Turning Camping Grub into Camping Gourmet

Boring food makes camping for climbing much less fun and leaves you yearning for a good Flodge burger (sadly the Doug at Frog Buttress and various pubs in Horsham really don’t live up to Flodge standards). But your camping food need not be boring or crap! Here are a few tips/recipes that might help make your trad climbing adventures a bit more palatable…

The basic formula
Your best bet while camping is usually some form of carbs (pasta and couscous are the best, rice works but takes longer to cook) with some form of sauce, meat and vegetable matter. You don’t need to alter this basic formula and start smoking trout in the campfire, but a few extra ingredients and tips will make your camping muck into something more tasty!

Magic ingredients

I generally throw a few extra things in my food box before heading down to Araps (or Frog/Buffalo/Bluies) – these are suggestions and it really just depends on what flavours and spices you like. By and large ALL of these go into just about everything I make and really make the difference between an average dinner and something super yummy!

• Stock powder – add this to your couscous water or into pasta sauces for a bit of added flavour as a substitute for salt.
• Dried porcini mushrooms – these are expensive but really flavour anything up (including couscous water J) and don’t go off like normal mushrooms. You don’t need many but they really make a difference.
• Paprika – a great spice that makes a tomato-based sauce a lot more interesting. Available in both sweet and hot varieties, depending upon your palette. (A personal favourite – true to the Hungarian heritage!)
• Chilli flakes – use sparingly to avoid drowning out the rest of the flavours…
• Bay leaves – adds flavour to anything. Just don’t chew them!
• Mixed herbs, either fresh (though they don’t last well except for rosemary) or dried. If you’re feeling gourmet, grab some Herbes de Provence (the French version of mixed herbs).
• Pepper – cracked and black is better than the powdery stuff
• Lemon – juice, peel or wedges add great flavour to anything
• Proper parmesan cheese – the older and drier it is, the better it will last without refrigeration.

My basic recipe and a few cooking tips

My general approach is to cook the carbs (pasta/couscous etc) first, and separately from the sauce/meat/vegetables so that the latter has enough time to simmer away and cook properly. It’s impossible to cook carrots and onions with a wad of pasta in the pot as well, so I would suggest investing in a  wok, pan or second saucepan, or alternatively putting your cooked carbs in a bowl covered over to keep them warm while you cook the rest.  A wok is absolutely awesome (and cheap enough) though a pot is fine for frying up your sauce.

Everything I cook camping has the same basic recipe – this should feed two hungry climbers.

Finely chop half or a full onion and 2-3 cloves of garlic (chop them in half or thirds if you want to fish them out later to avoid stinky breath to go with stinky feet and armpits) and fry them in about a tablespoon and a half of olive oil until they start getting transparent or golden or taste cooked (i.e. not crunchy and without ). The trick is then to add whatever vegetables you have in order of how long they will take to cook. For example, I always put the carrots in first and try to slice them thinly as they take a while to cook. A rough guide would be carrots, potatoes and other root vegetables, zucchini, capsicum, mushrooms, fresh tomatoes. Once one or two vegetables are cooking you can start adding in the magic ingredients, though you can add them at any time up until you serve the food provided that they have a bit of time to cook (I’d wait until there is more in the wok to add the paprika and stock, but herbs and spices can go in a bit earlier). A wedge of fresh lemon is also a good add at that stage that can be fished out before eating.

Once all of your vegetables are in and cooking, taste them from time to time to see whether they are cooked to your liking. If they are burning or cooking too fast, hold the pot or pan up from resting on the stove as most camping stoves don’t have much flame control and aren’t designed for frying up vegetables on a medium heat! You can also add a bit of water in to stop things from burning – I’d recommend a small slosh; it is better if you can add water with stock powder dissolved in it (eg what was left over from cooking your carbs). If you have meat that needs to be cooked, push the vegetables out to the side (leaving a sort of hole exposing the bottom of the pot) and cook the meat in that hole. Usually the vegetables will have produced a lovely flavoured liquid in the bottom of the pan to cook your meat in. You can add sliced beef, pork, diced sausages, mincemeat or tofu here, but be more careful with chicken (make sure you fry all the veges over high heat after adding the chicken to kill off any nasties). You can add salami or tuna in to the vegetable mix without creating a well as they don’t need to be cooked but rather just heated up.

If you are cooking couscous, I generally add the couscous in with the vegetables and meat at this stage and don’t add any other sauces as the couscous tends to absorb the pan juices of the cooked vegetables and meat, which makes it very tasty. You can add in a bit of stock here as well but don’t drown the couscous or it gets mushy. Fry it all up to warm the couscous and mix the vegetables and meat in well with it.

If you are cooking pasta, now is the time to add in either a bottled, tomato-based pasta sauce or alternatively canned tomatoes (whole, crushed, diced, whatever you like) and a small tub of tomato paste. If you only have tomato paste, add some water or stock here to dilute it and spread the flavour around. Simmer the vegetables and meat in it for 2-3 minutes to let the flavours mix together. Then mix the pasta in (if your pot/pan is big enough) to warm it up. Serve it up with some of the parmesan sliced on top with very thin slices so that they melt into the pasta.

For a sort of Asian-inspired alternative, substitute the tomato sauces for lots of soy sauce and a spoonful of honey and don’t add in the paprika or stock powder. Try to get your hands on some fresh ginger and coriander and add the fresh ginger in with the garlic and onion right at the beginning, peeled and sliced thinly. Try adding a bit more lemon than you normally would as well (half a lemon, sliced into wedges – squeeze them to get the juice out and then drop the wedges into the mix). Rather than adding pasta, add some pre-cooked, packaged udon or hokkien noodles and stir them into the soy-vegetable-meat mix.

This all takes a bit longer than your standard pasta sauce + pasta dinner, but it’s well worth the effort to have some fresh vegetables and good flavours in your dinner. It’s healthier and makes you feel less deprived of fresh food and probably makes you climb better. It tastes heaps better as well!!!

Rough quantities and ingredients for two people

• I-2 cups couscous or 250g of pasta (break spaghetti in half so that it fits in your pot)
• Approx 1 tablespoon of stock stirred into water for cooking couscous, with 1 or 2 dried porcini mushrooms
• 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• Half an onion
• A quarter of a lemon
• 1 carrot
• 1 zucchini
• 1 capsicum
• 5-10 mushrooms (Swiss Brown are my preference)
• 2 fresh tomatoes
• Other veges – snow peas, corn, parsnip, sweet potato, fennel, whatever takes your fancy
• 2 sausages, around 250g of chicken, beef, mince (with mince cut down on the veges and add more herbs, cook it less rather than more so it’s not too tough!), 10cm of a salami, a packet/large can of tuna
• 1 small tub of tomato paste and 1 can of tomatoes, OR half a bottle of tomato-based pasta sauce
• 2-3 bay leaves
• no more than half a teaspoon of paprika
• a pinch of chilli flakes (to taste)
• Three pinches of mixed herbs
• 10 or so slices of parmesan, shaved very thinly off the block
• Fresh herbs, one sprig each (rosemary, parsley, lemon thyme, tarragon, coriander – but don’t mix them together as some just don’t work in concert!)
• Salt and pepper to taste

For the Asian variant

• One sachet of hokkien or udon noodles
• Another quarter of lemon 3+ tablespoons of soy sauce (but don’t add salt)
• A thumb length of fresh ginger
• 1+ tablespoon of honey

Bon Appetit!

Fiona