Szymanski Kris - Men with the Pot Cookbook: Delicious Grilled Meats and Forest Feasts

DELICIOUS GRILLED MEATS AND FOREST FEASTS

KRIS SZYMANSKI & SLAWEK KALKRAUT

CHAPTER 1
A FIELD GUIDE FOR USING THIS BOOK

CHAPTER 2
FOREST COOKING AROUND THE WORLD

CHAPTER 3
MEAT MADNESS

CHAPTER 4
CHICKEN, TURKEY, AND DUCK

CHAPTER 5
FOREST BAKING

CHAPTER 6
FROM THE SEA AND INTO THE FOREST

CHAPTER 7
BURGERS, SANDWICHES, TACOS, AND QUESADILLAS

Hello! Witajcie! We are Slawek and Krzysztof, two Polish friends living in Northern Ireland. In our ten years of friendship, weve bonded over a mutual love of braving the elements to create mouthwatering meals.

Maybe youre already familiar with MenWithThePot from Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. What started as an Instagram page, where we shared our outdoor creations with friends and family, quickly snowballed into a passion project that people all over the world began to connect with.

Folks often ask us why our videos have caught on the way they have. From the beginning, we decided we should offer something different. On nearly every social media cooking channel, its all about the cook or the chef, and theres always a persons face in front of you sharing a childhood story. We realized we were tired of the people cooking the recipeswe wanted to see the food! For us, its all about food and nature, especially the beautiful sounds of both.

At that time, we did know about ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response, that blissful tingling sensation you get with certain soothing sounds or visuals), but that wasnt our original goal with the videos. Then, as we searched through social media, we happened upon a woman on YouTube, and there was just something about her we couldnt pinpointshe was just talking! But something about her voice wound its way into our ears, and that idea became the basis of what we do. (Except for that time loggers started working with saws beside us; they completely destroyed the whole ASMR thing...)

Going back to that first video, we figured wed set out into the woods because weve both hunted and fished, and weve both cooked lots of dishes before. The first recipe we made was ribs. We used a cast-iron pressure cooker, added potatoes, onion, and a bunch of spices, and cooked it for 2 hoursin a firepit we put on an island in a stream! We didnt know what we were doing! In fact, if you scroll down to our first recipes on Instagram, youll wonder, What are these guys doing? But you can also see progresswere getting better! Those ribs, by the way, were falling off the bone and very good.

By viewer request, we now have a cookbook. If youve been following our videos, here youll find many of the recipes. We hope youll enjoy them as they were meant to beout in the woodsbut you can re-create them at home. If youre new to us or youve been camping before, you might be used to a certain kind of camp food. This isnt that! Theres no hot dog on a stick here. Because we believe in eating tasty, real foodwe prep and assemble everything on site.

Weve been in this forest so long that weve given up trying to find our way out! Cooking delicious food is something well be doing forever. If you do what you love, you dont work a day. And if you can pay the rent and provide a good life for your family, why not do it? When we started with social media, nobody thought it would be possible to keep it goingand we dont know what the future will bringbut everything is going all right today. So, next time youre wandering through the woods, take a sniff... you might just catch a whiff of our latest creation wafting through the wilderness!

Happy cooking,

Slawek and Krzysztof

A FIELD GUIDE FOR USING THIS BOOK

If it isnt already obvious, we would much rather spend our days out in the forest than shopping for ingredients. And we want that for you, too. We frequently use whatever we happen to have on hand, and the recipes still turn out great! Food should be fun, after all, so dont stress the small stuff. We do, however, have some tips and suggestions that will help make your time in the woods more successful.

TOOLS

If youve seen just a couple of our videos, you know we enjoy making many of our tools. But we cant make everything! Here are some things we use frequently:

BOWLS: Two large bowls (same size) for mixing, serving, and covering and a small or medium bowl for mixing.

CAST-IRON POT (5-QUART, OR 4.5-LITER): If youll be cooking over the fire the way we do, youll want one with a hanging handle, rather than something like a Dutch oven.

CAST-IRON SKILLETS (2 [12-INCH, OR 30 CM]), WELL-SEASONED: Cast iron is unbeatable for cooking, especially with fire. Dont use anything coated with enamel (unless you dont mind ruining the enamel).

ENAMEL OR STEEL CAMP CUPS (2 large [12- or 16-ounce, or 360 or 480 ml]) with a handle (or small saucepan with a flameproof handle).

FLINT: Its how we start our fires (see ).

GRILL PANS (2, SAME SIZE): Ours are 11 inches (27 cm) with handles on either side but use whatever you have (so long as the handles are flameproof).

HANDSAW: Helpful in bushcrafting.

HATCHET: Useful for chopping firewood; we also use the blunt head as a mallet.

HEAVY-DUTY OVEN MITT: Something leather, like a barbecue or welders glove, not what you use in the kitchen, so youre not burned by the high heat.

KNIVES: Large chefs knife. One rainy day, when we were unable to cook outdoors, we decided to make a knife. We went into a shed and came out a few hours later with what would become our most-asked-about tool: our signature 7-inch (19 cm) cleaver. For us, its a universal instrument that chops, slices, stirs, flips... whatever we need. Plus, a smaller (6-inch, or 15 cm) camp knife: We often use this for whittling.

LARGE CUTTING BOARD: Our wooden one is 11 18 inches (28 45 cm), and we frequently roll dough to the size of our board. We actually have two boards, one dedicated for cutting proteins on.