Setting up our Antarctic Field Kitchen

It is a very very very bad idea to cook inside your tent, which means you are cooking outside on the snow.

In case you are rather stupid, the reason you do not cook inside your tent is two-fold. The first is you may burn it down with yourself inside it. The second is carbon monoxide poisoning.

So you need to construct a field kitchen. You use saws to cut out blocks, and then shovel them out.

There’s three things you are doing. First you cut out one row of blocks to create rows to sit on. Then you cut out two rows of blocks next to that, so you can put your feet down there. and you create a wall with the blocks to help shelter from the wind.

It was snowing the entire time we were out there building the kitchen, and cooking.

And the kitchen is complete.

Out comes the cookers and food.

And dehydrated meals have never tasted so good!

As I said, it snowed a lot.

This is the infamous P bottle.

And the toilet is a bucket with two plastic bags inside it and a very cold lid.

This is getting ready to boil water the next morning. The mat is to soak up any fuel, and you remove before cooking.

And then the fun part of demolishing the field kitchen. I took the direct approach of running into the walls several times!

We then headed back to Scott Base around midday Monday.