The start of winter, when outdoor activity tapers off, is a good time to go through your campfood supplies and outdoor kitchenware. Throw away that old pancake flour mix, spices that have lost their kick, and rancid cooking oils, and consider updating your cooking gear. (If you plan to get new equipment like top-quality knives or a high-tech nonstick frying pan, send your still-functional, but replaceable relics to a thrift store so someone else can buy them for their mountain cabin or camp kit.) It’s also time to think about restocking fresh spices and the condiments that make life easy in camp and your backyard when you need to speed up meal preparation without compromising food quality. I call these my “all-star” ingredients.
When my wife and I were both working, we needed to share quality time in the evening and easy-to-prepare, nutritious, tasty meals. We abhorred preprepared food laden with salt and sugar. My goal was to put a quality meal on the table in 30 minutes or less. Doing this required a pantry well supplied with herbs, spices, canned stocks, nuts, cooking oils of different types and flashpoints, and a variety of condiments and flavorful vinegars. Jars of prepared sauces, such as those for pasta or barbecue, are also useful. When one is in a hurry, making a ragu sauce or a six-ingredient meat marinade from scratch is not going to be possible.
I usually cook meals for two or more nights at once, and often, on the second day, entrée meat leftovers of all types go into a one-dish, one-serving-bowl entrée salad. On leisurely weekends, I may try a salad dressing recipe that could require some prep time, but on weekdays and in camp, out comes another all-star readymade preparation — Alder Market Sesame Spinach Dressing.
My wife and I grill outdoors all year long, but more often during our seven months of warm weather. I’ll julienne leftover flank steak or grilled skin-on, bone-in chicken breasts into matchsticks, add snow peas or snap peas (blanched for two minutes), fresh bean sprouts, prewashed organic baby spinach and arugula mix, cashew nuts, sliced red pepper, orange slices, cilantro sprigs, and wonton strips. Add the Alder Market dressing, and we have a tasty and nutritious meal on the table in 20 minutes. If you don’t have leftover meat, chop up a piece of pre-cooked fried chicken from the supermarket. That skin is tasty! At home, and sometimes in camp, I add a dash or two of pomegranate vinegar for another layer of flavor. In camp, serve it in a dollar store disposable aluminum pan (ecologically marginal), and you have one less dish to wash (water-conservation smart).
Often I decant liquids and spices into smaller containers for the camp kit. If my meals are preplanned, I sometimes put them into aluminum foil packets, much like the prepackaged meal ingredients that you can have delivered to your door at exorbitant prices and of dubious quality. Put spices in glass containers for freshness and liquids in clear, flexible bottles. The TSA-approved travel bottles at chain drug stores work nicely.
If you have ever traveled outside of California, you’ve learned that the availability of herbs and fresh vegetables is dismal compared with what you can find all year long at your local grocery store. This is especially the case in places such as Canada, Montana, Idaho, Utah, or small eastern Oregon towns. For long fishing trips, I’ll put sprigs of herbs such as parsley, rosemary, cilantro, and basil on lightly moistened paper towels and then into gallon-sized Ziploc bags. They will keep a week or more and add a special flavor to meals prepared in camp or on the cabin stovetop.
Sometimes, prior to packing for a trip, I precook cuts of meat at home for the first or second night that would have otherwise required hours of braising to tenderize. At camp, I’ll take it from the cooler and put it into the pot, add one of my all-star preparations, simmer 20 minutes to reduce the sauce and build flavor, and have a meal on the table in short order. A classic example is pork shoulder with D. L. Jardine’s Texas Ranch Tomatillo Salsa (see the recipe on the next page). It gives you a one-dish chili verde that can be served with precooked corn bread or good-quality corn tortillas. It’s hard to beat in many restaurants. On a chilly night, few things are better.
Useful Ingredients for Camp
In no particular order, here’s a list of the all-star preparations and ingredients that I use to make camp cooking easier and food tastier.
McCormick’s Grill Mates Montreal Steak Seasoning. A fabulous seasoning and tenderizing rub that works with many meats. I use it a lot on chicken and tri-tip during fly-fishing club outings. Buy the big bottles at Costco to cut your costs.
Big Green Egg Gourmet Seasoning. A less peppery, flavor-balanced generic rub and seasoning that works with everything on the grill, including vegetables that have been drizzled in olive oil. Use on ribs, pork, chicken, and fish.
Susie Q’s Santa Maria Valley Style Seasoning. Contains less salt and helps you achieve the famous Santa Maria style of barbeque for tri-tip.
Kosher salt. Flat granules have more surface area and thus more flavor for less product.
Lawry’s Lemon Pepper. Lawry’s Seasoned Salt.
Lawry’s Garlic Salt with Parsley. Freshly ground pepper. Always useful, whether fresh out of the grinder or into a container a day or two before.
Chipotle chili powder. I prefer larger grinds rather than the powder, and sometimes I’ll make my own from dried, smoked jalapenos. The subtle, smoky flavors give a mild balanced heat.
Paprika. A peppery spice that makes a great seasoned flour for sautéing fish when also mixed with garlic salt. Good in stews, particularly beef and pork.
Pine nuts. Use them to amp up salads and on fish and pizzas.
Basque Meat Tenderizer Barbecue Sauce. Perhaps my best all-star. A vinegar-and-herb base helps with food safety. For large barbeques, I dilute it with red wine and add some garlic salt and herbs to cut down cost. I’ve also diluted it with red wine and olive oil for a salad dressing in a pinch.
D. L. Jardine’s Roasted Tomatillo Salsa. Works as a salsa or as a simmer sauce when diluted with chicken stock. Try it on fish, chicken, or pork. A very high-quality product.
