They bought a Big Green Egg in pursuit of a $500 prize for a camping cooking contest? WOW. Those are pretty much the least portable and most expensive consumer grade outdoor cookers you can find. Hauling in a 250 pound BGE doesn't really seem to be in keep with the spirit that a camp ground cooking contest implies. Maybe the contest sponsors need to recalibrate the rules some. There's a lot you can do over an open fire that would put a traditional kitchen crafted meal to shame.

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This reminds me of a chapter in a book called, 'A Fine and Pleasant Misery' by Patrick McManus. I'll post a brief section, and highly encourage you to check out the entire book. *disclaimer - I have no financial affiliations to the writer or publisher*

'The campfire was of two basic kinds: the Smudge and the Inferno. ..... The Inferno was what you always used for cooking. Experts on camp cooking claimed you were posed to cook over something called "a bed of glowing coals." But what everyone cooked over was the Inferno. The "bed of glowing coals" was a fiction concocted by experts on camp cooking. Nevertheless the camp cook was frequently pictured, by artists who should have known better, as a tranquil man hunkered down by a bed of glowing coals, turning plump trout in the frying pan with the blade of his hunting knife. In reality the camp cook was a wildly distraught individual who charged through waves of heat and speared savagely with a long sharp stick at a burning hunk of meat he had tossed on the grill from a distance of twenty feet. The rollicking old fireside songs originated in the efforts of other campers to drown out the language of the cook and prevent it from reaching the ears of little children. Meat roasted over a campfire was either raw or extra well done, but the cook usually came out medium rare.'

http://www.mcmanusbooks.com/books/pleasent_misery/pleasent_misery.html

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