Cooking for the Campsite: Meal Planning for a Fun…

Plan Meals for Camping

Cooking

Planning out a week’s worth of meals at home is hard enough; it seems nearly impossible if you plan out all of the meals for a week-long camping trip. After all, you won’t have those easy fallback options of going out to eat or making a grilled cheese sandwich. The only food you will have is the food that you bring with you, so it’s important that you plan out your meals carefully and ensure that you have everything you need.

This article will give you a few tips on planning a menu for your camping trip so that you don’t end up scavenging for berries at the end of your trip. 

Plan around the Cooking

You want to take as few cooking tools with you as possible when you go camping, so you should try to plan meals that all use the same outdoor cooking equipment in Alpharetta. So, if you have a recipe for Dutch oven biscuits, try not to also have barbecued chicken on the menu.

This would require you to have both the Dutch oven and access to a grill on your trip. Unless you know the campsite already has barbecues available for your use, this can make packing extremely troublesome.

If you really want to make things easy, plan as many meals as possible that require no cooking equipment. This can include things like tinfoil dinners, hot dogs, and other foods that can be cooked directly over the fire. Depending on how long your trip is, you may be able to plan a menu that doesn’t require you to pack any cooking equipment at all. However, if you’re going to be camping more than a few days, you’ll probably want some variety and will want to bring some equipment along so you can cook different meals.

Non-Perishable Foods

As easy as it is to serve everyone cereal and milk in the morning, keeping milk cold during a week of camping is quite difficult. Instead, you’ll have to plan meals that use non-perishable foods, like canned goods, rice, and pasta.

If you do have a few meals that use perishable food items, plan your menu out so that you will eat those items within the first few days. This will allow you to have those meals before the ingredients are in danger of going bad.

Advanced Preparation

Wherever possible, do as much cooking preparation in advance as you can. This can include things like chopping up the chicken and potatoes for your tinfoil dinners, or rolling up some breakfast burritos so they just need to be heated up over the fire. Whatever preparation you can do at home will save you a lot of time and hassle while you’re camping. After all, it’s much easier to chop up chicken on your clean countertop than to try to do it on a cutting board sitting on a log.

Divide and Conquer

If you’re going on a camping trip with multiple people, make sure that you divide up the duties for food. Put each person or group in charge of one meal or one day’s worth of meals and make them responsible for providing and preparing the food for that meal or on that day. This will lessen the load for you.

 

 

 

Plan meals for camping – Just make sure that you communicate with one another when you’re planning out the meals, you’re responsible for. Otherwise, you might end up having hot dogs every day.