Try it, You'll like it.

So here I am standing over last night's coals, wondering what to do about breakfast. The setting is picturesque upstate New York, in a campground just outside Lake Placid. I'm leading the divisional trip for the sophs, and I've got twenty two of them stirring in their tents. While the four counselors in my charge do their best to help the kids with their tents and personal belongings, I take stock of what's left of our provisions. Dinner last night consisted of dozens of hamburgers and hotdogs, as well as a sleeve of gardenburgers for the kids that claim to have become vegetarians by the ripe old age of thirteen. Gardenburgers are the primary prey of actual burgers, so you have to keep them well separated in transit. Back to reality. When your buddy is eating a hamburger, you want one too. This leaves us with a dozen-or-so Gardenburgers, a tad mushy from spending the night in a cooler of ice and water. In addition, I have a much coveted pound of real bacon, a pound of cheese, two dozen eggs, and two dozen bagels...

The “plan” was to make everyone a fried egg on a toasted bagel. That plan went out the window when it became clear I could only fry ten eggs at a time, even in the rather gargantuan 20” skillet I had commandeered from the Nature Shack. No one wants to go hungry when your buddy is eating, so the new plan was throw everything in the pan and get this shitshow of a meal over with. After all, we had mountains to climb and cliffs to leap from before the day was over.

Back in college, The breakfast joint up the road from my apartment served a greasy, filling (and cheap) amalgamation of hashbrowns, bacon, sausage, eggs and cheese. It was a hodgepodge of whatever was left on the griddle, and they called it “Breakfast Stew.” In it's basic form, its a simple combination of starch, meat, eggs, cheese and fat. With that as my lofty goal, I began.

The carbon steel pan I had was as far from non-stick as you can get, especially when cooking over the fickle mistress of campfire. Using gardenburgers as the starchy component of this mess meant they would need to be crispy. I clearly needed fat. Enter heavenly bacon! I fried up the pound of bacon, then removed the prized porkbelly from the pan and added the now mushy lump of starch. To my delight, it sizzled and browned quickly. Once enough of it had browned, I poured a deluge of scrambled eggs into the pan. After some judicious turning, half the monstrosity I was creating was covered in crumbled bacon. Why half? Well some of the boys don't eat pork, you see. Oblivious to the fact the whole dish was swimming in rendered swine, no visible bacon in their serving was quite agreeable. The entire surface was covered on cheese, and melted into a seamless blanket of garish orange that only American processed cheese can provide. While I was creating this grand experiment, my capable staff were deftly toasting bagels; easier said than done without burning them. With a finite supply, this was an important consideration.

The moment of truth arrived, as campers who had successfully packed up their things and scoured the earth for all traces of their presence lined up to receive their fuel for the day. In truth, I was both pleased and surprised to see the looks of wide-eyed ecstasy that followed the first tentative bites. Soon came laudations and and superlative compliments of my efforts, as well as the obvious question:

“What's this called?”

Pitching the idea of this meal as acceptable, even common would require salesmanship. In the most casual and matter-of-fact voice I could muster, I proclaimed it as Adventure Slaw... From my perspective, we were on an adventure and the newly christened dish had an appearance similar to coleslaw. As any food anthropologist worth their salt will tell you, the word “slaw” is a derivative of salad, from the latin salata which dates to Roman times. Salads are combinations of anything you want them to be. Solid logic, no doubt.