As a bit of a continuation of the campfire pizza post I wanted to write more about the camping food side of things.
I have to confess that for all of our healthy eating, for us it’s a time to junk out… so much so that when I’m grocery shopping before we go I cringe to think that I might run into someone I know at the store. Seriously.) Hot dogs, chips and more chips, granola bars, cookies, sugary cereal… much of it is stuff I give a pass the rest of the year.
We are healthy people. We eat pretty well and try to stay relatively active, but this is the one time of year that it’s easier to let go. It worked in other ways too, like when the girls were small and wanted sugary cereals at other non-camping times of the year. They’d look longingly at the rows of bright boxes with smiling cartoony faces.
“Can we get some of this mom,” they’d ask hopefully.
“SURE!” I’d say. “When we go camping!”
The result? They leaned to stop asking for the most part, but I always kept my promise. For a few years we bought those tiny boxes of cereal when we went camping, but lately I’ve taken to buying one box to bring with us. 2011 was the year of Cap’n Crunch. Woo hoo!
On the morning of our first day of camping we unpacked our kitchen bin only to discover a disaster of epic proportions:
Our glass coffee press was broken!
CUE SCREAM OF TERROR
As you can see by the photo, a giant shard was missing. But guess what, we used it anyway. Can you believe it? Despite the risk of swallowing slivers of glass we made coffee in it all week.
I can’t think of anything else that so accurately illustrates the extent of our coffee addiction.
Anyway, this year’s camping menu looked something like this:
Tuesday
Arrival snack – Foil-wrapped English muffins with salami and cheese (“grilled” on the camp stove)
Dinner – steak, Caesar salad, baguette
Dessert – Banana boats
Wednesday
Breakfast – Cereal, milk, orange juice, coffee
Snacks – fruit/nuts/granola bars
Lunch – Grilled cheese, chips, pickles
Dinner – Hamburgers, raw veggies
Dessert – S’mores + marshmallows on the fire
Thursday
Breakfast – Bacon, pancakes and syrup, juice, coffee
Snacks – Fruit & yogurt
Lunch – Campfire pizzas
Dinner – premade chicken kebabs, raw veggies
Friday
Breakfast – leftover bacon, cereal and toast with PB
Snack – granola bar/trail mix
Lunch – fried spam (YES), veggies and toasted bagels with butter
Snack – fruit
Dinner – Hot dogs/sausages/buns/veggies
Saturday
Breakfast – cereal and toast
Snacks – fruit/cookies
Lunch – canned soup and toast
Dinner – linguine and pesto
Sunday (departure day)
– whatever’s left… and there ain’t much by this point.
To keep it simple (and because I have a terrible memory) I keep a printout of this for easy reference onsite.
The trick is to eat your most perishable and tender foods early in the week.
Non-perishable foods (chips etc) are kept in bins in the car. Perishable foods like butter and cheese and meats are kept in a large cooler along with some ice packs, frozen juice boxes and frozen cartons of milk. We dump a bag of ice in there every day to keep it cold. A second smaller cooler contained some fruit and veg and a third cooler (that anyone can access) was for beer and juice-boxes. No one is allowed to enter coolers #1 or #2 without express permission from me. :) (Can you picture me shrieking: “THIS IS NOT LIKE HOME. THIS IS NOT A FRIDGE YOU CAN STAND IN FRONT OF.”)
Anyway, that’s how I do it.
It seems like an awful lot of work, now that I see it all written down. Man. Can someone remind me why I agree to going camping every year? :)
