What are your favorite camping recipes for breakfast and dinner?
I don’t mean rehydrated backpacking food, but proper cooked food; made from scratch from the finest canned (or fresh) ingredients.
It will be car camping, so a two burner propane stove, a pot, frying pan, or maybe just a deep cast iron pan with a lid, and a kettle. Exactly what I bring will depend on what I plan to make, so several recipes that use the same pot are ideal. I’m a competent cook, and don’t mind some prep, the main issue is not wanting to carry along every tool in the kitchen. I think a cutting board, knife, spatula, and can opener are the only tools aside from the stove and pot.
Bonus points for ingredients that don’t need continuous refrigeration like fresh vegetables and preserved meats, Double bonus points for finished product where the unrefrigerated leftovers can be (eta) trail lunch the next day.
Camp Cassoulet
(adjust amounts to fit # in party)
1 can Ranch beans
6" kielbasa or Summer sausage
1 onion, diced
1 bell pepper, diced
Garlic powder
salt & pepper to taste
hot sauce to taste
Dump all ingredients into pot. Heat and serve. Best with a hunk of baguette and a glass of cheap red wine (Gallo Hearty Burgundy.)
For lunch the next day dice up an apple and add to the pot while reheating.
Not sure if this recipe meets your criteria (we always have an eski when car camping) but my family likes savoury pancakes:
1 c flour
1+ c milk (UHT is fine) or even water
1 egg
sliced cheese
sliced ham
spring onions to garnish (not necessary)
Whisk flour, egg, milk together in a bowl. Add more milk or water to thin, if needed.
Pour a thin layer of batter onto a frypan over medium heat
As that layer cooks, dip the slices of cheese and ham into the batter, then lay them on top of the pancake.
OR put slices of cheese/ham onto pancake, drizzle batter over the top, and spread it around with the back of a spoon.
Flip the pancake, and cook another couple of minutes, till cooked through.
Or you can just bring a pancake mix if you want pancakes. That’s what I had our boy scouts do at one campout. And we added mini-chocolate chips. And fried some sliced SPAM. And poured syrup over the whole thing.
The funny part about it was for a cooking competition, where the camp counselors went from campsite to campsite, serving as judges. Adult leaders were doing much of the cooking at many of the other campsites, with all kinds of Dutch oven stews, cobblers, and foil bakes. Those guys were serious!
We were awarded first place! I could see why, since it was simple, filling, and hearty. Also, it helped that the judges were teenage boys who needed lots of carbs.
That stew sounds nice and simple. What does the apple do, sweeten it up, it is not something I would have thought of?
I like that idea, along with @JohnGalt 's pancake mix plan. I’ve got a bunch of the “just add water” Krusteaz stuff. I’m thinking some kind of pancake based omelette. Nice thing is it’s easy to customize each one.
If we’re strictly going with shelf-stable ingredients, I suppose you could make a sort of ersatz biscuits & gravy on a camp stove with Bisquick, evaporated milk or buttermilk powder, fresh water, salt and pepper, and dried chipped beef. Sorta halfway between traditional biscuits & gravy and SOS. You could probably also use summer sausage in lieu of the chipped beef.
One of my favorite parts of camping is that I get to eat summer sausage, and it’s been over a decade since I’ve been camping. I don’t know why I can’t eat summer sausage other times, but I don’t make the rules, I just have to live by them.
For biscuits I’d just do the refrigerated can kind, and figure they’d be fine overnight in a cooler. Gravy is trickier, but evaporated milk is a good solution. So breakfast the first morning is biscuits and breakfast sausage from the cooler, and gravy made with a roux from breakfast sausage fat, with condensed milk and water.
Boy scout chicken or pork chops. We were tenting at Haleakala on Maui where there were no specific sites. The campground was empty when we got there so we set up our tent and went driving around. When we got back from touring our tent was surrounded by boy scouts. They invited use to eat with them. They gave us what we called boy scout chicken: chicken, potatoes and green peppers in a Dutch oven. It works with pork chops too! Easy and delicious!
Unless you’re running a mini-fridge off the cigarette lighter, I’d be wary of taking canned biscuits on the road overnight. It doesn’t take very long for those things to rise and burst when they’re too warm. My cite is that I work in a grocery store and I’ve seen what happens when people change their mind about the biscuits and just leave them on a shelf instead of putting them back in the fridge.
We arrived and set up camp at Assateague Island. Before long it was dark and I was trying to get dinner ready. I made hamburger helper on my Coleman stove, with my Coleman lantern the only light we had.
The shared lantern was close enough to the stove to attract bugs, but not close enough to see the bugs dive bombing into the hamburger helper. Not until we were eating it did it become obvious that there were thousands of mosquitoes, gnats, etc in the meal.
