how you like to pack and how you like to camp. You don’t have to get, like, the bigger ones that that we carry around, because you’re probably not cooking for 10 to 20 people either. You know, we, we tend to always have some cast iron, you know. But once again, it’s heavy, you know, and not everybody wants to carry that around. But, I mean, there’s, there’s some really great options out there. And seeing how we’re in St Louis, Griswold was a great company from around here, you can find some of their lighter cast iron, which should be at most flea markets.

Dean Klinkenberg 34:40

Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the Mississippi. My newest book, The Wild Mississippi, goes deep into the world of Old Man River. Learn about the varied and complex ecosystem supported by the Mississippi, the plant and animal life that depends on them. And where you can go to experience it all. Find any of these wherever books are sold. So you mentioned fish. What’s your what’s your idea about fish from the river pro / con? Like, if you’re going to have catfish as part of a camp cookout, are you going to buy catfish from a commercial farmer? You’re going to try to catch it when you’re out.

Josh Galliano 35:37

So one trip that we did on the river, I did bacon fat fried catfish, and I went for farm raised. And a few reasons for that, I can’t catch enough around. I live near the Kaskaskia River. I would not be able to catch enough to feed, you know, 10 to 20 people. But the other part is, like, fish out of the river I’m pretty okay with. I mean, it was always great growing up. You’d always see we had the Times Picayune was our major paper. And inevitably, once a year there would be a picture of some kid who caught, like, this monster catfish, and he’s hauling it back home, like on his bike, you know. And it’s just like doing this miraculous, you know, just balancing act. And it’s fun. It’s kind of cool. I mean, obviously I would catch and eat the crawfish out of the river. We didn’t do a whole lot of other Mississippi River fishing, but my grandparents had a fishing camp off of Old River, which was actually Raccourci Old River. It’s part of the oxbow just in Pointe Coupee Parish, little north of Baton Rouge, and we did a lot of fishing there. So that was mainly for Sac-a-lait, which everybody knows as crappie around here, some bass and perch and gar, and we didn’t keep the gar, but you know, you could catch a lot of gar out there.

Dean Klinkenberg 36:50

Few years ago, we were on a sailboat trip in Central America off the Belize coast, and one of the dishes that they made for us was ceviche, is that? So I’ve actually two questions. One, like, ceviche, seems like it could be a pretty good campfire, camping out kind of food, but you were gonna have to do some prep in advance. Probably, what would you think about catfish for that?

Speaker 1 37:13

So as a general rule of thumb, most people say no to freshwater fish as ceviche, and a lot of the reasons is because you don’t know the water source that well, kind of like the solution to pollution is dilution. Well, fresh water, you don’t have a chance to dilute as much. But I would say that that’s not quite true. A lot of the salmonid fish, trout, steelhead trout, those are fine for ceviche, and would work really well if you wanted to actually have some freshwater fish for ceviche, you would need to do a little bit of pre cooking to it, and not just have the acid do the tightening of the muscle structure. So I would say something flakier catfish is kind of meaty, and you would have to kind of slice it and then cook it and then hope that doesn’t fall apart. But strangely enough, something in that carp, big, flaky family, would do okay. We do have some smaller sturgeon that would probably be all right, although I haven’t tried it for ceviche, it’s got a tight muscle structure. It would do well for cooking and then applying a citrus onto it.

Dean Klinkenberg 38:11

Interesting. I love ceviche, but I was never sure, like, what kinds of fish would really be the ideal kinds of fish for that? Alton Brown had a recipe for catfish ceviche, really he did on one of his shows. Yeah, I’ll have to see if I can find it and send it to you and let you critique that.

Josh Galliano 38:28

But one I would not critique Alton Brown. I grew up loving his show when it was good eats, and just always been a big fan. But, I mean, that’s one of the guys who really helped to kick us off, I think Food Network and the kind of love of culinary world, you know. And he did it in a great fun directorial way, did it in a super smart way. And he also showed some recipes that were like quintessential going to work every time he did them, yeah? I would love to see that recipe,

Dean Klinkenberg 38:56

Yeah. And I do remember that he was pretty insistent on farm raised catfish for that recipe, so probably for the reasons that you described. So if the folks who are listening are interested in that, I just say Google on probably YouTube, Alton Brown catfish ceviche, and you can probably find a clip of that video. What about drinks?

