pleeeease share your camping cuisine ideas

[pombearcat]

Regular campers but stuck in a rut food wise !! ..hate food shopping so usually skip off in denial to campsite with just biscuits,cereal,milk,coffee,wine,beer and then have to haul myself off into civilisation to do food shopping whilst on 'holiday' usually ending up with sausages, pasta, tinned chilli etc
There me and DH and four DCs ...enlighten me with your fabulous, inexpensive, meals (no EHU just gas stove/grill and bbq and a coolbox)
Camping for five nights from Thursday

Do something more ambitious with your bbq - not sausages and burgers! (kebabs with pita breads and middle eastern style dips, for example, or chicken in a jerk seasoning)
Do something more adventurous with your stove - take the wok and wok ready noodles, stir fry stuff? packet of ready-chopped stir fry veg, chicken strips etc.
Camping Quesadillas: tortilla wrap laid in the pan, top modestly with cheese / tuna / thinly sliced mushrooms / anything you like - not too runny put another tortilla on top, dry fry in pan, flip, cut in quarters and serve.

Take some ready made chilli - made not sloppy, take a can of refried beans, tortillas, pot of yogurt, heat chlli and beans, grated cheese, tub of guac, make burritos.

4 DCs/ 6 of you is a lot. I would take ready made stews and serve with baguettes. And chick pea and spinach curry, take a pack of ready made chapattis.

I make curry and rice
Fajitas
Chilli and rice
I take a cooked pie and do new pots and veg.
BBq.

I know you said you're in a pasta rut, but fresh pasta (ravioli or tortellini) takes just a couple of minutes to cook. Stir through a nice sauce and serve with a salad.

A stir-fry is an excellent idea, Blu.

Thats great ...thank you ! Why can't I think like that? would never have thought of wok, noodles etc ...that all sounds great

Use the BBQ and cook mushrooms in tinfoil packets (with butter and seasoning). Or fish in tinfoil packets with some herbs, lemon and olive oil.

Ziploc bags can be used to marinade meat or veg and then cook on skewers. BBQ seasoning, jerk, piri piri or just a simple olive oil and lemon juice and herbs, I tend to use dried garlic a lot for making such seasonings.

Bring a meal from home for night 1 - spag bol or chilli or similar - a sauce to just heat and cook rice/pasta to accompany it. Or maybe even bring a meal from home that is frozen to use on night 2 - which also serves as an extra iceblock in the coolbox!

DD and I had pancakes for breakfast last week on our 2 night trip. I had the dry ingredients weighted into a Ziploc bag, and just made up half each morning with an egg and milk in a bowl. I've also seen other campers do similar but batter completely made at home and brought in a ketchup bottle to squeeze out onto the pan.

Mr Kipling individual apple pies and Ambrosia individual pots of ready made custard for desert.

I had contemplated but not got around to buying the tinfoil dishes to freeze meals - to use as disposable trays on the woodfire to cook in. They'd work on a BBQ as well - to do mixed veg or similar.

I also had a John West steam pot (couscous and tuna with flavourings) which only needs water, I had not got around to experimenting with flavourings for couscous that DD would accept but I do couscous at home - only needs boiling water to steep in to cook, and some flavor to help. That would be nice with some lamb chops off BBQ?

Oh, a pasta carbonara would be easy to make on camp too - one pan to fry bacon, onions, and a separate pot for pasta. Mix cream, egg and parmesan in a bowl/jug, add to hot drained pasta pot, add in onion and bacon, stir through for eggs to cook enough to thicken sauce. Could use long life cream and then it can be a "later in the week" meal.

Salmon fillets wrapped in foil and chucked on the BBQ. Couscous with tinned peas, sweetcorn, salt and butter. So bloody easy and delicious. Also healthy 😇

corned beef hash: chopped onion, sliced tinned potatoes, corned beef, fried until crispy with a fried egg on top.
barbecued bacon butties for breakfast.

You can cook roasted veg in foil on the BBQ as well. Chop suitable veg (onion, courgette, aubergine, a small amount of tomato, garlic, maybe sweet potato) into 1cm chunks, add butter, or olive oil, herbs of your choice, salt, pepper and a small amount of sugar sprinkled over, put in a foil parcel (I fold the foil double) which is loosely done up - not tightly parcelled up, you want a kind of pillowy roof, and roast on the bbq.

