Oh!
One other thing. Please forgive me if you already know this, but since lots of us don't grow up being taught these things -
A fire meant for cooking is different from a campfire
usually.
Generally for much cooking you want a nice hot bed of coals. That gives you an even heat, no flames licking around your wrists, less smoke in your face, etc. So for cooking, you want a fire that burns down fast... or alternately, work alongside a larger fire and let a firemaster shovel you coals.
Our last event, I let a family friend and his band of boy scouts set up the fire while I worked on prepping the food: when I turned around, I saw they'd done a diesel-kindled "upside down fire" - that is, the kindling was piled on top of the fuel. I thought this was just ignorance until it was explained to me - then found it's the hot new thing for bushcrafty folks because it just keeps the flames going and going and going for hours.
.... the exact opposite for what you want for cooking. I could kinda make it work, but it was far from ideal.
You can cook over flames of course - but as you probably remember from campfire s'mores it's a more unpredictable process. It still works well for liquids in a pot where you're not pre-browning meat/pre-sweating onions, and well enough for roasts if you pay close attention and don't mind a few scorched spots. But coals are easier.
A counterargument of course for trail cooking is that you're not doing things like browning raw meat: you're just tossing cut bits of pre-dried stuff into water*. I think an iron kettle with a decent sized bottom is a good versatile option because it works well for both cooking raw stuff over coals and boiling/rehydrating trail food over open flame. Others may have had a different experience, of course.
Is that helpful at all?
Oh - one more thing, about my kettle and lessons learned:
- I should have just asked for the pattern to be engraved into the iron (if at all) rather than having an attached band. The different heat expansion is a pain.
- I was too clever for my own good with that "lid as a skillet" thing. Greg's absolutely right, frying in the bottom of the pan is the better option. It's possible of course to (for instance) pan-fry a bit of dough while a soup is going, but after my initial experiments it's never been something I've actually had call to do... and a rock works just as well for that kind of thing.
- I still prefer a hinged pot lifter to a fixed bail. Some of that's holdover habit from 18th c. hearth cooking admittedly, but also - it packs smoothly, the handle doesn't get hot unless you're using it for a hanger, it does double duty as a small set of tongs, and and it doesn't loudly clank like conventional pot bails do. (though in fairness it doesn't look like Greg's design clanks). That's totally an arbitrary weighing of preferences though, and I think Greg's design is awesome.
* Another cooking tip: the thicker the soup/stew, the more you'll want to keep scraping the sides to keep things from scorching. The more you want to scrape the sides, the more bother cooking over open flame is going to be. But lots of water in your soup means lots of water that wants to leave your body in the middle of a cold night. So... tradeoffs.