What to cook/eat on a camping trip

Back in January, I wrote a post about what to cook and eat on a ski/snowboard trip—basically foods that were easy to prepare, provided ample sustenance, and could warm you from the outside in.It’s May now, and summer is officially a few weeks away. In Houston, where temperatures have reached the lower nineties on occasion, summer’s already here. This means it’s camp time!I’m not a hardcore camper, so I don’t need to concern myself with lightweight foods like MREs that can hold up for weeks in a backpack. Being visually impaired, hiking and nature watching are also not top priorities. Instead, what I look forward to most about camping are getting off the grid, sitting around a fire, eating, drinking, and conversing.Because it gets so hot, humid, and mosquito-laden in southeast Texas during summer, we had to get our camping on last month. Even in April, it was muggy at night with the tent cover on, though this was necessary because of the rain we encountered.In spite of the extreme mud and mosquitoes, we had a good time. (It probably helped that we only camped for one night, so misery didn’t have the chance to last very long.)The hubs and I were, of course, in charge of the food. Some things to keep in mind when planning the menu for your camping trip:

1. Try to stay away from foods that need to remain extremely chilled, such as ice cream or uni. If you’re going pretty primitive, you’ll be relying on an ice chest for refrigeration, so depending on how well insulated your Igloo or how long you’ll be there, remember climate control is not in your favor.
2. Strategize so that ingredients can be used in multiple dishes and leftover foods can be turned into another meal. This minimizes waste and maximizes efficiency.
3. Consider how many mouths you’ll have to feed and how many times you’ll have to feed them. Also keep in mind the food needs to amply sustain you and your campers in case you do any hiking or outdoor activities.

In coming up with the menu for this overnight camping trip, I thought about foods which aren’t fussy—finger foods are ideal; would cook well over a campfire with few tools; and, of course, taste good. Here’s what the hubs and I fed ourselves and our three fellow camping companions:

• Cilantro garlic dip with tortilla chips. Good for snacking around the fire with a couple of beers. The great thing about this dip is it’s versatile enough to make several reappearances throughout our noshing time—stay tuned for the reruns. To make it, you basically throw cilantro, garlic, jalapeños, lime juice, cream cheese, oil, and other seasonings or ingredients of your choice into a food pro and blend until smooth.
• Bratwurst topped with kim chi reduction and Sriracha mayo. I don’t yet own a meat grinder, so we didn’t make our bratwurst from scratch, but they tasted good nonetheless charred over the open fire. Ideally, I wanted to tuck them in a pretzel or cheese bun, but we could only find potato buns during our last-minute supermarket run, so potato buns it is. My mama-in-law makes the best kim chi, but as we are only a household of two, the Korean spicy fermented cabbage usually goes sour before we can finish the tub. The best thing to do with ripened kim chi is to cook it; usually we throw it in chigae or fried rice. For camping, though, I minced it up and cooked it down in a clay pot with just some water and dashi, an umami-packed Japanese soup base. We used this in lieu of the traditional sauerkraut—both are forms of pickled cabbage. And instead of brown mustard, I made a quick Sriracha mayo which, as you may have guessed, is composed of just the famous rooster hot sauce and mayonnaise. It was an Asian twist on a German favorite.
• Roasted Korean purple yams. These can be found in a Korean supermarket if you’re lucky to have one nearby. They’re smaller and tastier, and they’re best simply roasted over high heat. You can cover them with foil and then remove it for the last leg of cook-time for that nice char on the skin. Eat it plain or with the kim chi reduction and/or Sriracha mayo.
• Roasted corn. It’s summer, so corn’s in season. Roast them right in their husks—just be sure to soak them in cold water beforehand so the husks don’t catch fire (this was a mistake I made on MasterChef actually). Eat them with the husks pulled back as a handle to grip with some more of that cilantro garlic sauce.
• S’mores! I can never go camping without a s’more. We made open-faced s’mores using store-bought graham crackers, good-quality semi-sweet chocolate, and bourbon maple marshmallows I made from scratch the night before. The bourbon cooks off in the process so it’s not as boozy as you’d think, but if you want to bring on the booze, just add more. You just have to be careful with the liquid ratio or else you’ll end up with super soggy marshmallows. Serious Eats posts a good s’more recipe using bourbon marshmallows. I used some Canadian maple syrup in mine, and it made a huge difference, adding dimension to an otherwise flat food. (I actually despise prepackaged marshmallows, so the only way I’ll eat them is if they’re mixed in with Rocky Road ice cream or homemade and melted.) I like the idea of this adult s’more; the only thing I would add next time is a smoky bacon crumble because bacon goes so well with bourbon and maple. That would elevate this gooey, warm s’more to perfection.
• Breakfast tacos with chorizo and eggs. The next morning, we restarted the fire and cooked chorizo (think of it as Mexican sausage), followed by eggs scrambled in the same cast iron skillet to soak up all that fatty goodness. We stuffed them in flour tortillas, which we’d stacked and wrapped in foil to heat over low fire. Toppings included some chopped tomatoes and red onion, and don’t forget that ubiquitous cilantro garlic dip-turned-sauce—I told you it was versatile.

And voila! Fancy pants camp food. The hubs and I love to feed people—food is what brings people together—and we were happy when our friends said they ate better at camp than at home.Are you big on camping? Do you have upcoming camping trips? Do share your camping menus with me. Maybe I’ll try some of your ideas come October when the Texas outdoors is bearable again.