Camping foodies - advice please!

[HexBramble]

Travelling to France next week and I am going to make good use of my cool box. So am making a chilli which I will freeze in 2 blocks, do the overnight travel and cook on the first night.

I am also hoping to marinade and freeze chicken fillets with a sticky soy, ginger, garlic and honey glaze. We have hired a little fridge into which I will pop the chicken fillets when we arrive and then BBQ on the 2nd night (prob serve with savoury rice and salad).

3rd night -spag Bol.

That's all I've planned for so far. How does it sound?

Yummy!

Fine. But you can buy food in France you know. They have supermarkets.

Ouch!

They do have supermarkets but it's quite nice to have one week in the year when you don't have to step foot in the bloody things! OP I think your menus sound great. Jar of homemade pesto to lob on some pasta? Then a wander round the market which never feels a a drudgy as the supermarket when on holiday.

There will be a market on somewhere near you. Bread and cheese and salad and different saucisse that are made from a variety of animals... delicious!! We always find its too hot to actually cook so live on a variety of salads with whatever proteins are native to that area!

I LOVE shopping in foreign supermarkets. Everything is different and looks so much nicer.
Part if the fun of a foreign holiday for me is trying different local foods.

Me too! I love doing the supermarket run on holiday. It's a real experience- you get to try different things. Surely you will be going anyway to stock up on wine?

Definitely do supermarket - they have gorgeous stuff in French ones and enough ready made unusual stuff that you won't be cooking. It's the best bit!

I presume the prepare ahead stuff is to cut down on cooking when one is supposed to be on holiday? I find doing the freezing sauces thing gives us more time to do nothing nice things together, as a family.

If that is the reason... I also recommend the pouches by "look what I found", black ones, Sainsburys and waitrose sell them, probably other supermarkets. They do pretty nice meals with meat (chicken, beef, amb, sausage etc) that are then sealed, so no need for refrigeration. They're great with rice or pasta, or even fresh crusty bread (usually available in France) and very very quick to heat up. They often have them on offer, so you can stock up- obviously if you're a family with 6 children, it wouldn't be particularly cost-effective, but for 2 adults and 1 child, or 2&2, they're pretty good.

We do a 'hot chicken' crusty bread and butter tea at least once during our hols. We get a hot rotisserie chicken from the supermarket, wrap it in towels to keep warm eat back at the tent.

OP it all sounds lovely - I am a complete foodie and always cook from scratch but I don't get too hung up about it when camping.

We tend to camp off the beaten track - if I can buy locally I will but if I can't I can usually manage for a week. We have a child with very severe allergies and over the years I have become used to not being able to rely on buying things when I am away

Risottos are good camping food, I freeze chicken in little pieces before I go, a piece of parmesan is fine in a plastic container a week. Saffron and white wine make another lovely risotto when the frozen/cold things have been used up if you can't get to a shop.

I freeze things from my lovely butcher for a BBQ for a couple of nights and usually use those the first and third night when the salads are still fresh.

We also do 'Look at what I found' a couple of nights (curries are best imo), you can buy direct from them, much cheaper - I ordered last week and got 15% off and free delivery - I got 34 packets of various things for £54. Sell by dates are 12 months from now. We camp a lot - will probably have been for 50 nights this year when we stop at the end of October. I reckon we will still be using food from this order when we get going again in the spring. I usually add something like peppers to the curries. Things like naan can be longer life ones.

I also like to have Merchant Gourmet cooked grains/lentils and those packets of flavoured cous cous in my food boxes when camping. A tin of butter beans and tomatoes cooked with a stock cube and a few herbs make a lovely soup with a carrot and a bit of garlic and parmesan.

Have you thought of a pressure cooker OP? Great for things like Irish Stew in about 45-55 mins (I always take the other bits with me from home), depending on what you can buy locally.

The other thing to think about is how often you open your cool box. We have the swanky one with the frozen things (usually still frozen on day 5), another one for fruit and veg and a small one for the day. It really makes a difference to how long things stay cold if you have the room.

Have a lovely holiday - whatever you eat will be fab.

Sounds like great and ,importantly ,simple and easy to follow advice .

Like the sound of the soup .

I thought about it afterwards .... we go north in the summer, south in September/October and April/May. We don't do heat because we like walking/cycling/canoeing etc., etc., all better done in cooler temps.

Maybe risottos, soup and Irish Stew are not what the OP needs in France!

Ah you lot what fab advice - hugely appreciated.

Middleagedmotheroftwo Cor blimey - there are supermarkets in France??

We do a 4 week stint in France most summers, and always start with a fortnight camping. It's me that packs everything, load up the van, drives the whole way there, and while setting up camp is a team effort, the last thing I want to do once everything is up is make a dash for the nearest Intermarché! We paid €30 for 2 pizza's and 2 beers last year for the first night so I want to make sure that the first few days are sorted. I can send Dd's to the camp shop for baguettes and tomatoes and then I'll look forward to a few hours mooching around the lovely french supermarkets (with air-con!) to stock up for more stuff.

Nerf and Lavender - great suggestions re packets. I'll definitely look into those.

Oh and my cool box is a £9 special from Lidl, so I'm planning on freezing as much as poss (including milk, water and OJ) whacking in my freezer blocks and placing a top layer of bagged, frozen wine at the top (genius idea I read about on here). Said box will stay firmly packed and unopened until we arrive and plug in our hired fridge.

Wow, that sound fab Hex!! Very jealous!