Campsite Gourmet: Fine Dining on the Trail and on the Road

By Steve Liddick

Campsite Gourmet is more than a cookbook for campers. The recipes are designed for campers of all types: backpackers, tent and boat campers as well as motor home and hunting camp adventurers. With little extra effort, camp meals can be made more appetizing as well as lightweight and nutritional. More than that, Campsite Gourmet is a friendly trail-side companion that offers thoughts of some of the great thinkers. It is also a guide to proper camp equipment and easy food preparation. It also contains tips for living gently on the land and making the outdoor experience more enjoyable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Liddick
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9780971419322

Steve Liddick

Steve Liddick is the author of four novels (All that Time, Old Heroes, Prime Time Crime, and Sky Warriors; a memoir of his nearly half-century as a broadcast journalist, (But First This Message); a camping cookbook (Campsite Gourmet); a budget cookbook (Eat Cheap); a gift book (A Family Restaurant is No Place for Children), and a collection of short essays, (The View From over the Hill). . The author retired after 47 years as a print and broadcast journalist and now lives near Sacramento, California and writes full-time.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Properly planned, your backpack, boat or recreational vehicle can carry within it all of the essentials and many of the luxuries of home. It is the kitchen and dining room comforts we shall address here.

While there is some satisfaction to be found in living sparsely for short periods, I would not care to share an outing with someone who enjoys pure misery.

Misery may love company, but it won’t have mine.

mis-er-y (miz’eri), n., pl. - eries. 1. three meals a day of foods that are merely good for you;

Campers of all descriptions traditionally give far less thought to how their trail food tastes than to how much it weighs, the space it occupies, the energy it provides, ease of preparation, how well it keeps under less than ideal conditions and whether or not it sticks to the ribs. These are very important considerations, of course, but there is a lot more to life than just the practical. In that spirit, I have attempted to expand on trail and campsite food custom in the hope that we will start a new tradition.

No one wants to spend all of his camping time cooking. But we don’t park our taste buds at the trailhead, either. It takes very little extra effort to turn raw materials into delicious dishes. Even if only one meal each day on the trail is given that special touch, the experience can be greatly enhanced. And it is easy, although some of these recipes are too intricate for backpack cooking.

Some of the dishes described herein are more appropriate for the more elaborate cooking conditions in an RV than on a small butane stove. Others are simpler, especially designed for the backpacker.

All of the recipes have been field tested over a variety of heat sources. Cooking time is calculated at or near sea level. It is advisable to try them at home first, using your own equipment for the trial run. Most of the backpack-friendly recipes are one or two-pot meals that take into consideration a hiker’s energy needs, ease of preparation (often in near darkness), the size and carrying weight of food and cookware and the potential for environmental damage from unnecessary fuel use and excessive dishwashing.

Some cooks need only a list of ingredients and a general description of a dish in order to prepare it well. For those who are less experienced or confident, I have provided specific measurements. You may prefer more or less of an ingredient as you experiment. Each recipe is designed for two average servings, but you are the better judge of your own requirements and appetite. If you need to multiply a recipe, do so with all ingredients except salt. Salt must be adjusted strictly by taste. Remember, you can put too much of something into a dish, but you can never take anything out (although you can effectively cut your mistake in half by doubling everything else).

Be bold! There is great latitude for error and personal taste. Do not let the gourmet part of "Campsite Gourmet" intimidate you. In the context of this cookbook, it merely means adding a little zip to the meals on your trip without adding significantly to the weight you carry or the trouble it takes to prepare it.

And here is more good news for the hiker: a backpack gets lighter, meal by meal.

If you are a vegetarian or have other