Suggestions for camping food?

Cafe Society
1

I’m going camping next weekend. This will be with a group I’ve done this with before, so I’ll almost certainly have access to stuff like a camp stove, pots and pans, etc. It’s only for three day’s worth of meals.

The tough part for me has always been food. In previous years, I’ve wasted money buying perishable items like eggs and burgers that get unused at the actual event and/or make a mess for little return. (This is usually because I’ve eaten food cooked by others specifically for the group, but I’m not sure that will happen to the extent needed this year.) Then I bring the broken eggs and thawed burgers home and I don’t eat them.

Any suggestions? I’m thinking that maybe I should just do Kind bars for breakfast, PB sandwiches for lunch, and have snacks on hand, but that still leaves dinner.

2

Brautwurst, Smoked Sausage, Chedderwusrt… stuff like that They keep well prior to cooking, eat them with a bun or hands, keep well if not eaten. Cut em up use them the next day.

I’ve always found spagetti works, too. One pot to heat some frozen sauce, one pot to boil noodles.

Giant steaks are my go-to. Best over an open fire.

3

If you don’t have access to refrigeration the only meal that’s going to involve perishables is going to be the first evening’s. Unless you are going to a store twice a day to buy fresh food. If you can do that, the sky’s the limit.

Everything after that is going to involve shelf stable ingredients. You can get powdered eggs and powdered mile and make up some crepes or pancakes. You could even try to find unwashed eggs that don’t require refrigeration. Canned meats and fish are your friend.

Depending on how hot it is, fruits and veg can go “off” pretty quickly, especially if you’re storing them in a car so that you’re not attracting bears and other critters to your campsite.

I make naan bread from scratch, bake potatoes or sweet potatoes, roast corn and other vegetables.

4

I actually scramble the eggs and then freeze them. Add frozen hash browns and sausage and that is breakfast for morning #1. The microwave rice pouches can be cooked in a pot (add a little water) – can add pre-frozen meat for dinner #1 (or spam)
Instant oatmeal – if you want milk I’d just use chocolate milk powder.
(hot chocolate hits the spot when it is cooler not so much this time of year)
Flavored instant potatoes – can even add powdered gravy and spam.
(I boil water, put the spuds in a bowl – add water until consistency is good, cover the bowl with a towel and then make the gravy. The gravy is generally hot enough that the spuds will be warm enough)
Brian

5

If you have a cooler, the sky’s the limit.

Otherwise, canned stuff is easiest: Dinty Moore stew, Nalley chili, Progresso soups. Cooking a meal from scratch is a PITA when camping, and that assumes you’re car camping and have pretty much a kitchen’s worth of stuff if you need it. If you’re rafting or backpacking, forget it. Stick to MRE’s or Mountain House.

You can also cook up stew or chili ahead of time (homemade), freeze it in quart Ziplocks, then stick those in a cooler the day you leave. You’ll keep your cooler cold and have a homemade dinner without too much prep two or three days into your camp. Cleanup is easy too. Don’t forget trail mix (the no chocolate kind if you’ll be anywhere warm) and beef jerky to supplement those Cliff Bars.

6

My wife and I like to bring some veggies, hot dogs and instant ramen packs (all of which require minimal refrigeration). Chop up the veggies and hot dogs and mix them with the ramen soup (cooked over a camp stove) and you have a nice meal. We sometimes do the same for picnics.

In my experience, if you’re storing stuff in a car, a cooler with an ice pack should be sufficient to keep vegetables fresh for a weekend. Unless you’re camping in Death Valley, I suppose.

7

I would recommend canned items if you can’t or don’t want to use fresh ingredients. Don’t forget to pack out your unburnable garbage when you leave ETA and be sure to bring a can opener.

8

Breakfast: Costco has hashbrowns that are great for breakfast. Soak in water over night (zip lock bags are great), and pair with fresh eggs. Eggs keep just fine without refridgeration.

instant oatmeal was the staple of my family’s breakfast when camping.

Dinner:
cous cous is really easy, bring to a boil, cover and rest for a bit. If you like that. My favorite is Japanese curry over cous cous, but that’s not everyone’s cup of tea

Dried tortellini are not the best, but are great camp food. Butter sauce is just fine and butter keeps in warm weather reasonably well. Or get some Rao’s tomato sauce. Parmesan keeps unrefrigerated.

Burrito’s are good. Again, tortilla’s and canned refried keeps fine for a few days in the wild.

Mac n cheese. Annie’s is better than Kraft, but both kinda hit the spot out camping

9

100s of items in the dried pkg. flavored noodle and rice section of the store. One pot, water 10min. Dinner!

Of course some fancy stuff you could add would be nice. I wouldn’t want off broccoli or cauliflower in my back pack.
Canned items weigh too much.
A good rasher of bacon for the first morning kept cool will be appreciated by everyone.

Oh and old fashion bagged popcorn. Pop it in the retained bacon grease. Popularity increases.

10

Long ago I’d camp for a week at Assateague. Each day I’d crab and clam. I’d steam the blue crabs, serve with corn I bought from a farm stand.

Leftover crab meat I’d use in breakfast omelettes, along with farm stand fruit and veggies.

