Food for our Camping + Gaming Events

We thought it would be helpful if we outlined how we generally handle food for our camping trips. Obviously, if the group grows from around 6 campers to over 20, we will need to tweak things to make sure we are have everything covered. It takes a village and all that, so we're hoping everyone will want to pitch in and help with cooking — in fact, we are counting on it.

**How we handle things now...**

* We do group breakfasts (somewhat casual) and group dinners (we trade off who cooks).
* Usually whoever cooks also cleans up, mainly because they know where they want their things to go, and the old "too may chefs spoil the broth" so to speak, but for a larger group we are going to have to have more cooks in the kitchen which we discuss more below.
* Lunches, drinks and snacks are "every (wo)man for themselves". Some of us only eat two meals a day, so this allows some flexibility on when someone wants to eat. Have a late breakfast, skip lunch. Have an early breakfast, have a snack mid-day. Everyone needs to take responsibly for their energy needs. If you are hungry you should not wait and go ahead and eat something that works for you.
* We try and cook some of our meals in our Dutch oven, but if fires aren't allowed due to fire restrictions then that is a no go and we pivot to exclusively cooking with propane. Generally speaking our first and last trip of the season we can have fires, but any of the mid-summer trips are always fire restricted. Of course, any year that could change, but that's generally how it works.
* We bring up a large Blackstone grill and griddle and even have a camp oven where we've baked lasagna and tried to bake brownies, the latter was a fail. More on that in a moment.
* With a group size approaching 20, I think there are enough of us, that we can assign 3 people to each dinner to prep, buy and cook for the group and 2 people assigned for each breakfast and 1 or 2 people to help clean up each meal depending on how involved each meal is. If we all pitch in like this, meals should be a breeze.

**What hasn't worked for us?**

* Let me start by saying none of us are foodies and for the most part, we lean towards meat and potatoes as a group.
* We tried ham and cheese using those pie sticks like these. They ended up being more trouble than they were worth. One side would burn and stick, whereas the other side was under cooked. They don't pack well and were messy to clean up and honestly, I think we would have been just as happy with grilled cheese on the Blackstone. I'm sure with enough practice we would get better at using these, but with larger groups this is probably not ideal to try and cook an entire meal using them as we only have a few and so it would take a long time to make. There are better options.
* We've also found cooking from scratch while camping sometimes isn't worth the trouble. We love having baked potatoes for example, but we found they take a lot longer than one would think to cook in a fire, especially if they are on the bigger side. They were also fiddly as you had to try and open the tinfoil without burning your hands to try and gauge if they were done, and then when they weren't, you had to put them back in the fire. It sort of became someone's full time to job to sit and watch and rotate the potatoes. Which made gaming awkward during that time, as they couldn't really play a game while tending food in a fire. What we found worked much better was to cook the potatoes 90% of the way at home (either crockpot or microwave) and then just heat them up and serve once we were ready to eat.
* We tried cooking steaks once and that is something we probably won't go for again. For starters they can be pricey and everyone seems to want them a different temperature and a campsite isn't quite like cooking at home, so it ended up being somewhat stressful. I would say the juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
* Bringing plastic plates and metal utensils that we would wash after every meal sounded good on paper, but in reality wasn't super fun. It meant even if we had a super simple meal planned, we were always having to wash some dishes. We soon switched to paper plates and plastic utensils and haven't looked back. Especially if fires were allowed, we could just burn the plates and bowls and call it good.
* We tried a few campfire desserts with middling results. I've yet to be blown away by any desserts we've made, except the smores. Those always rock.
* Before we got more diligent about using a checklist we went camping with no butter and no sour cream. Imagine baked potatoes with no butter or sour cream?! Ya, no. Don't recommend 1/5 stars.

