What are Some Food Ideas for Camping?

Good food ideas for camping are extremely important, especially if you won't be near anywhere convenient to buy food during your trip. Without decent food, your camping trip is not likely to be very enjoyable! The best thing is that great food ideas for camping can be very simple.

All you have to do to get started in planning your camping food is to consider how many meals you'll need for what number of people. Then, use personal tastes to decide what each meal will be. Add snacks and beverages to your list as well. It's also a good idea, if space allows, to plan to bring a couple of extra meals just in case part of a meal gets ruined or your group ends up being hungrier than you thought.

The main part of a meal can be any protein food such as beans, meat, poultry, fish, eggs or cheese. Then you can add potatoes, bread or rolls, corn on the cob, or even rice. Salad, fresh vegetables or canned green vegetables round out lunches and dinners in a healthy way. Of course, the types of camping foods you'll be able to bring will depend a great deal upon the type of camping you'll be doing.

Food ideas for camping backpacking style may even be limited to mostly dehydrated foods, while recreational vehicle (RV) and cabin camping is much like having all the basic comforts of home. It's still worthwhile to plan your food ideas for camping ahead of time even if you'll be located in a resort campground and have a refrigerator, oven and stove since food prices at resorts can be very expensive.

Camping food can be as simple or as fancy as you wish. You can even combine the two styles by cooking simple, but elegant dinners accompanied by wine in a real wine glass. Even just a camp stove to cook on can provide plenty of good food ideas for camping. You can make almost any kind of breakfast, lunch or dinner dish with just a pot, a pan and a camp stove.

Don't forget that dinner leftovers can be used to make great brunches! For example, leftover corn scraped from the cob and baked potatoes cut into pieces can be transformed into a tasty hot meal when mixed with scrambled eggs in a large frying pan. You can use a bit of leftover bacon grease for frying and also add any leftover pieces of bacon or any other cooked meat.

Foil packets of foods cooked on a grill are popular and don't require any cookware. All you need is heavy duty aluminum foil to form a sealed cooking package for vegetables and other items. Practically any combination of foods cooks well in foil packets, but try to choose items with similar cooking times. You can even experiment with cooking individual desserts this way, such as by slicing and baking a banana in a foil package and then topping it with a little chocolate syrup. You can thinly slice apples and sprinkle with brown sugar, cinnamon, oats and a few dabs of butter to cook in a foil packet for a camping version of baked apples.