Chuck Yeager’s biography mentions his camping trips. He and his buddies would cache food and drinks out in the area. Allegedly a crate with food and supplies might drop from a helicopter into an remote area they were planning to camp.
He told a great story about searching for a crate with a cooler and freeze dried steaks. His group got pretty frustrated that it was AWOL. LOL
I’d say that meal planning is probably a primary task. Like how many people you’ll have at each meal, what your plan is, what they want to eat, etc. Once you’ve got that, then work from there.
It sounds like maybe it’s something of a potluck or BYO-and-share sort of event though, if you’ve brought a bunch of stuff that didn’t end up eaten, and you ate other people’s stuff. In that case, maybe bring what you are comfortable cooking/eating for you and yours, and then just share from there.
In my recent Boy Scout/Cub Scout camping experience, stuff like bagels & cream cheese, Kind Bars, and muffins are popular for breakfast, and you can’t really go wrong with sandwiches for lunch. Dinners are a crazy quilt though; the Boy Scout troop tends toward one-pot meals that feed ten people at a time, and the Cub Scouts love making burgers and the silver turtle/hobo meals (burger meat, sausage, vegetables in a tin foil pouch).
In general, pasta/spaghetti is shelf stable, easy to cook, and hard to screw up in less than optimal conditions. And most people are fine with eating it.
For adults, I’d absolutely make a charcuterie plate with salami, cured meats, cheeses, pickles, etc… None of that is going to spoil in that short of a time frame, it’s all great at ambient temp, and it’s all fairly filling.
I’ve shared in other similar threads my killer camp meal-- smoked trout chowder. All made with ingredients that take minimal to no refrigeration.
I used to camp in the northern parts of Michigan’s U.P. a lot. On the way up, we’d stop at Gustafson’s in Brevort and pick up some of their fantastic beef jerky and smoked trout caught in Lake Michigan.
The smoked trout chowder, besides the eponymous ingredient, consisted of onions, potatoes (both of which keep perfectly well unrefrigerated) bell peppers (which should be fine for a couple days at least unrefrigerated, or kept minimally cool), one can of diced tomatoes, some chicken stock (bouillon would be fine), and various herbs, spices and hot sauce.
Oh for sure, when we would stop for lunch driving through a small town on the way there or back (I had a couple fave pastie shops, but I forget which now, and they may no longer be in biz 20-30 years later). But I never took any to-go pasties with me to camp. Yes, they were created as durable self-contained meals for miners to take down the mines with them for lunch, but I don’t know how durable they’d be over a several day camping trip.
Oh, gawd no, if you were gonna do portable food like pasties for camping, it wouldn’t make sense NOT to make them in the confort & convenience of your own kitchen & then transport them to the campsite.
A breakfast we often did in Scouts 30 years ago was the “shake and pour” type pancake mix, the kind that comes in a jug to which you just add water, shake until the batter is mixed, and pour into a frying pan. If you’ve got access to a camp stove, frying pan or griddle, and a spatula this should be a reasonably simple breakfast. Somehow a pancake that’s burnt on the outside and raw on the inside, the kind you’d throw away at home, tastes really good when you’re camping.
Back in the day, my buddy hosted a Memorial Day weekend camping trip to property he owned In Bedford County, PA not far from Shanksville, where flight 93 crashed. This was pre-9/11.
Back then everyone brought their own coolers and my buddy purchased the beer (Iron City Beer Balls) They were spherical mini-kegs that were non-returnable since they couldn’t be recycled. We reused the empties as showers, sinks, etc for the campsite. Damn, I miss those.
We were just in Michigan, week before last - and never got a good pasty either. Bummer! We mostly didn’t KNOW about them until near the end of our stay. One person brought some frozen ones, which were cooked and served at the end of the gathering, but the bit I had was nothing special.
A fresh one would have been much nicer.
And yeah, those would be good camp food, presumably if bought / made just before heading out, and served that same day.
And not just stuff that smells like food to us humans. Stuff like sunscreen and shampoo smells similar enough to food to a bear to pique their curiosity. Basically anything with an aroma at all should be stored in the bear proof box if there’s one at your campsite.
Before this post and the responses, the only kind of ‘pasties’ I’d ever heard of were the things a stripper wears over her nipples in places where they don’t allow completely topless dancing. But now I’ve been edumacated.
One always learns new things around here!
This thread is making me feel like Bilbo Baggins before his eleventy-first birthday. My wife’s health doesn’t allow for camping, so it’s been decades since I’ve done any, and I used to do car camping all the time. Reading this thread is making me miss it so, so much!
I always carry some beer. I’ll drink a couple the first few miles on the trail. Depends on how many days I’m going for, I might bring dehydrated beer (aka Wild Turkey). And I have on occasion backpacked with a lady friend that was delighted when I pulled out a small bottle of champagne to cool in the alpine lake.