I’ve made lots of things in a field…but oddly not normal pancakes. Banana pancakes, yes…but not the normal sort you have on pancake day.
I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not currently standing in a field in the dark cooking tonight’s treats…I’m not even in the garden, but I did take the opportunity to practise the quantities ready for my next outdoor culinary opportunity!
Camping Pancakes (serves 2)
Mix together:
2 dessertspoonfuls dried milk powder
4 heaped dessertspoonfuls plain flour
1 egg
2 cups water
Heat oil in a frying pan. Pour in some batter. When one side is golden brown flip & cook the other.
Serve with white sugar & lemon juice (from a bottle) or syrup or chocolate spread…or whatever you have to hand in your camp kitchen.
Remember you always need more oil & a hotter pan than you think you do!!
My batter was lumpy, but this made nice thick pancakes so I couldn’t tell once they were cooked!
Even when I’m not camping I often use my camping recipes as they are super reliable – if you can cook it in a field, it ought to turn out ok in a domestic kitchen!
I also like to practise recipes that I think might make good additions to my caming recipe book. This week I discovered this very simple meal:
Tuna Pasta (serves 3)
3 cups pasta
1 tin mushroom soup (400g)
1 tin tuna (145g)
1 tin sweetcorn (200g)
Put pasta in pan with soup. Refill soup tin with water and also add this to pan.
Boil until pasta soft.
Stir in drained tuna and drained sweetcorn and warm through.
Super simple! This was the first time I’d tried it. Another time I might experiment with adding a tin of sliced mushrooms too as it might add a nice variety of textures.
If you’d like to read about our camping food suggestions, check out this section of the website Campsite Cooking.
As well as using up out-of-date tins on our camping trips, I’ve been taking my out-of-date ‘rewards’ for helping at the food bank home each week and turning them into a snack for the food bank volunteers coffee break the following week.
I’ve made a Christmas-cake style fruit cake with out-of-date tinned pineapple, hungarian peach cake, low-fat brownies with out-of-date prunes, chocolate crispy cakes with out-of-date strawberry flavoured rice crispies! None of which would be particularly suited to cooking on a campsite.
One week however I was rewarded with a tin of out-of-date raspberries and I made one of my favourite fire recipes for them & made them guess the mystery ingredient! It was a raspberry & thyme cake.
This particular one was baked in my oven at home, but it works well on the fire. I invented the recipe myself, so I can share it with you here:
Raspberry & Thyme Cake
Mix together:
2 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1/3 cup dried milk powder
pinch of salt
Stir in:
Juice from a 300g tin of raspberries
1 egg
1/2 teaspoonful dried thyme
Gentle stir the raspberries through the batter.
Put into a lined, greased 1 lb loaf tin.
sprinkle the top with 1-2 tablespoonfuls of chopped mixed nuts.
Cook for about 40 mins or until a skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. (If using a domestic oven, go for something like 170C. If you are using a dutch oven, use a trivet to raise the tin off the bottom of the oven, have fire just licking the bottom and have as much fire as you can on top of the oven.)
If you try it out, let me know how you get on!
And if you donate to your local foodbank, please make sure your donation is well in date, so it can help a hungry person!!
I’ve started volunteering at my local Trussell Trust foodbank. A lot of the food they give out is tinned and the foodbank is always grateful for donations of cans of food. Although tinned food lasts a very long time, it does eventually go out of date. Sometimes people clear out the food item lurking at the back of their cupboards and give it to the foodbank even though it is out of date by the time it reaches us. The foodbank’s policy is not to distribute out of date food – but the volunteers are encouraged to make use of it, so as not to waste it.
Goats have strong stomachs, so I’ve been making good use of this!
On our last trip we used up out of date tinned tomatoes, pineapple, evaporated milk and stock cubes. But the piece de resistance was trying a new recipe for pudding out of Jack’s tin can recipe book. It worked super well as a recipe to cook over the fire with only 5 ingredients – out-of-date condensed milk, out-of-date tinned prunes, eggs, flour, baking powder. Jack bills it as a sticky toffee pudding…. it comes out quite different to a normal sticky toffee pudding, but it is delicious and easy to make.
Pudding cooking – spot the condensed milk tin at the front of the fire & the recipe book on the chair!
I’ll be making this recipe again – I assume it will come out just as well with in-date ingredients!
L
PS I can’t find this particular recipe on Jack’s blog – but she has lots of other bargain recipes available if you want to try them out.
I got a new cookery book for Christmas – and I’m hopeful it will provide inspiration for some good camping meals!
Long-life ingredients are ideal for camping when you have limited space in your cool box. I’ve already adapted some recipes from Jack’s earlier book (A girl called Jack) for previous trips. So I’m hopeful of some new inspiration for 2022’s camping trips!
As you can see, I purchased some tins to start trying it out straight away!! The first recipe I tried was tasty, but not ideal for campfire cooking as it was a pie!
Sometimes we think it would be nice to have something lighter for breakfast … but it’s generally only a thought. We pretty much always end up having a cooked breakfast when we are camping – usually a fry up.
Sometimes we pack breakfast cereal. This is a good option if some of your camping party are the type who wake up hungry and can’t wait for the fire to get going and food to cook! The downside is that you need to store the milk for it. Long life milk could be an option, but we’ve a super cool box (which is just as well as one of the goats is a bit of a milk snob and likes fresh milk!!). Even so, milk is bulky.
Porridge is a good option, especially on chilly mornings. Even better it can be made very successfully with powdered milk, which is a versatile camping staple. I use a cup of rolled oats, 2 tablespoonfuls dried milk powder, 2 cups of water and a pinch of salt, boiled up on the stove to serve 2.
