My camp menu for 3 weeks

We recently went on a 3 week camping trip in our LandCruiser. We were part of a large convoy of 8 vehicles, driving for long hours nearly every day and so not much flexibility re time for lunches and too tired by dinner time to put much effort into our meals.

When considering our menu I had to take in various factors:

• our limited storage capacity
• No shops for perishables
• Hot weather - though it was winter we were up in the tropics
• Our cookers - we bought another butane gas cooker to give us 2 cooking rings. We weren't confident we'd be able to have campfires everyday!

 

Our food storage capacity

Pantry: We used 4 shallow cardboard boxes, for pantry food storage at the back of the Land Cruiser.  (since we rarely camp without the Robbiebago, I didn't want to spend the money on boxes, nor would we have the room for them after the trek. I tried to keep my frequently used items in the box on top. The larger boxes and heavier items such as milk went into the big pull out drawer, which doubled as my cooking bench!

Michelle preparing food out the back of the Land Cruiser on the 4WD trek!

Waeco

Cold Food storage:  We swapped a smaller Waeco for a much larger one just weeks before our trip, increasing our cold food storage.We now have a large 110 litre Waeco (portable esky style fridge) which you can see behind the black cooker. It is a fridge and freezer, to keep food cold whilst on the road. We  also used a smaller Waeco as a drinks & vegetable fridge. Both run on battery power though driving nearly all day, every day most certainly ensured that the batteries were kept charged up.
We also have a 120Watt solar power panels on top of the car, adding charge to the batteries esp when we were camped in one spot!

Butane gas cooker

For cooking we used 2 butane gas burners though occasionally we joined some others in camp fire cooking, but that was rare! We kept the campfire for group socializing mostly! Though toasted marshmallows were frequently on the supper snacks!

Below is what we planned for the 3 week 4WD trek without shops and power!

My actual menu plan for 3 weeks!

 

Breakfasts 

We are not big on breakfasts and as such ours consisted of weetbix cereal and milk most mornings. We prefer fresh milk when we can get it, but long life milk is a boon for remote camping.

Lunches 

Our lunches had to be made on the run. We generally stopped for maybe 30 minutes and as such our choices were based on salad sandwiches whilst bread was fresh enough and then toastaed sandwiches with the staler bread. After this we occasionally we had pancakes or instant cup a soups, but mostly we had the tortilla breads. Sometimes we had the tortilla breads as wraps and sometimes we had them toasted (fried). As mentioned above, we didn’t end up making the bread or damper as planned.

Dinners

Chicken Schnitzel

Generally speaking, I do not like tinned or packet meals though I don’t mind some jars of sauces. I find that fresh salads don’t keep well other than coleslaw, potato salad and pasta salads. As such the fresh salads were generally left out. Fresh salads also take up a lot of storage room in the Waeco.

Here are the list of menus I had designed my shopping around. I am not generally big on meat but we did buy a small whole rump and had it cut into steaks for meals. My hubby was very happy to have so much red meat for a change! I also found that eggs are a great main meal ingredient. Tinned tuna and salmon are also great standby ingredients.

My dinner menu

Obviously the fridge ingredients were used up first but other than this it is in no particular order as I tend to cook what ever I feel like on the day.


• 8 Steak meals in various presentations including marinated or straight BBQ’d was the most common with various vegetables accompaniment with the occasional packet sour cream noodles or fried rice on the side.
• Spaghetti bolognaise
• Left over bolognaise meat as stuffing for baked potatoes with coleslaw & sour cream
• Sausages
• Crumbed Chicken Schnitzels
• Bamie A simple and fast dish involving mince and 2 minute noodles
• Tomato Risotto
• Salmon & Pea Frittata (fabulous for camping – all comes out of the pantry and it is quick & easy to make)
• Baked potatoes with bacon, coleslaw, grated cheese and sour cream.
• Curried mince with cabbage, carrots & boiled rice
• Sweet chilli chicken & rice
• Salmon Potatoes
• Tuna Salmon a la king (fabulous for camping – all comes out of the pantry and it is quick & easy to make)

Bamie

Stir Fries such as Bamie were ideal. We found that long days on the road were not conducive to fancying up dinners, even something as simple as marinating the steaks required time and to be honest, the easier and faster we could get the dinner done, the better we liked it on this particular trip. Had we been traveling on our own, we would have slowed down a bit and stopped earlier each day and then maybe we would have put more effort into food preparations etc.

Desserts 

We are not big on desserts and don’t eat it often at the best of times. Because we had happy hour nearly every evening, the nibbles with this and/or the campfire after dinner negated our desire for dessert most nights especially once the yoghurt had run out. We had tinned peaches & packet mousse as backup if we did desire dessert.

In hindsight, I noticed that we had a lot more dishes accompanied with potatoes than I would have in a normal weekly diet. I guess my love potatoes in whatever form they come in took over! LOL.
The steaks were fantastic. They were fabulous quality meat: they were nice and tender even without marinading. They were quick and easy to cook and clean up afterwards! 

 I love comments and would love to hear what works for you.