20 new of 23 responses total.
Those are the kinds of things described and required in _The Magic of Fire_
We cooked over fire for a month in the far west (Colorado, Montana, Arizona). Jim would alway manage to find some dead wood on a tree somewhere. Our pan/pot was always filthy black. We smelled hickory smoked the whole trip. The grill that we needed to carry along weighed more than a stove would have. You needed protection to remove the pan from the fire - not with a stove. Since then Jim has acquired three camping stoves for use in various types of weather. He refills a medium-size propane canister for one that he modified, rather than buying expensive fuel. We have also taken a wok along camping, plus a pressure cooker. Wok for vegetables or oatmeal, pressure cooker for grain mixed with bean. Start the grain first and while the pressure comes down cook the vegetables. No dishpan needed. Put a bit of detergent on a sponge, pour a couple spoons of water in the wok and pressure cooker (and bowl if you do luxury camping) and wash, pour into the next thing to be washed. Rinse the same way. No hot water needed as we don't do bacon and eggs. We carry along a quart or two of water and refill as needed (on bikes). One trip Jim took a bag of dried 'shrimp chips' and fried them in the wok. They puff up. People on the Appalachian Trail were impressed. But they were really more grateful when we shared our fresh potatoes. There tend not to be stores on the trail. Some people had their friend mail them food packages. Have never yet baked a cake while camping, or pies, or cookies. We eat pretty much the same while camping as the rest of the time, with maybe less variety. One trip Jim bought a watermelon and finished it in a day. We don't cook with salt. We don't bring prepared salty foods. I brought a couple ounces of soy sauce. We get plenty of exercise and don't have heat related problems, though Jim has gotten too much sun going through treeless areas. They used to force us to swallow salt pills at summer camp. We don't bring pepper, ginger, mustard, ketchup, pancake mix, canned hamburgers (sic). I find it hard to believe people actually ate like that - practically solid sugar.
I own four camping stoves. One burns butane, one burns propane, one burns white gas and the other burns wood (it has a battery that powers a fan that blows on the wood to make it burn hot). I prefer the butane stove for backpacking and the propane double burner stove for car camping. When I am backpacking, I typically only take one pot which doubles as my dish/bowl/whatever. I dont need a dishpan. I just soap it up and rinse although I have to confess that I sometimes forget the soap and have successfully cleaned that pot with sand. When backpacking, I get pretty lazy about cooking so most of my meals involve boiling something. Usually, I take a big bag of rice and also a big bag of noodles and base all my dinners around those two things. I pack some olive oil, soy sauce, powdered garlic, salt, pepper, beef jerky, chicken jerky, canned black olives, parmesan cheese (which does pretty well without refrigeration although this is still best to use on the first day), dried vegitables (which one can get at a camping store), etc. Breakfasts are usually instant oatmeal with raisens or some other dried fruit or instant cream of wheat. I also like to drink tea so I make sure to have a few cups of that too, usually with powdered milk and sugar. Lunch on the trail is either a long thing where I get out the stove and cook something but usually I dont bother and just eat GORP or granola bars or crackers. I have gone on backpacking trips though where the eating was much better. Usually because I was bullied into carrying extra weight by someone I was camping with. I have a friend who has an "outback oven" which bakes things on a camping stove. When I used to camp with him a lot, we would have scones, fresh bread, brownies, pizza, cookies, etc.
I've got a little white gas backpacking stove, but it's somewhat anemic and I pretty much car camp all the time anyway. Probably I should just get a cheapo propane stove for next trip.
Butane is supposed to work better in cold weather. What is the advantage of using white gas rather than propane, is it cheaper or does it take up less space? First time I ever heard of anyone taking canned olives backpacking ;) But we may be the only ones to go camping with dried lily flowers and shiitake mushrooms and other dried things from the Chinese food store. The Chinese dry persimmons and sweet potatoes and jujubes and tofu (skins) and these are a lot cheaper than what you find in camping stores.
Butane doesnt work very well in cold weather. I once took my butane stove winter camping and had to warm up the fuel canister before I could get the stove to work. It was about 10F though so most folks wouldnt need a stove for those conditions. White gas is cheaper than butane or propane. Some people think the white gas stoves work better. *shrug* Ah. It never would have occured to me to go to the Chinese food store for dried goods. If I ever go on another backpacking trip, I will have to look into that.
We always have dried things from the Asian food store. Wouldn't be without them either at home or while camping. I cook mostly the same camping as I do at home.
It happens I just got back from a weekend camping trip with my son. I have a collection of camping gear I've acquired over the years; steel plates and pans, a coffee pot (which I never use), a Coleman propane stove and a Coleman lantern, and so on. I don't care how much space it takes; I don't carry it anywhere anyway. I load up my pickup truck. I have a few years supply of propane because I got a 6 pack of the small bottles as part of my Y2K preparations. I knew I'd wind up using it. Eventually. My son likes pancakes for breakfast. We took Bisquik. This also became breading for the fish we ate today. You can also put a hot dog on a stick, cover it with Bisquik mix, and cook it over a campfire into... well, I don't know what you'd call it, but kids like it. We took Jiffy cornbread mix, and sort of made cornbread. (I forgot to oil the pan, and it didn't come out very well.) We made tinfoil dinners. Take heavy-duty aluminum foil, add chunks of carrots, onions, and potatoes, add salt, pepper, and butter, include stew meat or hamburger or whatever, seal it very well, and toss it in the campfire for a half hour.
