On the ranch we're all about the outdoors, there's nothing quite like a meal cooked over a campfire. Make delicious jaffles or slow cook a stew, maybe give a steak or two a whirl using our provided Barebones cast iron cookware. How good is cooking on the campfire?! Pretty damn good.

For Christmas we bought ourselves this book by @harryfisher Fire to Fork it's got recipes from his adventures cooking out in the wilderness, it's also got great tips on the equipment to buy and it's not a typical cookbook with impossible recipes - it's practical for cooking on the road and bloody delicious (well we haven't tried all the recipes but they look tasty). We took some inspiration and cooked up a meal when staying at a cabin in Kangaroo Valley. It was such a nice way to pass the time being outdoors with a tasty reward at the end. Result - we've included outdoor cooking equipment for all our stays to make it part of the adventure.

At our stays we’ve included cast iron cookware from Barebones. Barebones is a cookware company all about food, nature, and the primal pull of the fire. They’re also a BCorp and they provide primary assets, like shelters to underprivileged communities across the world.

Anyways, back to the cooking. So one morning we headed down to the ranch dam, packed a traditional b&e breakfast into the Yeti esky and did our first basic cook-up. Only the best local eggs from Bega Valley Eggs and bacon from the local butcher. We weren't going for anything fancy that day, just wanted to try out our new campfire spot and picnic table we built for this very specific purpose - worked a treat!

The dam backdrop is so relaxing, we can see many memories being made around this place particularly after we fix up the dam jetty. The previous owners told us they used to swim in it, no one's been game enough yet but it will happen we're sure.

Anyway back to cooking, so the pan we’re using here is the Barebones 10 inch Skillet when using cast iron there’s a couple of things to be aware of, cast iron shouldn’t be washed in soapy water like regular pots and pans. It needs to be washed with water and a brush, cast iron needs special cleaning care to get the most out of it. It needs to be well seasoned (oiled) to keep its awesome non-stick qualities and it’s sturdy; it will break something before it breaks itself.

From our experience it’s worth the extra effort, after years of failed frypans being thrown every couple of years it felt wasteful for us to keep buying new ones so we invested in a cast iron skillet for our everyday use (even on our old induction cooktop). With a little love and care we know it will last forever, it’s basically indestructible. We had to learn to cook a little differently, it retains heat and gets really HOT so we burn our pine nuts often. The handle gets super hot too so we need to move it around with an oven mit, but the upsides are well worth it. The food tastes and cooks better and like we said, basically indestructible.

Instead of using a grill here we've just put a couple of pieces of timber we got from the firewood shed, the Barn Studio is stocked with a grill though and we'll give that a go another day.

At each of our stays we include the Fire to Fork cookbook in the library, all the outdoor cooking equipment this experience becomes part of the adventure staying at the ranch.

Every month we'll be publishing a new Campfire Cook recipe which you’ll find here in our Journal, we'll post up on Instagram and give you a copy in your stay to give you some inspiration for your next meal. Or just keep it simple like us and go with the b&e can't go wrong really!