I start building our meals while planning our itinerary. I do this for several reasons. It's helpful to know how much time we anticipate having at camp for that meal. Are we eating a meal out? Do we need to wake up and leave right away? Will we be getting back to camp late for dinner? Do we plan on coming back to camp for lunch? Are we bringing food for the whole trip, or do we plan on restocking food at some point? All of these things play a role in deciding our meals.
We like to pre-make the food and freeze it if possible. We've found this works well for several meals. It makes mealtime faster, we don't need to bring as many ingredients, and it helps keep our cooler cold longer.
When we're camping, we are going on a lot of hikes and usually swimming a lot as well. We want to make sure we plan for meals that will give us energy for the day.
For longer trips we will bring two coolers. One for fresh produce and the other for items that need to stay colder. We find fresh fruit and veggies so refreshing after a hike, and tend to incorporate them in our lunches.
We front load our trip with meals that need to be kept cold, for example; hamburgers, tacos and panini sandwiches. Then towards the end of the trip we have meals that required little to no cooler space such as spaghetti, summer sausage, cheese and crackers.
We like to have a hearty breakfast, but time doesn't always allow for that.
Another thing we take into consideration is what equipment we are bringing. We have a flat top grill we bring if we're camping closer to home and with other people. It is really helpful when making large quantities of food. If it's just our family, we tend to just bring our two burner stove. It takes up a lot less space, but this changes how we cook as we only have two burners to work with at a time.
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