Or just do what my parents did when camping and make biscuits and gravy with…canned beef gravy.
It was edible, but definitely not the biscuits and gravy we were expecting (I think whoever was in charge of that meal hadn’t bothered to look up a recipe).
This is more backpacking then car camping, but my trail fav is s breakfast sandwich made in a backpacking pot.
1: Hardboil an egg, set aside
2: Lightly toast slices bagel over stove flame on inside pot. - set aside
3: Prepare breakfast meat if needed in pot- set aside when done, wipe pot if needed, however sliced ham does not require this
4: Place in pot top half of bagel upside-down, breakfast meat, cheese. peel and slice egg, place on top of the other pieces and place bagel bottom on top. (basically the sandwich is made upsidedown in the pot.
5: heat slowly to the desired level of cheese meltyness or desired tempature.
6: Flip the pot on it’s lid, careful not to burn yourself.
7: remove pot off lid and use the lid as a plate
8: Enjoy
I make a terrific smoked trout chowder. Unfortunately for you it requires a stop at Gustafson’s in Brevort, MI, which is in the U.P. about an hour northwest of the bridge along US 2. They have the best onsite-made jerky and smoked fish I’ve ever had. So unless you happen to be heading that way, you’ll have to settle for lesser quality smoked trout from somewhere else.
Easy one-pot meal, and most ingredients will do well without being fully refrigerated, though the fish and vegetables should probably be kept somewhat cool beforehand. The leftovers, if any, probably won’t do well for long without refrigeration, though. But if you’re car camping, I assume you’ll have a cooler, so as long as you let the leftovers cool outside the cooler first, they should do fine in a cooler with ice.
Smoked trout
Diced bell pepper
Diced chiles (jalapenos, habaneros, whatever suits your heat level)
Diced onion
Minced fresh garlic (or garlic powder)
Can diced tomatoes
Diced potatoes (about 1/2" cubes)
Chicken stock
Small amount of butter or vegetable oil
Salt & pepper to taste
Whatever herbs, spices and flavorings you manage to bring: thyme, oregano, your favorite hot sauce, Worchestershire, all good options.
Juice of a lime (optional)
Sautee the diced pepper, onion and garlic in oil, with whatever dry spices you’re using, until softened up.
Add all other ingredients except for trout and lime. Simmer until potatoes are done. Add trout toward the end so the already-cooked trout doesn’t break up too much. Add lime juice, if using, toward the end as well.
Both car camping and long distance hiking style camping I like to bake bread.
Car camping I use a dutch oven on a fire, hiking I use a (much smaller) camping pot. I lay a bed of sand or small rocks in the bed, add some water and place a metal cup just smaller than the pot in order to make an “oven” then that gets placed in the fire.
Fun trick - the dough can be put in a large water bottle, like the Nalgene series, with large open mouths, to rise as you hike.
I’ve also done venison (Oryx, in this case, availablity may differ…) on a flat rock positioned above a fire. It was pretty good. We froze it, and ate it on the first night of a hike once defrosted.
I’ve cooked a snoek, which is a local fish (similar to a baracuda), about 1m long wrapped in foil with wine, herbs, lemons etc buried around 50cm underneath a fire.
And finally, one hiking trip I took was 10 days of walking crazy distances, and mostly eating popcorn with a mixture of marijuana, salt and pepper as flavouring. It is pretty good, even for people who are not stoned.
Diced apples are a semi-common ingredient in baked bean dishes in parts of New England. You want them cooked but still toothsome. I learned the trick from an aunt on my mother’s side. Sweetens the dish a bit (depending on the apple) and lightens it up a bit as well.
In college, one day I had no classes, so I drove to a lake/park and did some spring fishing. Full of optimism, I lit charcoal in one of the park’s grills.
I caught a legal rainbow trout just as my coals were ready. I was minding my own business, never noticing the woman walking toward me with her son (I guess she wanted to show him the fish). I gutted the fish and took it to the grill. The woman screamed, scarring the crap outa me. She then reprimanded me for traumatizing her and her son. The fish was delicious.
I mostly do “long form” hiking/camping where you need to carry all your food.
For that you are a bit limited, but I utterly recommend pre-packing dry portion-sizes of food, pre-mixed with herbs and spices, into zip-lock bags. The saving in weight and space is incredible, if you make a proper meal plan and allows some treats, like the aformentioned oryx steaks.
I like those tiny marshmallows to brighten up an early morning coffee. (I don’t enjoy them myself but it does some good for fellow hikers at 05:00 to get them on the trail)
And of course, chilli and garlic with every single meal.
Finally a peat-heavy whisky (I choose Laphroaig) in a metal flask for pretty much any occasion from waking up to going to bed.