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Perfect Healthy Camping Meal Plan (& a Heart-Warming Story)

Planning a menu for camping can be tricky – especially if you want healthy camping food. Have no fear! I’m here for you with healthy, easy foods for camping. 

campingfood, meal for camping

Now that we’ve gone camping every summer since our second child was 2 months old, we feel like we’re old pros. We have the same whole grain “camping pancakes” every time, and I’ve definitely learned how to avoid having them explode like this gluten-free version did once!

We have plenty of healthy, real food easy campsite meal ideas to plan for camping with, and we always print the packing checklist from The Family Camping Handbook (only $6.95) and rely on it heavily for campsite meal planning. There are lots of options in there plus gluten-free printables and packing lists, but I’ll sneak one example out of the book and share it with you today. 😉

Easy Campsite Meals

Here’s the thing: we often “cheat” a little, especially when we’re going to be working hard outside and getting tons of exercise walking up and down hills (that are about straight up) to get to the beach! This is our “20%” of the time that we’re unhealthy, and we can do the “80%” when we get back home!

My cheater items are mostly the cured meats, oh, nitrates, nitrates...May the Lord bless the food anyway and protect our health! (Do you Trust in the Promise of your Meal Blessing?)

It’s getting easier to find “better” meats in many stores, especially ALDI and Costco, and we’ve found quite a few sausages that have neither nitrates or MSG, hooray! I refuse to let me kids consume MSG if I can help it – but that’s a very hard-to-find item since it hides under dozens of names! 🙁

Sample Menu for Camping

Note: This 3-day plan includes plenty of homemade whole wheat options, but we have a GLUTEN-FREE camping meal plan as well.

Dinner Sunday:

Vegetables sauteing in a cast iron skillet over a camp fire, easy camping food

Breakfast Monday:

  • Soaked 100% whole grain pancakes  We call these our “camping pancakes” and make them every time, soaking the flour just before we leave, letting the jar sit at room temp overnight (saves cooler space!) and adding the leavening and eggs in the morning, shaking the jar. So delicious!
  • Bacon (definitely a “20%” portion of the day!)
  • Syrup/Butter

Lunch Monday:

Dinner Monday:

  • Foil packet dinner: polish sausage, potatoes, mushrooms, carrots, onions, garlic, salt and pepper, butter
  • Salad with homemade dressing and lots of Farmer’s Market veggies
Package of veggies and hot dogs in foil, campingfood

Campfire Foil Packet Dinner Instructions:

Lay out a large sheet of aluminum foil (heavy duty) for each person. Fold up the side a little to keep everything in. Pour a little olive oil (EVOO or not? I went not) on the bottom.

Cut up potatoes, carrots, onions, and mushrooms and place in the foil. Add fresh crushed garlic (why not garlic powder?), salt, pepper, and pats of butter. Put polish sausage (I used to use standard grocery store stuff, Hillshire Farm and focused only on the taste; now Costco has some excellent nitrate-free Polish sausages) on top, sliced in two-inch chunks or bite-sized pieces, which is especially nice for children. (Not cutting meat with a plastic knife on a paper plate is great!)

Fold the foil around the food and fold over to seal the top. Store in plastic bags in the cooler. Cook at the edge of the coals on a campfire until done, usually about 30 minutes for the potatoes to get soft.

You can also cook these on a grill for more control over how evenly they cook.

Our kids all get in on the action for this project – we lay out foil on the table, everyone helps cut up veggies and meat with the knife skills we teach in our online cooking course, and each kid can decide how much and what items to put in their foil packet. It’s the perfect balance of responsibility in the family!!

If your kids want to learn some of the knife skills necessary to help out with this, check out our free knife skills class on YouTube.

Am I squeamish about the ton of aluminum foil I’m using (and going to throw away) here? Yes.

But this meal has been touted by our family as THE BEST ever. It could be because we are often so tired and starving by the time we eat it, but it’s definitely a fav.

Plus it’s a super camping meal because everything is done for you except making the fire. It’s nice to relax during meal prep a little bit, while we eat our salads.

