Couscous is a great camping food. Takes almost no time to cook and is light, so good for backpacking. Throw in some chopped up salami/slim jims/twiggy sticks, dried herbs or vegetables, add tobasco sauce to taste. Even better if you can find the flavoured packets.
Thanks for the ignorance fought, silenus; cross out the honey idea! And what a brilliant Thanksgiving.
Do a search for “camping” and “food.” There are copious threads on this board about same. I just spent a good half-hour re-reading a few. Good tips.
Our Thanksgivings have become the stuff of legend among our friends. What started out as backpacking has, as we’ve gotten older, mutated into…not backpacking. 
Anything to avoid spending the holiday with family!
You might want to take a few MREs, which are lightweight and pack a lot of calories in each meal. If you’re exhausted and starving, I think that most or all of them can be eaten without even being heated. Please note that Skippy advises against using the Chicken and Rice MRE as a personal lubricant, not that he’s ever done it himself (#207).
Now personally, I like Frito Chili Pie on a campout, for nostalgic reasons. The ingredients are few, and you only need to keep the cheese cool. Basically, you heat up some canned chili (with or without beans), and serve it on top of Fritos. Then you add some shredded cheese. You can also add chopped onion and jalapeno slices, if you like. Many people just open single serving bags of Fritos, pour the chili on top, and then add the cheese and onion. One can of chili will feed 2 or 3 adults, and each adult will usually eat one bag of Fritos. You can use another brand of tortilla chips, but it won’t be the same.
Over to Cafe Society with you.
chop up potatoes and put them in a container and fill with cold water, then while car camping you dont have to chop up your taters (keep in the cooler)
second the potatoes/veggies in foil, stupid simple takes a while though.
oh yeah and for back packing google “penny stove” its incredible.
If your an amateur at camping, I recomend a small butane stove and some dehydrated meals they’ve come a long way and I’ve tried a few brands but found Mountain House meals to be the best, so good infact if I took their chili variants out of the bag and placed it in a bowl you wouldn’t know the difference.
I like the idea of cooking over and open fire as well, but it can be a pain in the ass at times. If your moving around a lot, and going to different campsites the last thing you may want to do after you’ve set you camp after a five hour canoe trip is set up a rain tarp in the rain, collect wet wood and try and get a fire going for your meals. Then you have to collect more wood for the evening fire.
If I was going on a trip that long, I may bring one meal or two that would be cooked over the fire but the majority of my meals would be of the dehydrated sort. However, the best t-bone steak and baked potatoe I ever had was on a camping trip. If the conditions are right it can turn out great, but generally it’s a pain in the ass.
If your sitting in one spot for the whole time, it would be a little easier manage. You can basically bring anything you want. If you have the means to carry and store it.
The OP is car camping in the Porkies - there are plenty of water spigots (even in the more primative campground)
Even the backpacking sites are generally near water (though you would filter or boil it unless you want to get Giardia)
Brian
I’ve never tried it but honey sounds great to me. Don’t cross anything out yet.
Fritos aren’t tortilla chips - they’re corn chips. I’m not sure what the difference is, and we don’t even get Fritos here, but I learnt that recently!
If you do any fishing, nothing beats a sautéed trout as an added treat.
There are much better quick eat options than MREs. I know some ex-military that carry them, but there are much tastier options out there that pack just as small and light for only a little more money.
Since you’re car camping, one tip I have is to make an extra large batch of some one pot meal at home this week (chili, stew, soup, casserole, sherried chicken, whatever). Have half for dinner and pack the other half in a gallon sized ziplock bag and freeze it lying flat in your freezer. Toss it in your cooler - it will help keep other stuff cold, and it will be your “emergency” meal when you find you don’t actually have the energy to cook a meal after setting up your camp, or it rains, or you get in late because traffic delayed you getting in and now it’s dark, or whatever. Dump in a pot, heat (next to or over a fire, on a campstove, on top of a grill, whatever) and eat.
Since I go car camping for 2 weeks at a time, I do a few of these “emergency rations”, just for nights when it’s getting to be dinner time, but the drums are calling me…
Also, freeze a few bottles of water, and use them instead of ice in your cooler for your first day (or as long as they last). Saves room in your cooler and then you have cold water to drink when they melt! You can refill them from a more eco-friendly large jug or spigot, and reuse them until you lose them.