I recall at day camp making something out of Bisquick and the few wild blueberries which we picked without eating along the way. You put it onto a stick (there was a list of sticks not to use because they were poisonous) and then held it over the fire until the outside turned black, then ate the gooey mess on the inside. Does the hot dog with Bisquick actually get cooked? Do people still burn marshmallows on sticks and put them into graham crackers with melted chocolate? Or was it bananas. How did you bake the Jiffy mix? Do you have an oven?
Yes, people still eat 'smores (marhmallows, chocolate and graham crackers). The hot dog is already cooked, so it just needs to get warm, which it will.
my favorite thing when I was a kid was to take those cast iron pie makers and then to put white bread in them with pie filling. You stick them in the fire and they end up making "pies". we called them "pudgie pies" for some reason. You can make pot pies with them too.
We usually bought bakery bread. About once a year we got hold of white bread (when I was about 10) and had contests to see how many times you could flatten in (remove the crust first) and fold it in half. It ended up as a cube about 1/2" or less across. What else can one do with wonderbread, as a creative kid? Do kids still go to daycamp in the woods, or is it just computer camp, sports camp, etc.? We used to ride the camp bus there every day singing songs with 100 verses. I remember rotten orange mountain ash berries and a very muddy pond and lots of raw Bisquick. They must have fed us something else as well.
Well, it's been years since I did any real camping, but I've done some backcountry camping that required those small propane stoves. They just consisted of a small propane canister and a switch with metal prongs to hold your pot. Because you have to pack your way into these areas, you have to pack light anyway, so bringing say, a water purifier/filter and dried food was best. Pasta, dried stew, Tang, cocoa, all seemed to work well. If weight is not a concern and you can pack a bag of charcoal briquettes, then there is dutch oven cooking, and I understand there's a lot of material on that. Fruit cobblers seem to cook well in these cast iron pots. I had a book called "Roughing It Easy" but it suggested using a lot of tinfoil which I thought was a REAL waste. The utensils I like or liked to take with me on camping trips were a double-pronged stick (yes, I bought it) for cooking hot dogs and the like, and a set of knife, large spoon, and fork. If I could find a large metal spork, I'd take that. I did have a set of pots and pans that fit into each other and were belted together. When corn (maize) comes into season, I have always loved just getting them from the store with all the husk on and cooking them straight on the coals. When most of the husks were charred off, the corn was ready. The only treat I've missed was living or being on a farm to pick it fresh enough so it could be cooked quickly to stay sweet.
re resp:14: We call them "pudgie pies" too.
I returned from my annual camping trip on Monday. I was car camping, not backpacking, so saving a lot of room wasn't a huge consideration, but I still repackaged a lot of the food I took with me because I generally can't eat an entire package at a time. Like slynne, I have a woodburning camping stove. It's called a Sierra Zip Stove (http://www.zzstove.com/sierra.html) and I love it. The most efficient fuel I have found for it so far is charcoal from other people's camp fires. Charcoal briquettes don't work at all well in it, so I use either sticks and pinecones or camp fire charcoal. I have also found that if I cover the outsides of the pots I use on it with a thin layer of dish soap before cooking, the soot washes right off the pots during cleanup. Given the nature of the stove, I have learned to cook one-pot meals when I'm camping, though I also bring stuff I can eat for side dishes with little or no preparation. Using coolers to keep food cold when camping is something that I consider to be a waste of ice (though we do keep a five-gallon beverage cooler in camp and put ice in it for ice-cold drinking water), so I never bring any food which requires refrigeration. I don't bring anything that I can't find in a grocery store, either. Once again, this year I took more food than I ate, but it was nice to have some variety in camp. Breakfasts consisted of canned fruit, a couple of granola bars or untoasted Pop-Tarts, and coffee. Other food I brought included a stick of pepperoni, a bag of hamburger I had dehydrated at home, some Zatarain's black beans & rice mix, some Near East couscous and stuff mixes, some tubular pasta, a couple cans of tomato paste and envelopes of spaghetti sauce mix for one-pot camp spaghetti, some Health Valley instant soup mixes, a can of kippers, some crackers, some peanut butter, some raisins, some olive oil, some Lipton noodle & sauce mixes, and probably a couple of items I'm forgetting. Most of the mixes were taken out of their original packaging, divided in half, and repacked in Ziploc bags with cooking directions written on the bags, since I can rarely eat an entire store package of that stuff. Cooking pots consist of the ones which came with the stove and a one-liter MSR teakettle which fits the stove top nicely and fills my insulated coffee press. I also have the remnants of four camping knife-fork-spoon sets, each set missing at least one utensil, a set of measuring spoons, a measuring cup, a dishpan and dish rack, and two folding tables on which my cooking gear and the ice-water cooler and the everything-else water container rest when camp is set up. Food lives in a big Rubbermaid tote next to the tables once everything is set up. I also usually bring some plates and bowls in case I have dinner guest(s), but most of the time I eat straight from the cooking pot.
That is sweet! Wish I had known about it when I camped more.
The soap thing? I learned it in Boy Scouts, a long time ago. It really helps over a smoky fire.
Yeah, void told me about the soap thing some time ago and I have liked my zip stove a lot more since then.
No, sillies, the Sierra stove. That is tres cool! The soap thing will likely come in handy, though. The titanium one looks nice although I doubt I could have used it on the backcountry trips I did.
Mine is just a regular non-titanium Zip stove. It seems to be holding up fairly well, but I only go camping once or twice a year. OTOH, I've been told that Zip stoves are popular among AT hikers, so I'd guess they're pretty durable.
You have several choices: