My fella is taking our son camping in the summer. He goes every year with a few of his friends and their kids. It’s a great bonding experience for them, brilliant to have some boy time together, but there is one problem – the meals.
Last year, my son came back and told me they had eaten pizza, burgers, hot dogs, and junk food, essentially. I don’t think he saw a piece of fruit for the whole week.
Now I’m not any sort of nutrition obsessive. I get it, when you’re away the focus is on having fun and getting more treats than usual. But there are levels to this. If the only vegetable my child has eaten in 5 days is the tomato paste on his pizza base, that’s a problem for me.
My other half is a bloke, so in his mind, a diet of carbs and protein is absolutely fine. But I am in favour of scattering a few vitamins in amongst all the barbecued meat and bread rolls.
So this year, I have already prepared five easy camping meals my cave man of a partner has no excuse not to make. They are still fun, but add up to a more balanced diet that won’t leave my child close to scurvy. They’re great for kids in particular.
So here they are. I hope you find them useful if you have a camping trip coming up!
Campfire Chicken Fajitas
Cook strips of chicken along with thinly sliced peppers and onions in a frying pan over the fire, then serve with tortilla wraps and grated cheese. You can add guac or natural yoghurt if you like, or even salsa if your kids will eat it. Add as little or as much fajita seasoning as you need.
This one is good because you can substitute any ingredients your children might be fussy about with something else. One of mine won’t eat onions so we add mushrooms, for example.
It’s low effort, and fun too, because the kids can add their own ingredients to the tortilla and attempt to roll their own wraps.
One Pot Tomato Pasta With Hidden Veg
A good one for lazy dads, since there is only one pan to wash up afterwards.
Cook the pasta in the pan, then drain and add the tomato sauce. The secret is to make the ‘tomato’ sauce with loads of other veggies blended in. You will need to prepare this at home of course, but it’s a 10 minute job. You literally throw everything in a blender then bag it up.
Good additions are courgettes, onions, peppers, or carrots.
If you want to make it more interesting you can add some meat (sausages are good since you have a campfire to cook on), and you can sprinkle some cheese on to add flavour.
Loaded Campfire Jacket Potatoes
You can’t go wrong with a jacket potato, and since all it takes to cook them is to wrap them in foil and leave them in the embers of the fire, there are no excuses either!
Fillings can be pretty much anything, but staples like beans, cheese, tuna, and coleslaw are all very low effort to prepare. Lashings of butter mashed in are obligatory 😁 It’s another fun one because everyone can have something different on their jacket, and the kids can make their own too.
The only downside is they can take a while to cook, so my top tip is to cook smaller potatoes and give everyone two. This way, you get the same amount of food in half the time.
Sausage And Veggie Skewers With Couscous
With sausage and veggie skewers, you still get some tasty meat cooked on an open fire, but there are other nutritional elements at play too. And they are fun to eat because they are on a big spike rather than a plate. Kids enjoy novel little things like that.
Cut the sausages into chunks and sandwich them between bits of pepper, courgette, or cherry tomatoes, that way the kids have to eat through the veggies to get to the meat 😂 They can even help prepare it before it goes on the fire, which can make them more interested in eating it.
The couscous only needs boiling water to cook, and you can flavour it to make it more interesting. Easy, healthy, tasty.
Breakfast Burritos
It’s called a breakfast burrito but you can eat it whenever you like – you’re on holiday!
The beauty of this is you can add pretty much anything you like – you can even make it meat free if you want to. Scrambled egg is a key ingredient if you ask me, but each to their own.
Also, because it’s full of lots of different foods mixed together, you could add something like avocado or chopped tomatoes without too much fuss since they might not even realise it’s there.
These are a good one for the last day of the trip because they can be used to get rid of any leftovers.
Safety and Preparation
Apologies if this bit sounds patronising, but I have just been running through this with my fella, and he is useless sometimes.
Firstly, you can help yourself by doing some prep at home, keeping the ingredients in containers and keeping them cool. Obviously, keep raw meat away from everything else. You can prep at the camp, some people prefer to, but if you want an easier life while you’re there some preparation can really help.
Also, cooking meat on a fire isn’t like cooking it in the oven. You need to make sure it’s cooked all the way through, even if it looks charred on the outside.
It’s also a good idea to pack plenty of snacks. Apples, satsumas, bananas, grapes, cereal bars, and little boxes of raisins require no effort other than buying them, so stock up, because your kids will ask for snacks. This is another way to get something healthy into them instead of endless crisps.
Now I’m going to print this blog post and pack it with the camping gear so my fella can’t pretend I didn’t tell him any of this stuff 🫡