High-quality mayonnaise in the smallest jars available. Mayo has the highest risk for food poisoning in camp. Keep this cold and don’t leave it out. Don’t contaminate it with used utensils, and throw it away if safety is in doubt. It has many obvious uses. Brush on fish after you have turned the fish once, then drizzle with finely chopped nuts.
Olive oil. Bring highest quality boutique extra virgin olive oil for salad vinaigrettes that will knock your socks off. Use medium-grade olive oil such as Costco Kirkland brand or Bariani from Sacramento for other tasks. You can’t have enough high-quality olive oil, which is very good for your HDL cholesterol levels. Olive oils range in taste from buttery to peppery and in color from dark green to almost yellow/amber. Olive oil doesn’t work well at higher pan temperatures and becomes bitter. Brush on hamburger buns and toast in a skillet or on foil over the campfire for great burgers.
Champagne vinegar. I love the Sparrow Lane product, which is much better quality that most grocery store vinegars. Try their boutique herbed vinegars for flavor. Balsamic vinegar is very good too, especially the high grades that have been aged. It’s expensive, but you don’t need much.
Bernstein’s Restaurant Grade Salad Dressing. Hard to beat for an out-of-bottle dressing. In a pinch it is also good for marinades. Try it on shucked corn that’s roasted in foil on the barbeque or in the coals.
Reggiano Parmesan cheese. Freezes and travels well. The best prices are at Costco. Subtle saltiness. Grate a little into salads and onto tomatoes or grilled vegetables to which you add buffalo mozzarella and grill for a minute or two. Parmesan helps everything.
Tubs or bags of prewashed salad mixes. You can’t beat the easy prep times and freshness, which lasts for days in coolers, but read the dates on the package before buying.
Unsalted butter. Many cooks prefer to use unsalted rather than salted butter. It doesn’t overpower your dishes, but makes them tasty and flavorful. You can always add salt, which isn’t all that good for you, when adjusting seasonings before serving. Mix with olive oil to cook beaver-pond or small-stream brook trout.
Grand Mariner Liqueur. Always good on fresh berries. Add a shot of canned whip cream, and you’ve got a great camp fare dessert that took seconds. The chef will get raves. Get berries at summer roadside stands.
Fresh Gourmet Garlic Ginger Wonton Strips. Will amp up any salad.
Fresh lemons and limes. Citrus brightens up most foods and travels well.
All-Star Recipe: Camp Chili Verde
If you have time, dice and sauté pork shoulder or pork loin with sliced sweet onions and diced pancetta or American bacon in some olive oil for 30 minutes. Deglaze with low-sodium chicken stock and add generous amounts of D. L. Jardine’s Roasted Tomatillo Salsa. A similar all-star product is Hatch Valley Green Chili Tomatillo Salsa with Garlic and Lime, if you can find it (try Costco). Simmer for another 20 minutes.
Another possibility is to precook the pork at home and seal it in a FoodSaver or in a Ziploc bag. In camp. start with sweet onions in a Dutch oven with olive oil and bacon or diced pancetta. Add the pork, some chicken stock, and the tomatillo salsa and simmer another 20 minutes. Serve on any bread or better yet on corn pone or corn bread. All you need is a salad and beer or a hearty zinfandel to round out the meal. Bring lots of corn tortillas. Toast them on the grill and throw the leftover tortillas into the pot at the end of the meal for a side dish the next day.
Packing Gear for Camp Cooking
My goal and yours should be to prepare exciting, tasty, nutritious outdoor meals with a minimum of fuss and effort. This is true for RVers as well as for folks like me, who still haul our gear in pickups, SUVs, or even passenger vehicles and who drag our cook kits to a Forest Service campground table.
At different times, I’m cooking for myself, one or just a few others, or 35 people over a campfire ring at a fly fishing-club outing that goes on rain or shine. The gear and meal ingredients all have to be safely packaged, refrigerated, loaded, transported, unloaded, and reloaded on get-away day. When I had a Chevy van, I fabricated a cook kit out of wood that fit against the contours of the back of the front passenger seat. It had a handle and was easy to heft onto a picnic table. But as my cooking skills improved, I wanted more stuff. When I moved to a full-sized four-by-four pickup truck with a shell, I used large plastic storage tubs with lids that stack on top of each other without sliding when I hit the brakes. These also work well in all sizes of SUV. Better yet are the sturdier, larger plastic or resin toolboxes with lockable lids. They have recessed handles that help in lifting, and the locking keeps out most critters, other than bears. The new rotational-molded, high-priced camp coolers are pretty much bearproof, although a bear can still roll them around your campsite.
Start with a basic unit good for two to four campers on a weekend outing and add more modules for extended stays and arger groups. Some ingenious winter woodworking helps customize the modules and makes the units more functional. Browse Home Depot or the Container Store for ideas. I use my deceased father-in-law’s Boy Scout project toolbox as a knife, fork, and utensil module.
Ponder the design well. Ingenuity and planning are what counts. Whether you purchase a ready-made kit at a big-box store such as Cabela’s, Bass Pro Shops, or Sportsman’s Warehouse or assemble your own after prowling Lowe’s, Home Depot, Ace, or True Value Hardware, a good kit requires thought and lots of trial and error.
A Cook Stove for Camp
I’ve backpacked with fragile Whisperlite stoves and I’ve car-camped with Coleman stoves that, while sturdier, still had relatively small burners. If I’m camping and feeding more than a handful of people, I want something that’ll crank out enough BTUs to get a big meal to the table quickly. What I use is a two-burner, gas-fed steel stove that stands a little less than waist high and that’ll fold up for easy packing. It’s also great for tailgating and for cooking things outside at home that create a lot of smoke or splattered oil. You can find this type of camp stove at many of the big-box hunting and fishing stores. Gas cannisters are available at garden stores, hardware stores, and supermarkets.
— Richard Anderson