Tuesday Breakfast Sandwiches:

  • Fried Eggs
  • Smoky links cooked over the fire
  • Cheese
  • Homemade English muffins (part whole wheat; recipe in The Family Camping Handbook)

Tuesday Lunch:

Healthy Camp Food

Snacks/desserts:

Paleovalley Meat Sticks

It can be hard to find healthy snacks that you can take with you on the go. When I want the convenience of a jerky stick, but want a healthy, protein packed snack option, I grab Paleovalley meat sticks. Paleovalley ingredients have these high standards that you can feel good about:

100% grass fed beef sticks, pasture raised beef sticks
  • 100% Grass Fed Beef & 100% Pasture Raised Turkey
  • Never given antibiotics or hormones
  • Gluten free, soy free, dairy free
  • 0 grams of sugar*
  • Contains no artificial nitrates or nitrites
  • Non-GMO
  • Naturally fermented and contain gut-friendly probiotics!

*With the exception of Teriyaki, which contains 2 grams of sugar from Organic Honey.

These beef sticks and turkey sticks taste delicious! My favorite is the Jalapeño but my kids love Summer Sausage.

Use this link to get 15% off your order at Paleovalley. Read my Paleovalley Review to learn more!

Healthy Camping Menu Food Prep

Here’s an example “to-do” list that generally keeps me busy for a few days:

  • Make mayo
  • Hamburg patties
  • Wash lettuce/salad
  • Slice tomatoes
  • Cut watermelon
  • Make yogurt
  • Make pancake batter/additions
  • Boil eggs x 2
  • Make egg salad
  • Bake potatoes
  • Make potato salad
  • Soak/cook spelt
  • Make spelt salad
  • Make yogurt ind’l cups
  • Make foil packet dinners
  • Make English muffins
  • Bake buns x 2
  • Cut veggies
  • Make veggie dip
  • Slice peppers and onions
  • Fill water bottles and jugs of water…we go waaaay out in the woods with nothing but a campfire pit at our disposal!

Healthy Food for Camping: Keep it Cool

3 handy dandy cooler tips for you!

  1. Freeze water in square or rectangular plastic containers (most space-efficient shapes) and use them as ice in your coolers. You’ll still want to buy some ice to really get it distributed around the cold food, but the added bonus of the boxes of water is awesome: After a day or two, you’ll have some ice-cold water to pour off into your bottles for drinking.
  2. Freeze your meat, cheese, and bread as well. Consider anything that won’t lose quality when frozen as a target for this process. If you pack shredded cheese, bacon, butter, or burgers frozen, you extend their “cold time” that much longer. Don’t use the strategy on lettuce, onions you’re not going to cook, or really any sort of raw foods. Yuck. Mush.
  3. Rather than use disposables, pack one lidded cup for each child who will drink milk. Even when empty, keep these cups in cooler, then refill as needed. You don’t have to feel like you’re doing dishes all the time since the milk residue on the cups will stay cold.

If you’ve ever gone camping, you’ll know that everything tastes better over the fire. Even boring stuff like spaghetti is amazing when you’re outside, cooking it yourself over a real fire. I don’t even get it.

Food is one of the BEST parts of camping, to be sure!

What do you pack when you camp/travel?

Check out our GLUTEN-FREE camping meal plan as well!

Bento box of peas, cheese, veggies and shredded gluten-free chicken over rice. Side of fruit topped yogurt.

A Fun Story – What do you DO out in the Woods with Little Children, Anyway?

I had to share this story I wrote quite a few years ago – if you love camping, this will warm your heart and make you laugh…

So what do you do with a 4-year-old and a 14-month-old in the middle of nowhere? First, you enjoy the fact that you are truly alone. No kidding, not a soul other than our little family was camping in the whole place. The 45-degree-temp at 9:00 a.m. may have had something to do with that…

The best parts of our camping trip:

Daddy and the 4-year-old boy can set up the tents by themselves.

Man and toddler setting up a tent for camping

…while the baby and the Mommy bring stuff out of the van. It’s so important to teach kids responsibility! Look how proud she is to help:

Toddler carrying a huge water bottle.

Putting sticks in bags is important, too… 🙂

Toddler playing with sticks

A beautiful morning walk, one of many. We saw 4 deer, lots of mushrooms, and lots of deer tracks. Children can be expected to walk one mile for every year of age. That doesn’t mean they won’t stop for every bug, leaf, and mushroom, but they can do it. Our little girl always amazes me with how far she wants to walk “all by herself”!

Dad, toddler and young boy walking in the woods
Dad holding young boy and toddler girl, all smiling.

