I had drafted this post on what we ate while camping in the Shenandoahs this summer, but never finished it. So when I thought about maybe taking the kids camping next week when school is closed, it seemed like a good time to finish this post in anticipation of more camping food.
I spend a lot of time before camping and during camping thinking about food. Constantly figuring out when and what we are going to eat takes up 90% percent of my mental capacity while out in the woods. Camping makes Maslow’s hierarchy of needs very real for me. After all, keeping the kids fed is probably 95% of keeping kids (at least my kids) happy. And happy kids make happy campers.
When I meal plan for camping, I think about what might be easy to eat, require low amount of prep, but also tasty. Tasty is important. Spending three days in the woods is a hard sell for the kids if the food isn’t tasty. The challenging meal is always dinner. Breakfast is usually oatmeal or cereal, with one morning being something that involves bacon. Lunch is sandwiches. Dinner is the big meal. Dinner also has the potential to be the most fun too, so I like to keep it interesting and novel.
The other big challenge I find for meal planning while camping is to make sure we eat enough vegetables and fruit. Most food that will keep and that is easy to pack tend to be carbs or protein, things like crackers, bread, peanut butter, cheese, canned tuna. I have a fear of people being constipated, so I want to make sure they eat more than just carbs and protein. To that end, I try to pack a variety of fresh fruit and also veggies to be eaten raw, crudité style. Years ago, I realized that a veggie side could indeed be something as simple as cut up raw carrots; a veggie side didn’t need to be cooked. That was game changing in terms of how I thought of incorporating vegetables into a meal.
When we camp, I generally cook on a Coleman Camp Stove, and one night I will cook over the campfire. The camp stove is very easy to use and almost like being at home. Cooking over a campfire is very labor intensive (thank goodness for the luxury of modern kitchens!), but it is a special camping experience.
The food prep for camping involves lots of lists and shopping and prep. The night before we leave for our trip, I do a lot of food prep to make things easier when we get to the campground. I wash and cut fruit and put it into Ziploc bags so that it is simple to eat and we don’t have to deal with the trash of stems and cores. I make trail mix. I prep ingredients for foil packets for one dinner – parboil potatoes and chop and marinate veggies. This time I also made muesli and energy balls.
Here is my chicken scratch meal planning/ shopping list:
Here is what we actually ate for a three night camping trip:
Day 1:
Dinner – summer sausage, cheese, Triscuits, sliced apples.
This was the night that we got in and I didn’t finish setting up the tent until almost 8pm. So I wanted something easy, fun, and filling.
Day 2:
Breakfast – Meusli/Oatmeal with milk.
Lunch – Tuna wraps, apples, veggies (cucumbers, sugar snap peas, carrots) and Hummus
Dinner – leftover “turkey chili” eaten over Frito chips. Dessert – Almond Jelly with canned fruit.
-For the tuna wraps, I mashed canned tuna with avocado, sprinkled it with Everything but the Bagel seasoning, layered on some cheese and we ate it wrapped like a burrito. So simple and tasty!
-Almond Jelly was an impulse purchase at the Asian grocery store. It’s one of my favorite desserts, a jelly dessert that tastes like almond extract, eaten with canned fruit cocktail. It doesn’t require refrigeration to set since it is made of agar not gelatin, and this made it an ideal camping dessert. This was my first time bringing it, and I’m on the fence as to whether or not I would bring it on future trips – it’s an easy shelf stable dessert, but it don’t know that the rest of the family likes it as much as I do and we had a lot of it left over.
-The “Turkey chili” was the leftover filling from the zucchini boats we had for dinner the night before we left, basically ground turkey sauteed with black beans and a jar of salsa. I had read the camp meal idea of eating chili directly out of bags of Frito corn chips, and thought that might be fun. But in reality, I was a little wary of the mess of eating directly out of a bag, seeing as how we were in bear country and all. So we just had our chili and Fritos in bowls.
Day 3:
Breakfast: Bacon and egg breakfast burritos. Mango
Lunch: Summer Sausage, salami, cheese, Triscuits, apples, and carrots.