11

Yep, that’s why sausage was invented- to keep meat viable without access to refrigeration. Bring some sauerkraut and spicy mustard to top it off, and you’re eating good!

Whether or not you have access to a cooler is a big factor. Even if you’re backpacking though, there are soft-sided insulated bags that work as small coolers. Freeze perishable meat and it will serve to cool other things in the cooler while staying good longer. By day 2 or 3 it’s thawed and ready to cook.

12

Instant rice, eat with shelf stable meals in a pack Tasty Bite, Pataks, ramen bowls. Heat and serve tortellini’s. Hard boiled eggs, pita bread hummus. Charcuterie fixings. Fruits. Instant oatmeal. Peanut butter, nuts, jerky.

13

It sounds to me like the main things you’re looking for are ease of preparation (in terms of both effort and expertise required) and durability.

This suggests canned foods (the sort of things @Lancia mentioned), that don’t require cooking per se, just heating up in a pot on the stove (or, if you’re desperate, you could eat them unheated straight out of the can).

Hot dogs, or other, somewhat more upscale varieties of “tube steak” (like those mentioned by @Gatopescado) are fairly durable and easy to prepare while camping. (And one possibility is to combine them with the previous suggestion by cutting them up and adding them to a can of beans or soup.)

14

Or access to fresh bags of ice daily - that’s how we did it, back in the day; we still have that Coleman cooler that we bought in 1985, that served as our refrigerator for a month.

One thing we brought along was dried soup mixes. Add water, cook up on the camp stove. May or not be something to your taste, but no refrigeration required.

15

Stuff you can cook on a stick over an open fire. It’s interactive and fun. Sausages, small whole fish, boneless chicken thighs, shrimp, paneer or halloumi or other cheeses that don’t melt, skewered vegetables. For dessert, marshmallows, and you can roast fruit in foil on the coals.

16

Cars are emphatically not bear proof. Do not store any food or anything that smells like food (for example, wrappers or other containers that previously held food) in a vehicle when you’re in bear country.

17

I hadn’t thought about Lipton Cup-A-Soup in decades, but apparently it still exists.

Or there’s that instant ramen that comes in its own styrofoam cup and you just add boiling water. Super easy, assuming you have a pot that you can boil water in and pour out of (which is pretty standard camping equipment).

18

Those can be somewhat carb-heavy, of course. If you do have an ice chest, hot dogs can be cut up into that while it’s boiling, or an egg or two can be whisked in, to add some protein.

You’d want to make sure it was something that didn’t require hours of cooking (e.g. NOT the bean-based stuff that we use at home in the Instant Pot).

If there will be a camp fire, anything you can cook on a long fork - e.g. hot dogs and the like - are a huge hit. Ditto foil packet meals - bring along some canned veggies (this is, perhaps, the only valid use I can think of for canned potatoes!!), some cut-up chicken or ground beef (both can be brought raw), some kind of sauce such as teriyaki or barbecue, and of course heavy duty aluminum foil. People enjoy assembling these, then you wrap up the packets and put them in the coals to cook. Make sure you have some kind of long tongs, of course!!!

The advice we were given, when camping in Grand Teton in 1985, was that the car was okay if not ideal - but whatever you may store in the car, make sure it’s covered. The ranger said “bears, being unable to read, cannot tell the difference between a box that holds crackers, and a box that holds Kleenex. They will break into the car to eat the crackers, and be PISSED. So, cover anything you leave in the car.”.

In any case, we had a big blanket that we laid over everything in the car, and had no trouble. But I do agree, anything that might smell strongly of food - such as empty wrappers - was disposed of in a bear-resistant trash can, some distance from our campsite, as soon as we were done with it. Anything we left in the car was either safely in the cooler (which would presumably reduce scent), or dried, or otherwise not too strong-smelling (e.g. bread, closed jar of peanut butter).

I think our alternative would have been to hoist food up in a net or something, high up a tree. That didn’t seem terribly practical (plus, bears can climb!).

19

I’ll echo canned chili. Bring some spices to jazz it up. If ya wanna get fancy, bring some macaroni to boil up and add to it.

20

I used to LOVE Cup-a-soup!!

Here’s an example of what I was talking about:
Bear Creek Country Kitchens 8.1 oz Vegetable Beef Soup Mix - 1152956 | Blain’s Farm & Fleet (farmandfleet.com)

Looks like it’s fast and easy to prepare, and meat improves it but would be optional. This assumes you have a camp stove of some sort, of course. And of course requires bringing a cooking pot - we had a cheap one that was just the right size and included an optional strainer insert, so was nearly ideal. I think we finally got rid of that pot a couple years back when we bought our induction cooktop. Ah, the memories :smiley:

Pretty sure we had Manischevitz brand, on our trip, similar to this:
Amazon.com : Manischewitz Soup Mix Minestrone Pack of 4 : Everything Else

Oh - are you coordinating this with the other campers? Seems like it’s well worthwhile to chat with them and figure out just who is cooking which meals, and what people like. If, say, you do dinner 1, and your buddy does dinner 2, and someone else does dinner 3, and everyone is on their own for lunches, or whatever - that simplifies logistics. You can also get a sense for what people will or won’t eat.