**So what has worked?**

* Making sure the first night's meal is super easy. It can be tiring packing up, driving up to the rim, unloading and setting up camp. No one wants to spend an hour cooking food when we are just hungry and want to eat so we can get to the fun part - the games.
* So we either do something super simple like hot dogs on the grill or we bring something up from Phoenix that just needs to be reheated. With 20+ of us to feed, probably cooking something simple is the way to go, but we will discuss this as the events get closer.
* To make breakfast easier, we pre-batch the French toast batter at home, so the we can get that going super quick in the mornings and there isn't a lot of fuss or a lot to clean up. Noticing a trend here?
* Lasagna in the Dutch oven or our camp stove has been surprisingly good.
* We try and buy fresh corn on the cob to grill or fire so we can pretend we are eating healthy.
* Pre-making foods that are ready to eat works out great. David and I make some ham sandwiches we keep in the cooler before we leave Phoenix. This allows us get something in our system if we feel like we are low on energy or if what the group is having isn't our vibe. Having food at the ready like that makes things super flexible for us as sometimes you just get hungry and dinner isn't for another 2 hours but you don't want snacks.
* Shawn likes to bring up some cheese and cold cuts that he can snack on if dinner is taking too long or if he gets hungry mid-day.

**Sample meal plan would look something like this...**

* Thursday breakfast & lunch: On your own
* Thursday night: Hot Dogs and chips
* Friday breakfast: Bacon & eggs

• Note: We almost always have a pot of coffee going in the morning.

* Friday lunch: on your own
* Friday Dinner: Baked potatoes with BBQ and grilled corn
* Sat breakfast: French toast and sausage links
* Sat Lunch: On your own
* Sat Dinner: Lasagna and garlic bread
* Sun breakfast: if we are heading out Sunday, we do not cook in the morning and instead everyone is on their own and/or we can heat up leftovers.
If we aren't leaving Sunday, we will sometimes skip breakfast if no one feels like cooking but more often than not, it's more of the same breakfast foods. May sound a tad boring, but we do try and keep things on the simpler side.
Sunday Dinner: is pretty much always, "What do we have leftover that we want to use up?" Whether that's sandwiches, or leftover lasagna, the night before we pack up we try and not have a big meal planned that needs a lot of cooking, as there is always a lot of stuff to do to get ready to leave the next day and often we breakdown the grill the night before we leave, although not always.

The morning of the last day, we do not rush out of camp. We generally spend the morning packing up our tents and kitchen stuff and leave the bathroom and shade structures for last. We are usually on the road by noon, sometimes 1pm as we try and beat some of the traffic heading back into the valley. It's perfectly okay to leave earlier if you want to get back earlier.

If the weather was poor (rarely happens, but has), sometimes as a group we just want to call it, so we pack up and head out fairly early.

**What we are thinking could work well with a larger group...**

* Assuming there are ~20+ of us going, there are 5 major meals that need to be prepped, cooked and cleaned up from. If each of us are assigned once to cooking duties, and once or twice to clean up duties that could work out really nicely. Obviously due to dietary restrictions it may not work out that cleanly, but just to start to put a plan together, it could work something like this:
* If you volunteer for a meal, say hot dogs and chips, we would probably need, I'm guesstimating, 45 hot dogs to be purchased, along with buns, ketchup, mustard, white onion, relish and chips. The leftover chips could then be used as snacks through out the weekend.
* If you were assigned burgers, it would be very much the same, just with burgers instead of hot dogs. And maybe since burger meat is more expensive, we assign 3 people to help split the cost of the more expensive meals.
* Breakfasts are easy, eggs and bacon - 4 dozen eggs and 4 packages of bacon should do it so splitting that between 2 people seems very doable.
* If someone really doesn't want to help cook (I get it), they can volunteer for clean up duty and/or pitch in some extra money to whom they are assigned with.

We've been asked if alcohol is allowed? Generally speaking, we do not drink during our camping weekends. If it's particularly cold, someone might throw some peppermint Schnaps into the gear for hot chocolate. We aren't anti-alcohol or anything like that, but we want to keep these trips focused on the games so we ask that you do not bring up alcohol.

We don't have the meals planned yet and I would imagine we will experiment with some new meals going forward, so if none of the above appeals to you, we are open to changing things up. This is just what has worked for us.

We probably should lean in on being more healthy, so if you have something to bring/share that is easy to transport and isn't a hassle to make, we are all ears.

We will work on a sign-up sheet for the meals, once we've landed on them, so people get to help with the meals they are most excited about.

As long as everyone is willing to help, I'm sure no one will go to bed hungry and as a group we will get better each time and I look forward to getting to try some new foods!

P.S. Like any game meetup, we just ask that you be sensitive with food and drinks around the games!