Josh Galliano 39:14

Yeah, that’s a really good one, because in so just kind of like we were saying about like the food culture has really kind of progressed. So is our drink culture. And I like seeing everyone bring their own drinks. So you see this whole mix of people who are bringing in, so no glass on the water, right? So they’re bringing in different cans from micro breweries or craft breweries all over the place. They’re seeing different box wines. You know, a lot of folks are putting some effort into, hey, what do I want to drink out there? But then you also see some folks bringing in kombucha, which is really cool. Really enjoyed that. So there’s also this fun kind of sharing moment, you know, like Amanda, who’s one of the guides for Big Muddy. I would trade with. Her some beers. Like she say, I have this. I have this one from Louisiana. You want to switch. And sure enough, yeah, then you have a trade, and you kind of get to learn something new. But as far as, like, making specialty drinks, I like the idea of a few different things, especially with the campfire kind of cooking going on, you can have a hot toddy very easily, especially as the night temperatures can dip on you. That’s pretty good. And especially with, like, still 630 right here in our backyard, you’ve got some great resources for tidying up the hot toddy but the other part that’s really neat is we’ve got some pretty cool fruits around here and some pretty cool kind of ways that you can utilize different flavorings. So we’ve got sumac, we’ve got elderberry. Was fantastic. But, you know, a lot of those are not eat out of your hand. You know, they’re not just like grapes or anything, so you have to do some kind of manipulation to them. And you can turn them into shrubs. You can turn them into like these mixers that can be alcoholic or non alcoholic. And so the elderberry part is pretty neat too, because you can use the flowers, which are June ish or so coming up and make a cordial ahead of time. And then the berries, you could also, let’s see, that’s end of August, they should be ripening up. You can take the berries and turn them into a syrup, which we do for serving with the pancakes. But then you can take that syrup and make it into a cocktail as well, which is pretty nice.

Dean Klinkenberg 41:18

Oh, those were some great ideas. And the only, I think I actually have had pawpaw twice. Maybe it’s a native fruit. We didn’t really explain much about pawpaw. You wanted to say, real quickly, a word of reverence for the pawpaw.

Speaker 1 41:30

Well, kind of like what you were saying, like, go online and YouTube. Usually, the New York Times has a great article or two about pawpaws this past year or two. There is ones about people growing pawpaws in New York City, or kayakers in DC along the Chesapeake Bay, like they would pick them and eat them, you know, like with the Corps of Discovery and Lewis and Clark. They didn’t know if pawpaws were an allergy or poisonous. They ate them, and then they had these breakouts, and only later did they figure out, like these big burly guys were probably also hands deep in poison ivy, sweating so much, and so they were probably just eating with dirty hands covered in poison ivy that didn’t break out because they were so callous, but then rubbing their face and getting poison ivy in their eyes while they were eating pawpaws, you know, like, it’s got this weird kind of past that’s really neat and kind of cool and esoteric, but it’s, unfortunately, not a commodity fruit like Baker Creek seeds and a few other folks are trying to make it to where it’s commercially available, but it’s not quite there, and it’s a cool one. You know, if you, if you want to, there’s a great book called The Pawpaw Handbook. It’s phenomenal. Has a lot of great recipes in it, tells you how to break it down and everything. But it’s a tropical fruit. It’s the largest fruit native to North America. It’s also really interesting. It’s flowers are this magenta color, that’s really neat. But they’re not pollinated by like bees. They’re pollinated by beetles, and then the other, and flies, and the other part of it, they believe I could be really off on this, but all my NPR listening, I remember they said that it probably was the mammoths that were really helping to propagate and push the migration of the pawpaw because the canopy for the pawpaw tree is either really low or really high. And the really low ones are deer fodder, you know, but the really high ones, the older stands, were tall enough for where mammoths could actually get to the fruit and, of course, deposit it along their way. So I mean, we’ve got this really interesting fruit that came about before fruits were really being fruits, you know. And it’s an ancient leftover thing that tastes good.

