Living in the upper Midwest, you must embrace winter activities or else it can make for a very long season until springtime. The most common winter activities include downhill and cross-country skiing, snowmobiling, ice fishing, sledding and ice skating, just to name a few.
The majority of these activities involve physical movement in order to keep warm while being out in the cold so it can be tough to spend quality time with the friends and family you are doing these activities with. Consequently, people typically return to a cabin, nearby bar or restaurant, someone’s home, etc. to grab food, drinks, and hangout after an activity. In our experience, we’ve noticed people would not make it to gatherings following an activity due to incremental time commitment. That is why we started bringing our Chuck Box to cook a warm meal or drinks before or after winter activities. After the first few uses, we realized gathering to share food / drink on-site was almost more enjoyable than the activity itself and we noticed people were more prone to stick around if we made food / drink on-site immediately after activities. Below are a few examples of how we use our Chuck Box during our favorite winter activities.
If you’ve been ice fishing, you know it can be extremely fun if you are catching fish but if you are not, it can make for a fairly boring day. Thus, we have gotten accustomed to packing our Chuck Box when we go ice fishing. It is a great way to break up the day and prepare a nice warm meal if the fishing is slow. Common items we cook include: eggs, sausage, bacon, pancakes, pre-made soup, chili, brats, burgers, hot dogs, and if we are lucky enough to catch fish, a fish fry!
We also use our Chuck Box quite frequently while cross country skiing. We typically ski first to build up an appetite. Afterward, we typically return to the vehicle, put the Chuck Box in our Otter sled, and head to the trail head or rest area to enjoy a meal and warm beverage. Most of the time, we’ll pack soup or chili (our favorite is savory creamy chicken wild rice soup) we make ahead of time so all we must do is warm it up. Hot chocolate is standard for us to have a little taste of something sweet after a savory bowl of soup. The Chuck Box is also great for preparing other warm beverages such as apple cider, coffee (with or without Baileys), hot toddies, hot buttered rum, etc.
Some other suggestions we’ve used our Chuck Box for during winter include cooking warm food and drinks while playing outdoor hockey / broomball, snowmobiling, snow shoeing, camping, or at the local sledding hill. Pro tip for a sledding hill: if you want to score points with your kids and their friends, bring your Chuck Box to the local sledding hill and make a batch of fresh hot chocolate – they’ll love the experience!
If you have other suggestions outside of what we mentioned above, please share them with us as we love to see new setups and uses for Chuck Boxes!