Going camping is the olny time I ever eat sardines.
I love eating sardines when I’m camping.
I also haven’t been “real” camping in years. . .I mean, hiking miles into somewhere, setting up a tent, and living there for a day or two. I kind of miss it, but it’s hard thing to pull off when you’re older with responsibilities.
The trick is to change what you call “camping”. For me now it’s when the motel doesn’t have cable.
Coffee! Nothing tastes as good as fresh brewed coffee in the mountains.
I always make a batch of brownies for a hiking/camping trip for energy on the trail, and for the third day of camping, when I’m Jonesing for some chocolate and sugar.
If you’re going to do any fishing, don’t forget to bring butter and onions so you can cook it over the fire in foil. Heavenly.
Yeah. I know.
What we do now and call “camping” with our friends is what I always called “car camping”.
You pull your car up to a spot and set up a tent. It can be fun. You get a chance to sit around a fire with beers, but I used to take a day to backpack into somewhere. Sleep somewhere crazy. Explore a day, then hike a day back out.
I’d bring 6 apples, a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread, cans of sardines, and iodine tablets. Maybe “beanie weanies”.
Hee. Just got back from doing this last weekend (tho’ ours was a canoe-in campsite). Lessee - weight’s a factor, as is freshness. Let me 'splain - we didn’t take a cooler, meaning that anything too perishable or that had to be kept cold was right out. We had to take stuff that would keep without refrigeration. If this describes your trip, you might want to rethink that steak. But if you’re taking a cooler, go nuts.
We took spaghetti (jar o’ sauce, noodles) and mac -n-cheese (the deluxe kind with the squishy cheese packet) for dinners. Grab yourself some pitas (get 'em just before you go - ours started to get just a tad moldy) and some canned chicken for a nice sandwich (stop by a fast food joint and grab some of their mayo to make it even nicer). Jerky is good. We had some dynamite potatoes and onions, cooked with pepper and some Crisco, over the camping stove - you could do these just as easily in foil. Look up some bannock recipes for some easy to take, easy to make bread (add herbs and garlic to make it yummy). Snacks were the aforementioned jerky, some summer sausage and crackers, apples, banana chips, and granola (yeah, we took way too much food). But it was grand.
Have a good time!
If you can keep things cold, try Salmon on a cedar shingle:
Take a piece of cedar siding (buy a 4-foot piece of regular old cedar from your lumberyard, cut off 12-15 inches to use), and soak it in water for an hour or two.
Take your chilled salmon steak (try for 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick), place it on the water logged cedar siding, and wrap just the top with aluminum foil. You can add seasonings and butter now or later. Lay the whole thing on top of the coals, and soon the cedar will start to steam the salmon.
After about 5 to 10 to 20 minutes, your salmon will be cooked (I like mine really cooked, use your best judgement). Take it off the cedar, but you can leave the board in the fire to burn through. Wonderful with corn on the cob…
Why do the words Doper Camping Trip come to mind? A hammock is essential for camping. If the weather is nice, you don’t even need a tent. Tie up your hammock, slip on a sleeping bag, and crash in swinging comfort. For pure camping showmanship I will dig up my pineapple upside down cake recipe that has been adapted to cooking in a dutch oven over coals. Impressive and delicious. Sure beats pie filling & cake batter cobbler, which ain’t half bad either.
I’m going camping next week, but I’m a big fan of one-pot and otherwise ‘efficient’ cooking anyway; last time, I did a sausage casserole with dumplings that was well received; it went like this:
Gently fry some sausages in a large pan (they were great big thick west-country-style butcher’s sausages)
Put some self-raising flour in a bowl
When the sausages are browned, tip of most of the excess fat into the bowl containing the flour.
Add chopped onions, carrots, peppers, garlic, etc to the sausages and continue to fry gently
mix the fat into the flour with a knife, then add milk or water to make a soft dough
Add some stock to the sausages (now more or less fully cooked) and vegetables (now starting to soften), bring to a simmer and drop in walnut-sized chunks of dough
cover and simmer for twenty minutes or so; some of the starch from the dumplings should have thickened the remaining stock into gravy.
Eat
We ate ours with wild sea peas, picked earlier that day on Chesil beach.
I’ve actually been looking at hammock tents. Check out this link: http://hikinghq.net/hammock/hammock.html, I’ve never tried it before, but the idea of it sounds really appealing.
Here’s the campground we’re heading too by the way.Pattison State Park in Wisconsin (about 10 miles south of Duluth).
Thanks again for all the suggestions so far, I’ve got Pavlov’s mouth going already.
I’m a huge fan of my hammock tent.
Mine is a Hennessy Hammock
The other major brand is the Clark Jungle Hammock.
The Clark is more complex. It offers storage below the hammock, and is fancier and more expensive. It’s also better in the cold. The Hennessy is larger, and has more models, including big and tall models. It’s also more comfortable, from the reviews that I’ve read.
My hammock tent is very comfortable. It only weighs something like 3.5 pounds, and rolls up very small. No poles are needed. It sets up in seconds.
One snag: Do not use these things in the cold. Anything below 50 degrees and you start to get cold quick. The wind robs your backside of heat in a big way. Clark is better for this because of the lower storage pouches which insulate. Also, the Hennessy is just now adding cold weather systems which beef up the existing hammocks. However, even with these improvements they are only good to 35 degrees or so.
For backbacking food I’d second the recommendations of many here. GORP is a good thing. Big ziplock bags with large chunks of cheese, sausage, and crackers are a great lunch. Stay away from things requiring pots and pans to cook. A ziplock bag with peppers, onions and potatoes pre-seasoned can be put into tin foil and cooked on the fire and eaten. All without using a utensil or plate besides a single fork.
Non-food essentials, for me (bearing in mind I’m talking about family camping on camp sites - there isn’t any wilderness here) - string, gaffer tape and a thing that I don’t know the name of - it’s a large rectangle of fabric with lots of pockets, suspended on a coat hanger - essential for stowing keys, watches, glasses, scissors, etc.
Am I the only one who’s had strawberry shortcake a day’s journey from civilization?
Grilled pizza?
We use the pie irons all the time too. We call them hobo pies, and you can put anything from meat and cheese to veggies or canned fruit in there. Make sure you butter the outsides of the bread first, keeps it from sticking and gives you a nicer flavor. My new favorite: spread inner sides of bread with peanut butter, put in a few squares of chocolate and some marshmallows. It gets all melty and good in the iron.
I second (third?) the foil cooking mentions. Toss just about anything in some foil with some butter and onions and it will turn out good.
On my last camping trip we had grilled chicken breast with seasonings galore and a marinade. It was served with peppers and onions and garlic. Roasted potatos over the coals and fresh baked bread. The bread was made and cooked on site in a dutch oven.
In my younger years I once cooked a turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, stuffing and veggies all on a campfire. (You use a tin foil lined box on coals to bake the turkey.)
It just seemed to me that the OP was looking for something a bit more basic. Also, there is a huge difference between camping out of the car and hiking in even a short distance.