Dean Klinkenberg 43:32

How would you describe the flavor?

Josh Galliano 43:34

So most people describe it as kind of a mix of tropical fruits, mainly bananas. It’s like a custardy texture. So it’s got a little banana, depending on the ripeness, you get a little mango out of it. You might get a little passion fruit out of it, but it’s in that tropical realm without having too much acidity.

Dean Klinkenberg 43:49

So So you mentioned that pawpaws as a nice seasonal ingredient to work with. There’s a fairly small window of time when those are really available. But there, there are other ingredients that come available during the season as well. You have ideas for other kinds of, like, ways to approach using seasonal ingredients, or other, like, mid summer ingredients that you love using?

Josh Galliano 44:13

Yeah. So I think in many ways, you know, it’s kind of take inspiration from what’s coming up, right? And so if it’s growing together, it goes together, which is really great to kind of keep in mind. You know, right now, being that it’s May, we’re still into asparagus season, so a very simple kind of marinated or grilled and seasoned asparagus is fantastic, because you don’t have to really pack much to come with you, and you definitely aren’t packing a lot to go out, and it could go very well with just a little bit of sliced bread. As you know, bring a nice loaf of an artisanal bread with you, and kind of grill that almost to a bruschetta, you know, when I think later in the season, one of the things I like to do is we have a lot of peppers that come up, and so we’ll do more like a Mediterranean kind of take on it with, like a peppers, almost a sweet and sour agrodolce. And that goes really well as a dip, almost with a whipped feta cheese or whipped ricotta cheese. And so obviously, we’re not really whipping it on the on the sandbar or anything. But you know, if we pack it away already whipped at home, that makes it a little bit easier. And the agrodolce is very quick to come together, because it’s a quick saute with a little bit of sweetness, possibly from something that you have left over from breakfast, like a sorghum molasses or even a honey, and then a little bit of a sour component, which could be a part of a salad dressing, or as simple as a vinegar that you bring just for that. So we really like to kind of focus on the things that take little to no cooking, but really pack a lot of flavor to it. And I know we mentioned that kind of watermelon salad, but there’s plenty of other ones out there. As zucchini is coming up, you can think of it as like a shaved zucchini type salad with, you know, big flavors of lemon and herbs, you know, whatever you have coming up. Obviously, basil goes really well with it, but you can think kind of the Southeast Asian variety of flavors too, where it’s mint, basil, cilantro, and it really just requires you to do a little cutting work and that, that stuff I love, because I really like to minimize my time in front of the fire when I’m not just sitting back enjoying it. You know, sipping on coffee or talking and telling tales, the fire is great, but it’s also middle summer, and hot as can be, so you don’t want to sweat while you’re doing all that too much, at least.

Speaker 1 44:18

Right, right? You got to have that campfire conversation time, so you don’t want to spend the whole time cooking, right? So, yeah, zucchini is an interesting one too, because I know I like zucchini on its own, doesn’t seem like it’s got much flavor. And is it sort of like a blank palette in your mind, like there you find different ways to dress it up, like with the ingredients you mentioned?

Josh Galliano 46:54

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when, if you’re growing zucchini, you’re well aware that when it starts coming, it’s coming, and a lot at you. So you kind of have to either find that favorite recipe and just keep doing it all through zucchini season, or keep varying it up. And that the varying it up is where I like to play, because it is kind of a blank palette, and it’s a texture which is really cool. But at the same time that blank palette could go in so many different directions. You could throw olives and, you know, big kind of citrus onto it. You can go more muted to where you have just really simple, kind of the seasonal vegetables at the time, peppers and tomatoes and zucchini all together, and you let them kind of blend on their own. It’s very much whatever you want to kind of make it, you know, and it’s just there to kind of get you a little bit more green vegetable sustenance. And, you know, something that has some bite to it that does kind of soften up over time.

Dean Klinkenberg 47:46

So that’s something you could cook over the grill and then toss with those herbs. Or you could do that, I guess that could be a cold prep, something you just do in advance and have ready there, right away.

