I came in to mention the apples. The trick is to keep them in the coals until they are mushy. On a chilly autumn night, they are amazin.
I was stepping in to mention apples too!
I also do chili over the campfire during fall camping season. A good cast iron dutch oven works well for this.
For breakfast, how about breakfast tacos. Fry up some loose sausage, onions and peppers, crack a couple of eggs in it and serve it with tortillas, some cheese, olives and whatever salad veggies you have with you. We tend to use this for the last morning since it uses up the leftovers.
Ratatouille is another very simple dish over an open fire. Really, with a bit of practice, you can do just about any dish in the great outdoors.
We don’t camp anymore, but one favorite meal used to be beef stroganoff.
We needed two heat sources, one for the beef (we used high to medium-high quality beef), onions, mushrooms, paprika and other spices etc, another for the noodles, but that was easy enough.
Absolute favorite was fresh-caught trout, cleaned and stuffed with parsley,sliced lemons and onions, lightly oiled with butter or olive oil. You could either fry it up in a pan or if you had a grill, wrap it in foil. We’d eat it with sliced zucchini and other vegies, which had been seasoned with garlic and olive oil and either pan-fried or done in foil.
Pie irons aren’t that expensive. We used to make pizzas in them: sauce, pepperoni, cheese, bread. IIRC, we used to call them “mountain pies”.
Suddenly I’m hungry…
You can also grease the heck out of them and have the kids make square eggs.
Along the same line, for a great side dish with say steak, do a cooked onion.
Peel a whole onion, and cut about 1/2 off the top.
Make several deep cuts in the top of the onion
Salt and pepper, a pat of butter, and lay 2 pieces of bacon across the top.
Wrap tightly in foil and place on the coals.
Probably about 30 minutes or so to wonderfulness.
We have a plain cast iron one and a couple of enameled cast-iron ones, so by all means, fire away with the recipes. I think he’s leaning more toward main dishes and sides, though–they tend not to really do desserts for some unfathomable reason. And we’ll have fancy homemade marshmallows to roast and make s’mores.
That sounds incredibly good, and I’ll bet that I can do it in an oven, too, once it cools down enough to use the oven.
General tip - do as much prep at home as possible. Planning to need chopped onion? Chop at home and put in a zip lock bag.
As you’ve seen above, the most versatile cooking equipment for camping is aluminum foil.
You can soak unshucked ears of corn (peel back the husk, remove the silk, reapply the husk) in water for about an hour and then roast in the coals without needing foil.
The recipe first came from a grilling cookbook, so feel free to toss them on the bbq