A few packs of halloumi - used to be very expensive but now in Lidl, or Tesco own brand, very reasonable - marinade in a plastic bag in lime juice and herbs, dash of honey, grill in thick slices on the barbecue, serve in pita with salad.

Wow..thank you .
I WILL do the food shop before I go now

That ketchup bottle pancake idea is GENIUS!

Gnocchi are easy to boil and suffer less from overcooking than other pasta.
Also the leftovers can be fried in the bacon fat in the morning. Food of the gods, I tell you.

I do pancake mix in a plastic milk bottle at home - you can do 4 pints and it'll keep for a few days, just shake before use.

Gnocchi with garlic and herb cream cheese is excellent with some ham snipped in, and one pot.

We often do noodles after a trip to the supermarket and collection of a noodle meal deal (meat, veg, noodle, sauce)

Swedish meatballs (they sell them in Asda, the precooked kind) with tomato sauce and precooked rice (just plonk in boiling water then drain)

Cheese fondue. If you ask sit around the stove and eat it straight from the pan then there's hardly any washing up!

I go one further with pancakes. Cook at home with pre cooked bacon in the mix. Freeze when cooled. just heat and serve with maple syrup.

Sausage stew. Cook halved New potatoes in a mixture of passata, stock and puree for ten minutes. Add cooked sausages fried with onions. A can of Harricot beans. Mushrooms. Corgette. celery and carrot. Simmer for 20 mins untill sauce thickens. Serve with crusty bread.
Good luck with new ideas.

I don't prep anything ahead , use the time spent cooking to relax, sit down and drink wine.

We usually BBQ every other night. I make risotto, curries, tortilla wraps heated up on top of our wood burner or meths heater with pan fried chicken and other stuff. I try to buy a bit of local meat and/or fish most days if we are near civilisation, otherwise I take frozen stuff from home and shop every fourth day.

I take those pre cooked rice things and flavoured cous cous packets, weigh risotto rice and put it in a bag with stock cubes.

These make the best curries. I usually make two, one for vegetarians and a meat one.

I save my coolbox for things that have to be kept properly cold and use a cool bag for veg and fruit (and anything else that won't kill us if it isn't freezing).

I feed 4/5 on a single burner.

Mainly curry, but that's what we eat at home.

Boil kettle.
Make rice absorption stylee.
Whilst absorbing make curry with ready-cut meat or veg.

How do you cook your rice Uterus? Do you have a trangia?

At home I soak it and rinse it before covering it with 3/4 inch of water and it cooks in less then ten mins.

I have never been bothered enough to do the soaking/rinsing thing away so buy the packets which are not as nice.

Fantastic ideas!

Bit late for this weekend but for the future- We use wraps to make calzone pizzas, means I can have gluten free. Also useful as most of the ingredients other than cheese and ham/ salami can be bought ahead of time. We often have it when travelling. Duck salad with Doritos is a new discovery - only need to cook the duck. I know you said no EHU, but if you ever succumb then a slow cooker is great. Pop some stuff in on low in the morning while everyone is waking up and it is ready to eat in the evening. Sausage, butter bean and tomato stew is nice and warming. Maybe serve with a pack of ready rice.

Mmm nice ideas

With the pancake mix you can freeze it in a sauce bottle at home and then chuck it into your cool box, defrost and shake it before you use it.

I have a suitcase-style gas cooker.

I boil the kettle on it. Set that aside whilst heating the rice through with a wee bit of oil. Once the grains are translucent I pour on the water with much hissing and steaming. Boil for a couple of minutes with a tight lid on, then just put it aside.
It's what I do at home too.

Well, thanks to you Uterus I cooked proper rice when camping at the weekend. I used my normal family serving, judged by the height in a particular pan then poured into a lidded plastic container. Weighed my lentil combination into a plastic bag. Measured the lentil slices into a piece of cling film and the tarka spices into a tiny plastic pot. Six shallots (had run out of onions), tomatoes, french beans and peas from the garden in another bag inside said plastic box. Essentially curry and rice in a box with no refrigeration required.

Once I had got the lentil curry going and veg in a second pan I soaked the rice as I do at home, but in the plastic container it came in with all the other stuff that was now cooking .... Genius - so much nicer than the bags of rice, added a £2 strainer to my shopping for the camping kit as I won't be going back to bags of rice!