Onion Bombs (Camping Food)

I found this one on Pinterest, and it was a camping food I have never heard of.  
I did a decent amount of camping (particularly with Girl Scouts) in my younger days so it was fun to browse Pinterest for camping food and stumble upon some old favorites, and some new ones!  We made these back in June on a beach camping trip to Pismo Beach. 

These are called meatloaf in onion balls on Pinterest.   I called them Onion Bombs the whole time. Honestly, I am not sure where I came up with that. (I THOUGHT I saw it on Pinterest, but now that I go back to link to the pins and post, I don't see onion "bombs" anywhere.  Weird.)   Close enough...

It's basically just meatballs wrapped in onion halves to cook.  

And it's basically delicious.  :-)

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I suggest a couple of meatballs per person on average.  They vary pretty drastically in size, depending on the size of your onion pieces.  One onion gave me 2 decent sized "wrappers", 2-3 medium sized, and a few tiny ones.

As prep, you just take off the outer onion paper stuff, and chop it in half, as evenly as you can!  Then you separate the pieces into matching pairs from the outside to the inside.  They LOOK big enough, but when you put them together there isn't as much room inside as you might think. 

(**Note:  This step could be done at the campsite if you wanted to keep the onions fresher or whatever.  I prepared them entirely at home.) 

Next (or before or at the same time if you are working with your boyfriend) you want to prepare the meatballs.  I followed the recipe I found via Pinterest as far as additions to the meat.  But I started it with some Italian sausages from our friends' butcher shop. (About 2 lbs meat?)  I also chopped up a few cloves of garlic, added ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, bread crumbs, and salt/pepper.  Hand mix it all together!

 (Don't start making the meatballs until you are ready to wrap them!) 

Once you have the meat mixed up, and the onions cut and matched up (at campsite, or at home), you are ready to wrap!   The size of each meatball is going to depend on the onions.  So just use your judgement and roll up some meatballs.  Squish them between two pieces of onion and voila! Some meat might push out the ends but it's fine because you will be wrapping them in foil.  I tried to keep them as compact as possible, though.  I had a few of every size when I was done.  Big tomato size to small lime sized.  :-)

Then I wrapped them each in foil with a twist at the top.  I used one layer of regular foil and one of heavy duty since I knew they would be thrown in the fire.  Be careful not to rip or poke holes in the foil, especially the outer layer. Ash is not a good condiment. 

This is my boyfriend putting the balls into the fire.  There are probably numerous tools for doing this but we didn't have any or (if we did, like a shovel, duh!) we didn't think to use them.  I just let the (getting drunk) boys be boys.  You can see a couple of them in the bottom of the pic, at the front of the fire.  He tried to get them in where there were coals. 

Here is a close up of one of those in the front.

We let them cook for about 10 minutes, flipped them around, and another 10 minutes (or so).  I don't think leaving them a little longer would have done any harm, as the onion keeps the meat nice and juicy. 

I didn't get any pics before the men started digging in and saucing them up. (Ketchup, Sriracha, etc)

But, they were delicious!  Fresh out of the foil the onion wrappers were nice and charred and sweet smelling.  The meatballs were super moist and had yummy grilled onion flavors soaking into them. 

Everyone in camp loved them.  We (6 people) ate every last one and wished we had more. 

This was a big success and I KNOW I will be making them again as soon as dirtbike season is in full swing.  They are just so easy and convenient.  Minimal prep time, ready to throw on the fire when you get to camp,  sand resistant, they are a good "first night camping" meal.  I'm so happy I found these on Pinterest! 

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