Corn chips are made from corn meal. Tortilla chips, like corn tortillas and most kinds of tamales, are made from nixtamalized corn, also known as “hominy.”
Good to know we have so many hikers on the dope. Thanks for the suggestions.
I just bought thisreally inexpensive tiny backpacking stove. I loved those ultra tiny Pepsi/Penny stoves but I have too much on my plate before I leave to figure it out, though they do look simple. I think I’ll have plenty to work with between the stove and throwing foil wrapped stuff on the campfire coals at night(I’m bringing my own wood). I’ll probably mix in some of the old fashioned “put something on a stick and hold it over the fire” method also. That quick bread is incredibly interesting. I’ll definitely give it a try, I might have to be a wuss though. We’ll see. As for water I’m just going to bring some giant jugs with me. I’ve never had to boil and filter water before, so maybe that’s something for next time also.
I was going to start another thread about food storage, but I’ll go ahead and put it here.
I going to have a large(48 qt) cooler full of ice and mostly frozen stuff. I’m wondering how long I can expect it to stay cool. I can drive outside the park every day to get more ice every day if I need to, but I’d like to be in the park the entire time, or just make one trip, if I can possibly manage. Does anyone use rock salt to extend the life of your ice chest, or does that just cause more headache than its worth?
Note with emerald ash borer concerns, many parks don’t want you to bring firewood (though I didn’t find anything on the park website)
Brian
A few folks have mentioned foil-wrapped potatoes, but you can do a full meal that way, too. Wrap a hamburger patty, some veggies, and some chopped potato all together in foil, and tuck it in the coals. Eat it straight out of the foil, so you don’t need to dirty a plate. For dessert, core out an apple, stuff the cavity with raisins, brown sugar, and cinnamon, and cook it the same way.
I’ll just mention stones. Instead of cooking over an open fire, what you can do is use the fire to heat up and sterilise stones. Not too hot or the stones can crack. Then cook whatever it is using the stones. Either buy placing the item on the stone (e.g. steak) or the stone in the item (e.g. soup) when you don’t have a fireproof pot, or by placing stones around the item (e.g. cooking a joint of meat) - place hot stones and joint in a pit which is much less hassle than spit-roasting.
We’ve always used a butane powered stove and found one with a grill too which is a bonus. We generally just cook what we can fry or boil in a pan and are usually on a campsite or at a festival. I have also used disposable barbecues when out camping they are easy to use and dispose of when finished with, they are good if you are only camping for one or two nights.
I’d like to get a dutch oven and try cooking with one of them on a fire, but they look very heavy to carry so would be no good if you were moving around a lot.
When I was in Girl Scouting, we learned all about making fireside meals by cooking in aluminum foil. The night before we left on a camping trip, we’d pre-make packets that each included some potatoes, a breast or leg & thigh of chicken, maybe some other veggies, seasonings, and butter or olive oil. Pack them on ice, and bring them out of the cooler when you’ve got a good fire going, bury them in the coals until cooked, and man, oh man… very yummy. Eat it right off the foil and there’s no plates to wash. Very good “work:deliciousness” ratio.
Worked great for baked potatoes, corn on the cob, meatloaf, any number of other things.
In the mornings we’d mix up a batch of cinnamon/sugar, and fry up some simple doughnuts, rolling them in the cinnamon sugar after they’d bubble up to the top of the pot. (I’m sure this is very bad for you, but boy, was it delicious!)
Dutch ovens were great for making fruit cobblers for dessert. Simple, easy recipe. And the leftovers (if any) made a great breakfast side dish the next day.
Make sure to find time for some simple fishing, if there’s an available body of water. You might not catch anything, but you never know. Nothing better than stuffing your face with fresh, hot fish that was swimming around an hour earlier. Have a game plan for frying up any fish you might manage to catch. Watch a quick video on YouTube on how to gut and filet a fishie (you don’t necessarily NEED one of those special, long, thin-bladed filet knives but they’re very handy) and have a little olive oil or something to fry it up with and a lemon or so and some salt & pepper to season it with.
This is our latest outdoor toy. The 3 Coleman stoves we usually take are good and all, but I like the ability to bake fresh muffins for breakfast and cookies for dessert. Not to mention keeping the pies warm until after dinner. 