Camping Food Menu and Ideas

One of the great parts of camping is the food. We recently went up to the Mogollon Rim near Payson, Arizona and had a great time. The great food was just a bonus!

Day One
Breakfast: Whatever we had at Home
Lunch: from Wendy's on the ride to the campsite
Dinner: Shepherd's Pie Tin Foil Dinners

Day Two
Breakfast: Pop Tarts and Cereal
Lunch: Grilled Ham and Cheese or Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches
Dinner: Steak and Potato Packets

Day Three
Breakfast: Eggs and Bacon
Lunch: Sausage and Tots or Hot Dogs and Tots
Dinner: Classic Tin Foil Dinners

Day Four
Breakfast: Pancakes
Lunch: Snacks on the way home
Dinner: Whatever we had at home

Different Cooking Methods

For the Sausage, Hot Dogs and Steak we cooked them over the fire (our neighbors that went with us sometimes pulled out the grill instead). You can make your own sticks by whittling the ends of a stick and sanitizing it by burning the edges really quick or use ones that you bought. For the steaks especially, they can be propped up to the fire by rocks and turned as needed. The campfire really does add good flavor to them, I'm already craving another campfire steak!

The tin foil dinners are cooked over coals. I don't mean that you brought charcoal, I mean that you started a fire and let it burn for a little bit until you had some great coals. You will have to move around the logs that are still on fire to get to them though. Also, make sure to bring some gloves to pick up the foil packets because they will be really hot! I use just plain leather work gloves but something a little bit more fire-safe would be better. The potatoes were cooked in tin foil packets as well as the tin foil dinners.

For the breakfasts and the grilled cheese we used my camping frying pan inside of our friend's 5th wheel on their gas stove. If it were just me camping I would have cooked all of those things over the campfire/coals or even on a camping stove. Do whatever is easiest for you!

Prepare Ahead

Most everything we had prepared ahead of time. I made the tin foil dinners and prepared the tater tot packets before we left and froze them. Freezing them helped them stay at a safe temperature in the cooler, and helped keep everything else cold. The first night we realized that we should have taken out the tin foil dinners way sooner to thaw, because they took a long time to cook. The rest of them defrosted right on schedule.

The only thing we really prepared there was the pancake batter and the potato packets. It was fine to do them while we were there but had we done them earlier it would have saved us some stress of bringing all the ingredients and supplies.

Check out recipes that we made after this camping trip from the wild blackberries we picked. See them here at Arizona Mama.