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

How to Save Money on Camping

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

In these difficult economic conditions across the world, it’s not always easy to consider luxuries like camping trips and vacations as “essentials.” However, if we’re going to maintain our sanity during these times, we’ll have to keep living our lives and find ways to scrimp, save, and still pull off an adventurous, fun lifestyle.

That’s why this article will explain how to save money on camping, allowing you to take a quick, easy, fun camping trip for less money then you’ve been spending in the past. Let’s take a look at how this is done.

To save money on your camping trip, start in your house.

Your house? Absolutely – before you even start spending money for equipment and camping gear, you need to look in your garage, basement, and attic to see what you’ve already got. No sense in buying a new tent if you already have a perfect one downstairs, waiting to be used.

Second, don’t go to the store to buy camping gear without a search online.

Online stores like Amazon and eBay might have what you need at lower prices, especially if you’re buying used equipment. If you don’t have an Amazon or eBay account, don’t worry – it won’t take long to set up and you can be saving in no time! Use the internet to find cheap items you can buy that you didn’t find around your house.

Third, bring your own food and be ready to cook it.

Buying bulk items like hot dogs and buns will be much cheaper than taking your family out to eat, and roasting wieners over the fire makes the process fun. Just make sure that you’re ready for your food: pack up a cooler with ice to keep your meats cold and fresh and you’ll be set for the weekend. You can even cook popcorn over your fire, which makes a great snack and is incredibly easy to carry.

Looking at these tips, you have a great starting point for saving money during your next camping trip. There are dozens of other ways to save money, so the rest will depend on you: if you adequately plan and prepare for your camping trip, you’ll find that saving money is easy, as long as you hold a watchful eye on every purchase and ask yourself “can I save money doing this a different way?”

Photo Credits: mckaysavage