Camping with food

Hello and Good Afternoon,

Saying good bye to a long weekend is always hard, but in my case it has been such a long awaiting good time, I’m happy to go out on a high. A last minute decision to go away camping for the weekend at the start of winter is something that we haven’t done for a while, so it was fantastic to embrace the long weekend and take a bunch of fantastic friends along with us!

Camping is something that I enjoy a lot, I love the scenery, the four wheel driving, the social aspect, the relaxing time, the quietness, the lack of phone reception, and of course, I love the food! Gourmet, exciting, new, uncharted territory, delicious and best ever aren’t the sorts of words the ordinary person would say about traditional camping grub. But they are general words in the camping food dictionary for me and my friends! Campfires, camp ovens, gas cookers and billy’s have so many opportunities to charm and entice campers, you just need to break the rules and possibly put in a bit of effort.

When I think of going camping, I instantly take my mind to what is going to be cooked for breakfast, lunch and dinner each day. I investigate and think about what delicious, warming things I will take and make with minimal effort but maximum fun and taste. One of the things my friends and I find the most fun is starting to plan breakfast the night before and dinner sometime after breakfast! Happy hour is something that has been introduced as a concept of absolute delight to our camping afternoons! We all try and take some nibbles to contribute to the communal afternoon time happy hour feast. It has a tendency to provide a platform for people to try new things and it has created new ideas and love for different foods.  There has been blue cheese, pastry twists, smoked trout, dips, crackers and more over the years and this recent camping tradition has once again brought new light to traditionally “fancy” foods by placing them in such a different scene. My friend broke out the smoked trout again on this weekends’ adventure and combined with avocado and crackers. It was something super fancy and delicious, but oh so appropriate. It was great to see people that didn’t think it would be nice absolutely love it and go back for more and more of the great cracker creations!

Lunches were and always have been a bit of a time filler. Mainly because everyone is either saving their energy and room for the dinner that has been in the planning stages since breakfast, or we are all slipt up doing all sorts of “camping” things J Dinner is where all the excitement happens, I can’t deny. Everyone is back from fishing, four wheel driving, swimming, walking, or doing as little as possible and things just fall into place at that time of the day. A few drinks have been sunk and conversations are freely flowing. Ideas are always taken on board with more excitement and enthusiasm. I always have a personal mission to make the best with traditional camping foods. I think the trick is not to get sucked into presentation or what it looks like, potential in the food needs to be seen and opportunities to turn boring things into great things needs to be embraced. Variables like smell, ingredients and the amount of love put in are the things that matter in a camping food creation, and that’s what makes the meal we don’t stop raving about! Last night was the big night for dinner. The camp oven does brilliant things to food, so our friends’ camp oven is something that is always a staple in the communal dinner cook up! It was discussed that we would create something beautiful in the camp oven, where the only rule was that if you could contribute an ingredient, you were guaranteed a bowl! So a brilliant concept of spaghetti was born. It soon turned into an interesting but intriguing idea with carrots, potatoes, peas and corn, curry powder, sausages, and bacon added into the mix. But none the less, it turned into a fantastic stew/pasta/one pan dish that we pretty darn proud of J

I could go on for a lot longer than this about the bacon and egg breakfasts that we cooked, the vodka, lime and soda mixes and the other dinners we cooked on our adventures, but I better keep some material for the other future posts! Overall a great weekend with great people. It really had every element of a great weekend. The food was experimental, and turned out better than we could have imagined which is always a plus! The bar is always set higher every time we get away, so we have a high expectation of the next happy hour and the next camp oven cook up, no doubt. But, I’m sure that we will all take the challenge on with our heads held high!

Xo

NJC