10 Hacks Will Make You A Campfire Hero

Cooking well while camping has become a puzzle I love to solve. It involves making a careful plan and sticking to it, working around three key principles: Travel light, allow for variable cooking conditions and create as little garbage as possible. It's an endeavor that illustrates how simple things can be — and how much ingenuity goes into keeping them that way. I try to avoid expensive, individually packaged camping food and tons of special gear, while still making real, satisfying, hopefully delicious food that the family and I want to eat.

It's haiku-form cooking: restrictive but, when you nail it, amazing. Whether you're a first-time camper or a veteran, I suggest you try it. And since knowledge of the outdoor life should be open-source, I'm offering up 10 hints and fixes from our camp kitchen to yours. 1. Try backpacking-lite. We hike to our campsite, which lets us get closer to the wilderness (try a picture-perfect spot by a sparkling, clear river), but our car is only a 2-mile hike away.

It's pretty easy to hike out once during the week to replenish supplies from a cooler stashed in the car or get trash to the dumpsters. 2. Plan for leftovers. Spinach from your first-night salad becomes a garnish on the next day's trail sandwiches, and the last wilted leaves get thrown into a pot of beans or an omelet on day three or four.

Eat everything — food garbage gets gross in a hurry and attracts animals. 3. Use zip-close bags. I know, they're plastic, which isn't ideal. Commit to washing and reusing them to minimize waste, then use them to freeze water and precooked food at home, to hold mixes of dry ingredients for things like pancakes or cobbler batter and as mixing containers.

4. Follow a multiuse mantra. If you're buying gear, focus on finding things that serve more than one purpose. Look for versatility from old favorites too: Cooking pots are also mixing bowls, a skillet can be used as a lid, a pot lid can be a serving plate. 5. Try a cooking pot hack. I love cast-iron pots, but I can't commit to hiking one into a campsite or dumping one of my favorite pots into the coals to bake campsite pizza or bread. Instead, grab a lightweight pot with a lid from the thrift store.

If possible, unscrew the handles and ditch them. Buy an inexpensive clamp-on pot lifter instead. Use the pot for cooking on a camp stove or fire grate, and transform it into an oven by nestling it into the coals, inverting the lid and lining it with aluminum foil, then placing coals on top.

If it's too far gone after roughing it, you can simply recycle it. 6. Reverse-engineer your best recipes. Serving simple favorites while camping gets you four-star cred — the atmosphere and the post-hiking hunger do the rest. Plus, recipes that are already in your comfort zone are less likely to go awry under camping conditions. Look for ways to make your go-to recipes camp-friendly: Substitute dry milk to make your pancake recipe into a shelf-stable mix.

Or cook up a batch of your best beef bourguignon at home, then freeze it. By the second night, it should be a thawed, ready-made feast. 7. Freeze everything. Frozen zip-close bags of water and foods like stew or bread dough you whipped up at home will act like ice packs in the cooler, keeping other foods cold.

This means all of your cooler space is devoted to stuff you plan to eat or drink, not ice packs. If there's a short hike to your campsite, bring cold-storage bags along, and transfer food to them for that leg of the journey. 8. Make breakfast burritos. Cook up the eggs, and custom-fill the burritos at home to each camper's liking. Then wrap them tightly in aluminum foil and label. Drop them in zip-close bags and freeze.



9. Hit the farmers market. Plan to score last-minute items at a store or market right before you go into the woods — search for the nearest one before you go. If a farmers market is available, it's worth the trip, since your produce and eggs will be fresher than in the supermarket, buying you more shelf life in camp. Foods such as cheese last much longer without refrigeration than you might think.

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