what do you consider the best meal to cook when camping

Don't forget those deep dish cherry or peach cobblers made in a Dutch oven with canned or fresh fruit, sugar and Bisquick.


HHHUUUMMMMMMMMMMM......................................GOOD
 
Dutch oven stuff, Shish-ka-bobs,
sliced congealed corn meal mush (made from freshly ground corn)
fried in bacon grease for breakfast.
Last month I went backpacking (usually the food sucks),
but for $4 I got some dry ice at walmart
and froze a foil pack of ground beef, chopped spuds, vegis..
and made a spicy stew (the dry ice kept it frozen until I started the hike and it stayed cold all day).
 
chili and corn bread (topped with real butter and thick slabs of cheddar) , and BRAIIIIINS!!!!!

sorry, had a Zombie moment there..........
 
Sausage and real onion gravy served over mashed potatoes

Gear:

medium sized pot
gas stove
campfire
cast iron/steel skillet with lid

Ingredients:

Potatoes
3 small red onions
1 stock cube/powder
water
any type of sausage
balsamic vinagar
big spoonful of flour
Oil
butter

Recipe:

Build a large ember base. Place two sticks or rocks on embers to sit skillet on. This is to allow the coals to breathe under the skillet. Place skillet on embers to heat up.

Fill pot with water. cut potatoes in half and dont bother peeling them. add to water and bring to boil over gas stove. Cook until fork tender. use lots of water.

Peel onions, cut in half then slice roughly.

Add oil to skillet (I use olive) with a pat of butter. Place onions in skillet and season with salt and pepper. Rub sausages with oil and add on top of onions.
Put lid on skillet. Put plenty of embers on lid to get heat coming from both directions. Cook for half an hour to 45 min. Do not bother flipping or stiring at any time.

After the onions and sausages are browned pull sausages out of skillet. Cover sausages so they dont get cold.

put skillet back on embers with onions. They should be jamified and sticky. Add some oil and butter and a big spoon of flour. cook for one min. Scald skillet with a lot of balsamic vinagar. Add two cups of the water the potatoes were cooking in, with some stock powder/cube. Cook until thick. This is your onion gravy.

Drain potatoes and mash in pot. Add butter. Dont worry about the skins.

Slice sausage and serve over potatoes with onion gravy over top. If you can pull of a bag of greens (watercress, lettuce or arugula) dressed with oil and balsamic or lemon, you are golden.

This recipe is not set in stone. We are talking campfire cooking here, you will have to mod the recipe to suit your situation.

Easy? Not exactly.

Rewarding? you will have never tasted food so good.
 
Mmmmmm ... now i wanna go bush

The pre prepared dinners wrapped in foil is one I gotta do but just havent got round to yet ... sounds great.

Hiking - my approach is carry dried food and add liquid when cooking wherever possible. Water is a big deal and depends on useable water where you are heading and what you can carry. Rice, noodles, jerky, freeze dried packets from camping shops, chocolate dried fruit, nuts ... my favourite cooking outfit is the trangias for a lightweight set but theres plenty of stoves to choose from and the fire is always a good option (i use a primus multifuel lightweight setup most of the time).

Drive in camping - hey hey ... bacon & eggs, good sausages, pancakes, damper, steak, chops, potatoes in foil, precooked and frozen meals, fish (fresh fish, lobster and abalone if a spear camp) ... take food frozen and lots of good freeze bricks or techno ice ... the portable 3 way fridge if you have one ...
All cooking on a hotplate on the fire or hotplate on the gas cooker if weather prevails

I would feel a trip comming on if it wasn't middle of winter now ... snowing at one of my favourite spots now
 
bltjr1951 said:
What if there's no lake with fish?? Spam is your friend. B^)
Or you can check out these dinners:

http://www.chuckwagondiner.com/categories.php?id=11
Click to expand...

This is a terriffic link, thanks for posting it!

Well for me, since I am alergic to both fish and eggs... I love to take along the makings off a good beef stew. Something my wife and I have made together since we started camping together. Of course when backpacking and hiking, it has to be kept cold, or the first evenings meal. This is especially good for "cool" weather camping early spring or late fall. When I am with my oldest boy, it tends to be foil packs of ground beef or steak tips with veggies.

But no matter the meal... coffee peaked over the fire is a must! :)
 
Damn I need to camp with some of you wilderness gourmets! I'm missing the good stuff.
 
The fire pit is an excellent BBQ. I divide the fire into two sections. One for cooking on with just a bed of coals, and on the other side the fire to create more coals, and then move them over to the cooking section as needed.

I then cook whatever meat that I would cook on any BBQ. Chicken, steak, ribs, chops they all do better on a real wood coal bed. I use the same sauce and seasonings that I do at home, but on the open fire the taste is so much better.

It sometimes gets a bit tedious keeping the fire even, but the meal that follows is well worth the extra effort.
 