Dinner: Cooked over the campfire: Shrimp foil packets, Sausages. Baked Beans,. Bagged Caesar Salad. ‘Smores for dessert.
-We don’t eat a lot of bacon at home – I find it messy, plus it’s not the healthiest food. Despite that, I always bring bacon on camping trips. I cook up the bacon then fry the eggs in the leftover grease.
-Lunch was on the snack-y side because we took it on our very long hike, so I wanted something that we could pack easily but also eat easily with our hands.
-The shrimp packets were: potatoes, zucchini, corn, peppers, onions. Sprinkled with cajun seasoning. I packed the shrimp separately and assembled the packets at the camp site – on foil packet I put some kind of oil (usually butter or bacon grease) and then layer the veggies, shrimp, and some sausage. Some people say to assemble the packets at home but I find that makes things soggy especially since we weren’t eating them til the third night.
Day 4:
Breakfast: Cereal and pastries that the Husband had brought with him.
Snacks that I brought. (Snacking is a very important part of camping):
-Trail Mix – I like to make my own. I use mixed nuts (the Costco roasted unsalted nut mix), M&Ms (sometimes peanut ones), dried fruit (cherries, raisins, cranberries), pepitas, sunflower seeds, and pretzels for a bit of salty tang.
– Fruit. Apples, grapes, mango. I like mango because it keeps well without refrigeration and feel special so the kids are excited to eat it.
– Welches fruit snacks (Berry blend!) Also used as a bribe/ treat when the kids were getting tired on hikes.
– Shrimp chips and seaweed rice crackers. Basically I go to the Asian market and see what looks like it would be fun and crunchy and savory.
– banana chips
– String cheese
-energy balls – I made this recipe from Pinch of Yum for pecan pie energy bites. The rest of the family didn’t care for it, but I really liked them.
-jerky – turkey and beef.
The MVPs of this trip:
-Tortillas. I like the whole wheat tortillas from Trader Joe’s. In the past, I’ve always packed a loaf of bread for lunches, but I think I now prefer tortillas. They don’t take up much space to pack, they are dense, and I don’t have to worry about them getting crushed.
-Avocados, barely ripe. Avocados were great as a vegetable option, but also I mashed up avocado and used it instead of mayo mixed in with canned tuna for lunch. Really tasty.
– Trader Joe’s Everything But the Bagel Seasoning. I don’t bring a lot of herbs and spices when camping; mostly I just pack salt and pepper. I’m really happy that I tossed the Everything But the Bagel Seasoning in the bin at the last minute – it was an easy pop of flavor for a lot of things – tuna salad, breakfast wraps.
-Honey. It’s the only sweetener I bring and I love that it is so versatile. I mostly use it to sweeten the oatmeal and also to make Peanut Butter and Honey Sandwiches.
Other favorite camp meals (These I didn’t make on this trip, but I have in the past and I like them and they are very easy to make):
-Ramen. It is very versatile, but one of my favorite methods: I pack some miso our soup base with ginger and curry powder. In a separate container I pack diced onions, carrots, cabbage, whatever other veggies I like. At the camp site, I boil water, toss in the soup base/ginger/curry. When that is boiling and dissolved, I add the veggies and boil for a few minutes, then at the end I add the Ramen noodles.
-Mac n Cheese. Kraft makes a version where the sauce is already premixed so you don’t have to deal with the cheesy powder.
-Salmon – wrapped in foil and easy to cook over the fire, though ought to be eaten on the first night.
– Hot Dogs. cooked on sticks over the fire. Usually eaten with canned baked beans.
– Dehydrated backpacking meals. These aren’t necessarily the tastiest, but there is a lot of novelty in pouring hot water into a foil packet and having things like Mushroom Stroganoff emerge. They’re also good for keeping for the last meal of the trip since they don’t need to be kept in the cooler.
Well, that’s a big brain dump on how and what we eat while camping. I’m always on the look out for other food ideas to eat while camping! Currently we car camp, but I have dreams of going backpacking one day, and that is a whole other food ball game.