WTF CAMPING (and outdoors-like stuff)

@gee We're going camping this weekend. Need your best yummy dishes.
Mandatory campfire food for us:

- Kebabs. Buy a cheap roast, cube it and marinate it in something, get some long metal skewers and fire them on with onions/peppers/pineapple/whatever you're feeling.
- Glazed donuts. Roast over the fire 'till the sugar starts bubbling, the moment it starts to brown, set aside for a few minutes for the sugar to cool/harden.
- Fried cake mix. Buy a cheap cake mix. Whisk together softened butter (instead of oil) and the eggs (add an extra one) with the cake mix first, then add just enough milk (instead of water) so you end up with a thick batter that's halfway between a pancake batter and a muffin batter. Put a frying pan on the fire, fire in a decent amount of butter (you want like 1/16"-1/8" of oil in the pan), let the butter cook until most of the water's gone out of it, then spoon in some cake mix and fry it like you're making pancakes. Let it cool, smear on some premade 'whipped' icing.
- Butter fried steak. Get a couple of well marbled steaks and dust them with some salt/pepper/steak spice/whatever - important thing is that it's salty and you leave it on there for a good half hour or more to pull the moisture out of the surface - less moisture in the surface gives a better sear. Wipe the salt off before you fry. Get a lot of coals going in your fire pit and get a cast iron pan rippin' hot, to the point where if you throw in some butter, it almost immediately catches fire. Then in with the steaks. You end up with a bunch of fat spitting everywhere when you do this, so it's not something you want to do indoors or you'll be cleaning grease off your kitchen walls, but on a campsite who cares.
- Can't have a campfire without Jiffy Pop.
- Jiggs Dinner. Bring a turkey roasting pot, soak some cut up cured trimmed navel beef (or your favorite beef-from-a-bucket cut) overnight in it. Change the water, fire the roaster on the fire pit for a few hours and cook the beef. Then fire in cabbage/turnip/potatoes/carrots/parsnips and a small whole onion. When it's done, crack open a can of turkey gravy and have at 'er.
- Pasta of some sort. Seafood alfredo of some sort seems to be a common thing we do. We did lobster this trip, earlier this year we made a scallop one.

Other than that, normally what we do is pop into a grocery store and look around for ideas. We've got a few things we almost always buy - cheap side dish noodles/rice/etc, a pack of hollandaise powder, gravy, etc. Usually every trip ends up having a few 'experiments'.

Your fire pit also determines what you can cook. We try to hit up the national parks here because the fire pits are designed for cooking food with a grate and a good top surface built into them, vs the provincial/private parks which just leave an old truck rim on the ground and call it a day - those are good for roasting marshmallows but that's about it because the airflow sucks and you have to provide your own grate. See if you can find out what the park has ahead of time.

And tool up. You'll want a few kinds of roasting sticks (the 'two prong' ones are the best for donuts/marshmallows), proper long metal skewers, a couple of cheap/disposable non-stick pans. Bringing a bag of charcoal and a chimney starter has come in handy for quickly getting a hot fire going, that you can then keep going with wood, especially helpful if you're starting with wet wood.
 
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Put all your food into a blender, then transfer to squeeze bottles. ;)
I put "just add water" pancake mix in a squeeze bottle. Uncap the bottle when you're there, fire in some water, recap, shake and you're in business.

The main advantage of this method isn't the convenience part, but the fact that the squirt bottle lets you draw elaborate dick shaped pancakes in the pan for @fly.
 
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"Honey we're going camping, pack up the water heater and I'll load the bathtub."


You can fit quite a lot of convenience gadgets in a backpack if you're a good packrat.
 
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I used to have a neighbor whose wife would drop him off at the edge of the Mt Hood Nat’l Forest and pick him up a week later. He took a small knapsack with minimal gear and would survive off the land for the week. That guy was a badass.

And I think his wife was a cheater, or maybe he was, because they had a severe blowup after one of his excursions and he moved out right then. He didn’t seem the Brokeback Mountain type.
 
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