Josh Galliano 47:57

Absolutely. I mean, that’s, that’s the beauty of, you know, how we were talking about the asparagus, you know, a vegetable that you can bring grill it, it holds up, and you don’t have to worry too much about, like, other preparations or overcooking it, or not getting that exact medium steak temperature that your friend wants to have. Super versatile, you know, and that’s, that’s what’s really awesome about it.

Dean Klinkenberg 48:18

So for the protein, or the mains, then, like, you know, probably a lot of us default to hot dogs and hamburgers and nothing wrong with that. You know, I’m a big fan of both of those myself. But if people are interested in maybe mixing it up a little bit, what are some some tips for maybe getting outside of that routine?

Josh Galliano 48:36

A lot of times, I kind of think back to what I’ve got three kids that are in scouts. So we kind of always shoot back to what we tell them to do and not do. So really, when it comes down to it, just make it to where it’s something that’s going to cook relatively quickly. You don’t have to spend a lot of time tending the fire or making sure that it’s it’s fully cooked, you know. So stay away from the things that are like braising or boiling just so that you can spend more time enjoying your company or enjoying the setting. So the quick cook stuff, I mean, my kids really love foil packs, so that’s always a big hit for us. And when it comes to proteins, seafood is very quick and efficient. You know, I know it’s not always on someone’s radar, but cooks quickly, packs pretty easily, you know, really compartmentalize into hopefully no cross contamination. But it works so well. And when you’re already by the water, it just seems to be a natural fit. So we mentioned kind of the cedar board or cedar plank on salmon, which is really great. Even flaking a fish into a saute really works well, you know. So you don’t have to worry about, you know, that perfect sear for perfect center of the plate filet of whatever fish you can kind of have it to where it’s really just a component onto a saute or onto another dish. So in that case, you know, a lot of times it’s the last thing that might go. Into a pan of succotash, you know. And the succotash could be not that kind of traditional fall type succotash, but something more like Three Sisters, where it’s very fresh, vibrant peppers and corn, sweet corn, and something that really, the fish just accentuates. So that’s, that’s where my mind usually goes when I’m trying to break out of that norm. But you know, like you said, this past weekend, when we were camping, I got some good garlic and green onion sausage. But you know, it was a quick cook because we were already kind of behind the eight ball when it came to setting up our tents. But it kind of goes really well because you’re used to it.

Dean Klinkenberg 50:37

Right, absolutely right. So what about foil packs and like, what are some of the considerations to really make that work? And do you have a favorite sort of go to a recipe for that?

Josh Galliano 50:48

I’d say a lot of times we just call it, you know, foil pack hamburgers. So that’s, that’s a favorite of one of my daughters. The other consideration is just trying to have it to where you’re cutting the vegetables that go into the foil pack so that they roughly will cook at the same time. You know, that’s, that’s one of those things that maybe, as a cook, I think about more often, but it’s, it’s definitely kind of that more Asian stir fry idea, make the vegetables to where they all roughly will cook at the same time. And that might take a little trial and error, but you know what I mean, everyone that’s going to be around the campfire is pretty forgiving. They’re not going to send the food back to the chef and ask for a redo, but the vegetables around the same size, and then hopefully your protein is not going to have to take a long time to cook. I mean, the beauty of the foil pack is that you do steam and kind of roast at the same point. But if you can kind of take your protein, maybe it’s chicken breast, and filet it a little bit thinner that could help speed things up to the point where you’re not overcooking your vegetables while you’re waiting for your chicken to cook. And then the other tip I always have is just keep a probe thermometer, one of those instant read probe thermometers, in your mess kit so that you can quickly poke it and make sure that you did hit a good temperature. Because sometimes, you know, they those foil packs move off to the side and you don’t realize it didn’t get as much heat as another one.

Dean Klinkenberg 52:13

Right. And sometimes the the fire slows down at one spot versus another. You may not be have noticed that the cooking temperature had dropped a lot. Yeah, those instant read thermometers are really indispensable.

Josh Galliano 52:25

Yeah and the technology has come so far, and the price has dropped so much on the digital ones, it’s even easier now. And kind of to your point, maybe on side note, you know, when we’re camping on a sandbar, we’re mainly dealing with driftwood, and Driftwood burns super hot, super fast. So really paying attention to those temperatures in making sure that you’re hitting good safety temperatures on your cooking, it’s pretty important. And I mean, if you do it often enough, you can just go by your feel and your senses, but if it’s kind of new to you, take the extra moment to be cautious and make sure things are cooked right.

Dean Klinkenberg 53:04

Absolutely. Yeah, so we haven’t really talked at all about dessert options. One of my favorite sort of after dinner snacks in the summertime, especially coming up here in June, is just to get some fresh blueberries and maybe toss them a little bit of lemon juice and honey. Do you have other quick and easy sort of ideas for that? Obviously, ice cream is probably not the best idea.

Josh Galliano 53:29

So in in some cases, what I try to do is kind of the same idea with the the pawpaw pancakes is that I have maybe a bag of prepared dry ingredients that I plan to mix together. So I really think in that, that realm of the American desserts of like grunts and slumps and buckles and cobblers, obviously. So in some cases, whenever the trip is happening, I really try to look to see what are the seasonal fruits around me. In some cases, it’s fantastic because it’s peaches, because you don’t really have to do a whole lot to peaches. Kind of back to the idea of a real simple grilled peach with a syrup, or even, you know, a splash of vinegar, really goes well for an ending part of the meal. When it comes to some of the later fruits in the season, we grow muscadines, which is a native grape to America. And so there’s the grape hole kind of pie realm, which is kind of akin to the cobblers and stuff. And we’ll make a grape hole slump, which is really easy to do over a campfire. And as long as you’ve got a Dutch oven with a lid, you’re pretty good. Now on the sandbar with the kind of driftwood coals, it takes a little bit more work just trying to make sure that the top gets cooked before the bottom gets burnt. But in a lot of cases, a good Dutch oven with one of the flatter lids works out great for that.

Dean Klinkenberg 54:54

I’m getting hungry.

Speaker 1 54:58

That’s the problem with these kind of talks is that we start having a good time talking about what we want to eat, and then also, it’s like, Is it lunch yet?

Dean Klinkenberg 55:07

Lunchtime somewhere. Yeah, the other thing that I think we should probably talk about quickly too, is, is just the idea of cleanup, and you mentioned, leave no trace. Can you just say a little bit about your you know, how you approach that cleanup and and the way you pack out your trash.

Josh Galliano 55:26

So the one thing that I’m not too pleased with, but it’s kind of a necessary evil, is I bring nitrile gloves with me when I’m preparing, because I’m usually going between three to four different dishes for one meal at a campsite. So for me, that’s that’s a problem because I’m creating a lot of trash every time I switch between gloves, but it’s the necessary evil, because I can’t sit there and really wash my hands every time, or I’m using up a ton of water. That’s kind of maybe necessary but unnecessary. So when that happens, I’m usually keeping one Ziploc bag and just keep popping my gloves in there so that I’m not creating a mess that gets blown away when it comes to the rest of it. There’s usually never any extra food, and that’s a big plus, and I love that. But if there is, we’ll tend to burn it basically. So we’ll make sure that before we put out the campfire. We spread the coals a little bit and burn anything that might be extra or, let’s say, I screwed up and I accidentally scorched something that’s going on to the fire. As far as the cleanup goes, I try to make it to where the cast iron is quickly and easily scraped out in a quick reboil of potable water before we pack it away, and that’s just so that I don’t ruin the seasoning on it, and I can use it fairly quickly for the next cook that I need to do after that. We kind of treat it just like with any other camp out. We survey the area, we make sure we grab everything that we meant to grab, pack it away as compact as possible. So back to the idea of, I have two ice chests, one that I use for kind of each day, you know, as I’m emptying out one ice chest, that ice chest is empty and now getting filled up with any trash that needs to be brought back that can’t be, you know, taken care of on the beach side, or it’s, you know, coming back with a dirty dish that can’t be taken care of on the campsite. So we’re trying to minimize the expansion of trash space, but at the same time, make sure that we’re not leaving anything for someone else to have to deal with.

Dean Klinkenberg 57:32

Right. So just to be clear, too, like you’ve got food scraps from the meal or bones or something like that. What’s your approach to handling those?

Josh Galliano 57:41

Most of the time, if that can’t be burnt, we’re going to bury it so that, you know, it’s not going to be an immediate kind of like a raccoon or something digging it up. Hopefully, you know, we don’t have to worry about that most of the time. When it comes to the really, kind of more problematic stuff, if I think that it shouldn’t be on a beach to where it could be, you know, dug up relatively soon, I’m going to bring it back with me. And honestly, I haven’t really had a whole lot of those instances that I’ve had to worry about, but if I’m at all concerned about it impacting the surrounding nature, I’ll just bring it back with me and deal with it back home.

Dean Klinkenberg 58:19

Fantastic. I have a feeling we could have this discussion for hours on end, but we probably also have other things that need to happen in our lives. So I know you have a work in progress right now. Would you like to preview a little bit what you’re currently working on?

Josh Galliano 58:36

Thanks, and I guess it’s one of those kind of like moments of full disclosure, thank you also for guiding me through some of this. So I’m trying to while I’m working on a cookbook, and the cookbook is basically an outgrowth of my realization that for whatever reason, I’ve lived around rivers my whole life, and those rivers have been a big impact on what it was like growing up, but also what it’s been like for me, personally and professionally. So it’s definitely a memoir, kind of a souvenir type cookbook, where I’m telling stories, but I’m also imparting a bunch of recipes that are either reflective of that area, that that time in my life, or something that I’ve kind of taken as inspiration and worked on through the years. So in my sense, I grew up along the Mississippi River and lived along the Mississippi River at different parts of my life. I mean, obviously we’re kind of in that range again, but I’ve also lived around Cane River, Old River in Louisiana, the Thames. Now I’m kind of close to the Kaskaskia. So all these rivers have kind of had an impact on who I am and what I’ve done, and I kind of want to just honor that, and I think it’s a good time in my life to be able to put that into words and and kind of hopefully inspire some other people to get out there and enjoy the river ways.

Dean Klinkenberg 59:57

That sounds fantastic. I’m sure there’ll be a whole bunch of people. Interested in reading a book like that, especially if you dropping in a recipe here and there, and helping us expand our of the possibilities when we when we had the kitchen or the campfire.

Josh Galliano 1:00:10

And I like how you said that too, because, you know, it’s not just recipes for when you’re out on the river camping, or for the things that you get out of the rivers. You know, it is hopefully going to be something that you can use on various parts of your life. And kind of to that point too, is like, you know, we want to kind of really talk about the sustainability of our river ways and talk about the relatively heritage foods that come from them. So it’s kind of like I said, paying homage, and, you know, kind of working with a lot of people that have different input. So, you know, we work with the Big Muddy folks we work with. I get a chance to work with NGRREC [the National Great River Research and Education Center], you know, and kind of taking their expertise of what they do and filtering it into the cookbook, and hopefully the recipes and the stories as well.

Dean Klinkenberg 1:00:58

All right. Well, that sounds great. So if people are interested in kind of following your progress, I know you have been posting occasional updates about things that you’re working on with this, if people want to follow your work and know and be informed when the book is ready to be released to the world, what’s the best places for people to follow you right now?

Josh Galliano 1:01:18

Instagram would be best. So the handles JoshGalliano and the website’s a work in progress right now, so I’ll announce it on Instagram when the website is up and going, and hopefully all the little kinks and nuances are worked out.

Dean Klinkenberg 1:01:32

Great, Josh, thanks so much for your time and for your patience during this interview.

Speaker 1 1:01:38

Well, thank you for having me, obviously, you know, thanks for the guidance as well, because it takes a lot of patience both ways to make this one work.

Dean Klinkenberg 1:01:47

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon to help keep the program going, just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg, if you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that’s set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley traveler podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time you.