Camping Food!

We feel the need to welcome you back to the blog after another long spell between posts. And really, what better way to welcome you back to the end of summer as we look forward to fall than to offer some thoughts and recent experiences on camp food cooking! Helen and I just completed a wonderful camping trip to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore and enjoyed a variety of tasty camp cook cooking.

Thanks to our friend Shanna, we had a giant hunk of flank steak to bring with to our campsite; we also brought along a couple of bags of bacon, some canned beans, a couple of other random items (and some soup and stew in case we had massive failures).

Our first lovely evening camping featured a dinner of seasoned flank steak, potatoes, carrots and brussel sprouts. We wrapped all the delicious ingredients up into tin foil and placed them on the handy-dandy grill grate that flipped over the fire pit. One potential pitfall of cooking all your ingredients in a tin-foil package is that some items may cook more quickly than others - we encountered this problem as the diced potatoes you see in the background of the above photo were not diced finely enough to cook quickly enough to match with the beef. Overall, the dinner was absolutely lovely and a true indulgence on our first night of camping together.

Our handy-dandy flip-over grill grate and Helen's fine fire-building skills are featured above.

No weekend breakfast is truly complete in our minds without some bacon, so we brought along a couple of ziploc bags of frozen bacon to cook up on our not-so-chilly mornings. For quick morning cooking, nothing beats a single burner propane or Iso-Pro camp stove. We were able to quickly heat up water for coffee, cook bacon, cook pancakes and heat up more water for oatmeal with a couple of twists of the wrist (to connect the fuel) and a single click to light the flame.

After breakfast, our Sunday eating featured a couple of items that we didn't bring camping. Following a lovely hike and scenic drive we entered the "quaint" town of Glen Arbor and enjoyed a nice sit-down lunch at a local eatery. Our discerning eyes, and rumbling stomachs, led us to a spot that offered local beer and menu items that featured adjectives such as "wild-caught" and "organic grass-fed." Conveniently located across the street was a little grocery store where we purchased some Boar's Head Beef Franks (in natural casing) for later consumption.

Our Sunday dinner was perhaps our simplest (and possibly our most quintessential camping) meal. Skewered hot dogs, can o' beans and S'mores for dessert. I don't need to say anymore. Ya'll know it was delicious - but we can HIGHLY recommend the Boar's Head hot dogs for any future grilling or camping experience. We also prepared our lunch for the next day on Sunday night, using more flank steak, brussel sprouts and carrots. With proper dicing technique - everything cooked wonderfully evenly and we enjoyed the fruit of our efforts on the Lake Michigan shore Monday afternoon.