Cook food or eat cold meals?

While camping, do you cook on a campfire? Or do you eat cold meals?
For us, sometimes we cook easy things on the fire, such as hotdogs, eggs, bacon, etc.. Though, for some meals, we eat cold, like sandwiches and stuff. What do you normally do for meals?

 

I don't really have too much of a choice since my kids are allergic to life. The only thing cold we can really get away with is a lettuce wrap with lunch meat... Otherwise there would be even more serious nutritional gaps lol. We do bring a lot of fruit though because my kids eat non-stop.

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We also pretty much do the same as you do when we camp @ashley0323. During our first camping day, we usually pack cooked food for lunch and eat them by the time we arrive in our camp site. We then cook food for the rest of our camping trip. Cooking and roasting food along a camp fire is actually one of our most awaited moment during camping.

 

I'm all for Cooking food definitely. Unless it is ice cream or any other cold dessert, I'm not too fond of cold food. Thereby I prefer to take my time in setup the bonfire/gas portable kitchen and then fry or prepare some stew over an iron cast cooking pot. The stove is nothing fancy as you might think from "gas portable kitchen"; is something like this instead with a tiny gas canister attached:

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We always cook our food because our family camping is also a kind of vacation that should be enjoyed. We usually bring cooked food and raw ingredients often meat for barbecue. The cooked food can stay in the cooler so we cook the raw ingredients first. You can imagine the glee of the kids when hot dogs on sticks are placed near the barbecue pit. It's always a feast when we go on family camping trips. Cold food is not in our agenda.

 

We use pie irons. You can make just about anything and clean up is easy. There's nothing like a hot meal next to a fire at the end of a long day hiking.

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Well it is much easier just to stick to the traditional hiking food but we all know that a nice cooked meal can really lift your spirits. I always pack maybe one or two good meals and then everything else is snacks.

 

Not sure what traditional hiking food means but the reality is there are a whole lot of choices one can make today. This is especially true in our neck of the woods. Long gone are the days when there was only a few food choices. Name it...you can get it; from precooked to it's already to start.

The skill is to know the market, the prices, and how best prepare the foods. If you are stationary [base camp] you can do just about anything - and I have. Hiking and tracking cooking will be different as well as canoe camping. BUT - everything you want is there.

X There are some good threads on our food section that folks might be interested in reading.

This military meal is complete and only takes cold water to get a hot meal.

THIS MEAL = THIS

It includes everything - main entree and all the fixings including utensils, right down to sugar, pepper and salt. Now...would you want a full meal half way through your hike?

If it's good enough for our military it's more than good for me.

 

When we went camping as a family, we always took along some food, and then also cooked food over the campfire. We actually didn't have anything fancy, a lot of times, it was hot dogs and marshmallows toasted over the campfire, which was always a lot of fun. it is odd, because at home, we seldom ate either a hot dog or a marshmallow; but when we cooked them over the campfire on a willow stick that we sharpened, they were an awesome meal !
I would make a big bowl of potato salad, and we took along a large can of pork n' beans (which we always called "fishin' beans, because that was the only time we ate those, too), and potato chips. Sometimes, i also fried chicken.
When we were at the lake, we went fishing, and then we cooked any fish that we caught over the campfire on a cast iron skillet. In the morning, we made fresh coffee and had pancakes, bacon and eggs also cooked in that cast iron skillet over the campfire.
Those meals were some of the best we ever enjoyed, and all of my kids still like camping , too. I am not sure that they are able to go much anymore, either; but we had a lot of fun when they were growing up.