I like fresh caught fish,fresh rabbit stew & there's nothing quite like waking up to the smell of bacon & eggs:thumbup:
 
A couple people have mentioned it now, but stews always taste good over a fire and don't require much tending.
Bannock is an easily made bread that can be wrapped around a stick and roasted - no cleanup.
A couple of dry, flat rocks as part of your fire ring are great for doing steaks, just roll 'em into the coals for a while to get the scent off them.
One meal I always pack is just some dry kidney beans, a couple bay leaves and spices. That way, I make a stew with whatever I find or catch - it's been a great way to learn wild edibles. Obvious warnings...

Everything you do in camp takes a bit longer than at home, so simple is good and who wants to spend their trip doing dishes ?

World's best breakfast - trout, a couple thick bacon strips, a couple eggs and piping hot coffee...mmm
Good, simple, one pan.

Whatever you make, try it out at home first. Pre-portioned meals are a good idea, and a couple IMPs (MREs) are always a good backup.

Dutch ovens have been mentioned, but I'd hold off since you have to pack into one of your sites. A 10" cast iron frying pan is still worth its weight IMO.

The toughest stuff to make is stuff that needs milk fat (milk) and butter/margarine. Powdered milk is skim, so it doesn't have the cream and IME butter and margarine are just a gloopy mess without a cooler. Hard cheeses pack well though.
 
I like to cook cannon balls when we go camping. Hollow out a big walla walla sweet onion, work some spices and veggies into your ground beef, insert ground beef into onion place potatos and veggies in the foil and wrap it all up. I like to double up on the foil. Put your cannon ball in the coals and let it cook.
DSC00064.jpg

DSC00069.jpg

DSC00084.jpg


For desert, core an apple, fill with brown sugar & raisins, wrap in foil and put on the coals for a short time and you have a hot apple treat! Great after swimming in the river all day.
 
I don't do ramen. Various reasons. Our "always ready" car camping larder includes pasta, couscous, rice, jarred sauces, smores makings, oatmeal, nuts and raisins and other dried bits. Oh, and LOTS of pepper n spice.

We generally pack in sausages of all types (VERY versatile), bacon, eggs raw and hard boiled, fresh fruit.

I love a good open fire BBQ, but sausages work for anything. and most foragables just toss right into your stir fry or jimbalaya. I tiny bit of a fatty sausage or bacon with any game or fish really brings up a recipe when you are stretching 2 pounds dressed out between 4 or 5 people.

Corn on the cob is one of our seasonal favorites, as are apples for frying. You need butter, not bacon grease for frying apples, and cinnamon & honey to go on top is good.

If we're doing a quick in and out without the full oon camping gear, I almost always do foil. bacon and hamburger meat with a lot of seasonings, bed of taters, sliced onion and whole garlic cloves. (bacon is for this purpose just a solid form of oil to put into the foil)
 
And yeah- when we do a base camp, I somehow end up making the endless soup/stew. We do that at home in the winter, too. Usually lasts 3 months.
 
Lots of good suggestions here but for simplicity I'd go with hotdogs ( if ya have kids then they love sharpening a green stick to skewer them on to hold them over the campfire !
For something a little more fancy I'd go with a chilli.....nothing better than watching a chilli bubble over the campfire while you knock back a beer !

I also agree with the person who recommended the book " Roughing it easy " lots of great camp cooking tips and recipes !!!
 
The absolute best breakfast I ever had was an egg and toast cooked over a charcoal grill. Just scrambled eggs in a small cast iron pan, and toast straight from pockets. I was a little kid, my first cooking escapade. The closest I have come to replicating that, is cooking breakfast over a wood fire while camping. Even though it's still in a pan, there is just something different when cooking with wood, as opposed to an electric or gas range.
 
Holy crap, some of you guys love to cook! For a quick trip, in my opinion, nothing beats either killing something and cooking it (first choice) or whippin up good old chili and hot dogs.
 
Sometimes I enjoy cutting a slice in the middle of a banana, putting chocolate and brandy (I usually use rum because its what I normally have), and cooking it on the fire, sometimes in foil, sometimes not.

Baked potatoes wrapped in foil thrown on the coals are easy and tasty.

Bacon and eggs, potatoes, tomatoes, pork sausages, all fried in the morning. Something we used to do in the boyscouts was fried bread instead of toast:).

Bannock or damper bread is very versatile, light to carry, and easy to cook. I find myself having it more and more.

If I'm backpacking, me and my girlfriend will often pack in rice, a little hard cheese (its fine not kept cold for at least a few days) freeze dried refried beans (bought in bulk from the local supermarket) and some tortillas.

We'll also eat lots of dried fruit and nuts. And jerked meat whilst on trail, with maybe some PB&J's.

Koyote: I'd love to hear more about your endless stews, I couldnt find a whole lot online. Do you keep them cooking over a fire constantly? Or just heat them up in the evenings when you want to eat? Are there foods that you should avoid putting in them?
 
Brazilian style roast on a spit. Pack a roast with pea sized rock salt, rotate it over the coals, shave off a bit to eat after it cooks a while, repack and do it again. You can do it on a grill too, but flipping it knocks the salt off too soon, just be a little more careful. Also, look up recipies that the revolutionary / civil war reenactors use.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top