Kids don’t need big toys to have fun…and the sand does come out of the pants/shoes/shirts/underwear/diaper. (Mommy made the mistake of saying to a toddler, “The sand is steep, like a slide!”  Thus ensued playground time.)

Young boy and toddler girl in the sand.
Young boy and toddler girl laying in the sand.
Toddler girl and young boy sliding in the sand.

My son is so creative. This is what he did for most of his time around the campsite:

Young boy digging in the dirt.

He’s digging holes. He explains that they are traps for deer. When the deer come in our campground, they’ll trip in the holes, and “if they fall hard enough, they’ll get dead and we can eat them for meat in the morning.”  We’re always thinking about food and frugality in this family! 😉

Sister can play in the dirt that brother digs up, too.

Toddler girl playing in the dirt.

Kids who love playing in the sand and water, and the sun being just warm enough to make it happen.

Toddler girl playing on the beach.
Young boy building a sand castle
Young boy pouring water into a sand castle
Dad and toddler girl in the lake.

Volunteering to be the dry parent who warms up the cold kids while my husband went in the frigid water with our nerves-of-steel children!

Mom feeding toddler girl ice cream, young boy eating ice cream next to them.

My favorite: eating ice cream around the campfire in our fuzzy PJs, winter hats, and sweatshirts! We thought we were going to be so cool, making ice cream while we were camping in the hot summer weather, but instead, we felt ironic eating it when we could see our breath!

And the best part of all? The kindness and generosity of strangers.

No photos here, since our two camera batteries had both long since run out. Funny…I guess we had a battery theme going, because when we got all packed up and ready to hit to road for home, the van spit out a “click-click-click” instead of turning over. Dead battery.

Remember the whole “appreciating being alone” thing? Not so helpful when you need a jump.

On the beach, already a 15-minute hike from our campsite, you can see ONE house. One. The walk out of the woods to the nearest anything would have been a couple miles, at least. We took the chance with the beach, and the answer to our prayers came in the form of kind, generous people, who not only were home and willing to let us use their phone to call for a tow truck, but they then offered to jump our van instead.

I’m sending them some brownies.

We had a chance to offer up our suffering, minuscule inconvenience that it was, for those who were suffering even more. We were given the opportunity to practice humility and accept the service of others. And most importantly, we made it out of the woods!

Other Healthy Camping Resources:

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11 thoughts on “Perfect Healthy Camping Meal Plan (& a Heart-Warming Story)”

  1. Pingback: Your Real Food Camping Menu Primer (With 50+ Recipes & Food Ideas!) - Keeper of the Home

  2. Love your camping menu– especially the foil-wrapped polish sausage. I’m not much of a camper but as my son gets abit older, I will have to be open to this. I think this recipe will make me look like a rock star in my husband and son’s eyes. Thanks for sharing.

  3. We are camping this weekend and I am new to this. I knew that I could come to kitchen Stewardship for some great ideas for getting ready!

  4. Allison Hartley

    “Healthy” smores: tortillas with nutella, marshmallows and choclate wrapped like a burrito and then in foil to put on the coals to melt. Delicious!

  5. How fun! I hope your family has a fabulous camping trip!

    It can be pricey, and therefore is a very occasional treat for us, but I can vouch for the quality of Polish sausage, Italian sausage and beef hotdogs from U.S. Wellness Meats. I’m sure you know they are grass-fed/pastured products and contain no nasty ingredients. Best of all, they are OUT OF THIS WORD good!

    Maybe you can request gift cards for Christmas. 🙂

  6. Rebecca in Michigan

    what is it about camping and eating foods that are not our normal foods? we will be leaving on thursday and I can tell you that it will be about 50% unhealthy and 50% healthy. Kelly the Kitchen Kop and I have talked about smores and how they just can’t be 100% healthy. do the best you can do and don’t worry about it. Once you are back home and on your normal schedule then worry about food.

  7. Great menu. We’re going camping next week and I’m always looking for new things to do on the campfire.

  8. We hope to go camping soon, too. When we travel, we completely neglect nutrition, eat out more than usual, and are just lazier about everything except sightseeing and activities.

  9. Phoebe @ Cents to Get Debt Free

    We love camping! I must agree, the food is one of the best parts about it. Sadly we’ve not been for the past 2 years, but I think we are changing that in two weeks!

    Hope you have a good trip!

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