Delicious Camping Food – Uh, Really?

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

You read right: you can have delicious camping food, even when you’re roughing it in the wild. This doesn’t involve necessarily bringing in an RV or finding a place to eat out – instead, you can learn to become a great “outdoor cook” that knows how to handle his or her way around the campsite kitchen. It just takes a little know-how, a solid attitude, and the willingness to make it happen. Here are a few tips to making your camping meals great.

Good food starts with good tools.

If you’re not working with good tools, it won’t matter what you’re cooking – you need to be able to cook your food well. This means clean pans, a good way to heat your food, appropriate utensils for eating them, and the right tools for flipping, poking, grabbing, and mixing. Tools like pans built for the outdoors, tripods that let you heat pots over fires, and camping silverware need to be present – and you should consider them essentials for a comfortable camping trip.

Ingredients, ingredients, ingredients.

Your ingredients will determine the quality of your food – it’s that simple. So you need to start thinking of you and your family’s favorite ingredients that also travel well. A steak can be great, but unless you’re prepared to bring some with you, you won’t be able to enjoy them in the outdoors. You’ll need to prepare for it by bringing a cooler and keeping your meat refrigerated.

Think about other ingredients that both taste good and make for easy packing – foods like nuts, beans, and other canned ingredients can be combined easily during a meal. If you use a little imagination, you can find ways to bring these ingredients together and create some great recipes.

Think calorie-dense food.

When you’re running around in the outdoors all day, you need plenty of energy. It’s not time to count calories and order the salad – you need food that fills you up without dragging you down. And you need plenty of energy to feel good. What foods are calorie dense? Bring a bottle of olive oil to add to your pans for healthy fat; other calorie-dense foods like cheese pack well and can be stored in the cooler.

Cooking in the wild is just like cooking indoors: it’s the preparation that will make or break a meal. You can’t cook without preparation indoors, so why would you expect to whip up something easily outdoors? Prepare by bringing the right ingredients, keeping them stored safely, and knowing how to bring them together over a simple pan and fire. It only takes a little bit of thinking and shopping: you can let the fire do the rest.

Photo Credits: fishbone1