Cooking on the Go

When you’re camping you want to take everything you need and nothing more. We have a kitchen utility box with knives, pots and pans, cutlery, plates, bowls, wine glasses, propane stove and so forth.

Three white plastic boxes hold the non-perishable food: one for canned goods, one for staples like flour and sugar and one for miscellaneous mixes, tea, coffee, chips and cookies.

I make sure we have a week’s worth of food. But more than that, I make sure we have three days of food that doesn’t require cooking or heating, in case the stove stops working or we run out of propane. That did happen to us once, right in the middle of making pasta. Ever eaten half raw pasta? Didn’t think so.

A trick to save space and keep food fresher is to take things like stuffing mix, granola, or oatmeal and put them in zip-locked bags.
Since we both like to cook we need our spices, but not all those little bottles and jars. So we did the same thing and repackaged everything in … you guessed it … zip lock bags. All labeled of course. You might think you can tell the difference between cumin, cinnamon and paprika but when it’s getting dark … not so much.

I haven’t tried baking while we’re camping. I’m not much of a baker when it comes to cakes and cookies but I do make flakey biscuits, tender corn muffins and fresh bread.

The challenge with baking is the fire, or actually the lack of fire but plenty of hot coals. It takes an entire bag of wood to make enough hot coals to bake a batch of biscuits. A bag of wood costs $5.99 so those biscuits are rather expensive.
Dee
Note to Self: Get oven mitts before attempting to bake, a dish towel easily catches on fire.