And of course porridge can be jazzed up in numerous ways – adding raisins is one of our favourites, or a sprinkling brown sugar on the top. Alpen museli also makes a good sprinkle topping. Or how about a swirl of cinnamon? Or stir through berries or chocolate chips? I like that ginger you get in syrup finely chopped and stirred through, but the other goat would not approve of that!
An alternative take on porridge is to make baked oats over the fire. This is oats (2 cups), sugar (3 tbsp), milk powder (3 tbp), baking powder (1 tsp) and a pinch of salt mixed up with an egg and some water (1 1/2 cups) and baked like a cake. Add some raisins and this also works well as a tasty snack for elevensies.
Being as you’re on holiday – how about treating yourself to pancakes?
Banana pancakes work well for breakfast: mash 2 bananas then stir in 4 heaped dessertspoonfuls of self-raising flour. Next stir in an egg, 2 dessertspoonfuls of sugar and 2 of milk powder. Thin the batter using 200 ml water and then cook spoonfuls in an oiled pan, turning to brown both sides. The end result looks like little scotch pancakes and taste delicious on their own as breakfast or with a little drizzle of maple syrup to make a dessert.
And who says you need to be camping to enjoy these breakfasts – I had banana pancakes this morning!
A fry up isn’t the only way to do a cooked breakfast when you’re camping – here are a few more cooked breakfast options…
1) Shakshuka
This is a good vegetarian option – eggs poached in a tomato sauce with spinach or kale.
2) Omlette
This one is a mushroom omlette with tomatoes and spinach as a side. Mushroom is my favourite omlette and mushrooms also transport well for camping. I think the trick for making a good omlette is to cook it in butter. I cook whatever’s going in the omlette first and then add more butter to the pan. When the butter’s all melted I add the eggs which I’ve already beaten with a splash of water & salt and pepper.
3) Breakfast stew
We’ve been refining this over our last few camping trips. Basically it’s a fry up in a pot!! This is our best attempt so far – chipolatas, chorizo & mushrooms fried, then add baked beans, barbecue sauce and tinned cherry tomatoes, get it boiling and poach some eggs in the sauce.
I’m sure someone such as your mother or grandmother probably told you that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Certainly breakfast is a very important part of camping!
So here are a few breakfast ideas to inspire you.
The classic fry-up
This is our default camping breakfast. We like other things… but often you can smell the bacon from your neighbours and inevitably you feel a bit jealous. We mix and match to keep things interesting – here are some of our favourite options:
sausages – chipolatas are the best as they cook quickly and are less likely to result in the burnt on the outside, raw in the inside phenomena!
bacon – cooked until it is nice and crispy, who can resist the smell of cooking bacon?
eggs – fried or scrambled. When I make scrambled eggs, for every egg I add a knob of butter, a splash of milk and my secret ingredient a knob of cheese!
mushrooms – a favourite of mine, roughly chopped and cooked in a pan with some butter. If you are doing a vegetarian breakfast you could also add a little finely chopped onion and some handfuls of spinach.
baked beans – not my favourite, but the other goat likes them. Fortunately you can buy half sized tins for exactly this eventuality!
tomatoes – cut in half and cooked briefly on both sides to mimic grilled tomatoes
bread – either bought, or if there’s plenty of time I often make damper bread in the dutch oven over the fire.
fried potatoes – always cut them into smaller cubes than you think is necessary to be sure they cook through
potato cakes – made with leftover potato from the night before or with instant mash, mixed with butter and flour and dry fried
griddle scones – good to rustle up out of stock ingredients (self-raising flour, egg, milk) and fried, my favourite varity have shredded cabbage in them too!
orange juice – I think this is an important accompaniment as the sharpness of the juice cuts through the fatty fry up. I get the longlife fruit juice when we’re camping as it makes storage easier.
a pot of tea – I don’t do anything before tea, let alone cook breakfast in a field!
More breakfast options to follow in the next post.
L
PS don’t forget to pack the ketchup! (I often do forget, much to the other goat’s disappointment!!)
Over lockdown, in anticipation of better days, I’ve been trying out new recipes for our camping trips!
Tasty lunches can be particularly tricky to plan out. You want something light, especially if you had a cooked breakfast not so long ago! You also want something that’s transportable with ingredients which won’t go off if you’ve only got a cool box not a fridge. Warm lunches can be particularly welcome if the weather’s a little chilly.
Here’s my latest find – quesadillas!
These are super simple – you just need tortillas (the soft kind – I used wheat ones), grated cheese, any other fillings you fancy and a frying pan.
Place cheese and other fillings on the torilla, pop another tortilla on top. Lightly oil your pan and heat on a medium heat. Cook the tortilla sandwich until the bottom is crispy and the cheese is melting. The melting cheese will help hold everything together when you flip it with a fish slice. Once the other side is also golden and toasted, transfer to a chopping board and cut into wedges.
“Queso” is cheese in Spanish and you need that to help them stick together, but in terms of fillings you could try adding to the cheese how about:
slices of tomato
sliced mushrooms
chopped olives
sliced spring onions
sliced avocado
spinach (although can be bit fragile to transport when camping)
wild garlic
ham (but be careful of how you store it if you’ve not got a fridge)
thinly sliced onion
…basically anything you fancy! I’m going to make these this weekend and try adding capers, because they transport so well for camping and I think the little bit of acidic bite will cut through the rich cheese well.
Different types of cheese are also worth trying – guyere works particularly well, but for camping I usually take pre-grated cheddar as it’s easier.
I’d love to hear your favourite quesadilla fillings – leave a comment if you want to inspire me!
Embrace your inner goat 