Planning a meal is an important part of the camp cooking experience, with proper meal timing all the food is prepared so all your parts are hot and tasty when delivered.
Show Notes:
- Menu Cards: These menu cards were prepared as part of my Woodbadge project and contain the recipe for the chicken teriyaki and other simple camp cooking recipes.
Transcript:
While not specific to camp cooking, meal timing takes on particular resonance when the sun is going down. The planning of meals begins with your overall menu and the environmental factors where you are cooking.
Cooking in the outdoors can be hard. Things like rain, snow and heat need to be calculated into the mix, as well as the complexity of the menu.
As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to try and keep things simple, this will help the overall meal timing.
When cooking on propane stoves it’s best to dissect your meal into the parts needed. Let’s take a simple chicken teriyaki as an example.
For Chicken teriyaki you have your chicken, your sauce, vegetables and rice. As tasks go, you need to cut up your chicken and then let it marinate in the sauce, then sauté with the vegetables and serve it over rice.
With two burners to work with, you need to prep the chicken and boil water for the rice. Depending on the temperature outside you can generally prep the chicken, let it marinate, and by the time the water is boiling, you can drop in the rice, start cooking the chicken and vegetables and everything will be done at the same time.
One of the mistakes many young scouts make is thinking too linear, prepping and cooking all the chicken before even thinking about the rice. If you do this in the winter it could be breakfast before the rice is done, as you are fighting the ambient temperature as well as trying to heat the water.
While not the most complicated meal, by doing a little advanced preparation you prep the chicken in advance of the campout. By cutting up the chicken at home you can avoid all the problems with handling chicken without the benefit of a full kitchen. You can even cut up the chicken, lay it all in a single layer and put in in the freezer. Then when you go out camping, you can have it ready in a plastic bag, and mostly defrosted when you are ready to cook.
Another tip for prep is to pre-measure your sauce, and place it in a plastic baggie in advance as well.
Then when you are ready to prepare the meal, you can take the pre-cut chicken, put it into the baggie with the sauce and you are half way to your completed meal without washing the cutting board or the knife.
This also goes for spice packets, prepping them in advance is especially important to teach younger scouts because it reduces the complexity of the meal without sacrificing the flavor and makes it more likely for them to opt to cook and not just make simple dump and stir meals. But this is what works for us.
Take what you like and leave the rest, and as we say in Woodbadge, feedback is a gift, leave yours below in the comments, with the hope we can all learn together.
I’m Scoutmaster Dave, and this was meal timing
