Holiday Meals In Camp

Camping is a fun way to enjoy holidays.  Being out in your RV or tent doesn't mean you have to skip your traditional holiday eats. It may take a little more work -- or a different kind of work or a different menu -- than cooking at home, but you can still enjoy festive and filling meals in camp.  You might choose to maintain your regular holiday menus or sometimes its fun to try something different.

Some traditional meals, like Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, tend to be somewhat over whelming and over done at home, so cutting back or scaling down on some items might be appropriate in camp without anyone even missing them.  However, don't cut out family favorites! You might have reduce sizes or to cut back or cut out some dishes, but make sure you stick to the basics everyone loves.  You might have to prepare some items at home and bring them along to re-heat or get creative in how you fix them, but it will be worth the effort.   Family traditions are often the glue that holds families together.

Roasting a turkey in your RV or cooking it on your campfire probably means getting a smaller turkey than usual so it will fit in your oven or pot.  It might be fun to try roasting in on a spit over an open fire or in the coals and have a kind of pioneer experience.   Other traditional dishes might also need to be scaled down but most everything we love can be cooked in camp -- or prepared ahead of time and just re-heated at the right time.  Or try something really different.  For our traditional Thanksgiving with our Desert Rat group of dirt bikers in southern California (aptly named Turkey In The Dirt) we dug a pit, filled it with coals, stuffed in the turkeys, buried them, and let them cook all day, like a pig at a Hawaiian luau.  The rest of the meal was rounded out with a fun pot luck dinner that was somewhat pre-planned to ensure proper distribution of foods.  Frozen dinners give you an easy out if you still want a Turkey Dinner for Thanksgiving without all the fuss.  As long as you have microwave or even a conventional oven you can have dinner ready in just a few minutes with only a little silverware to wash afterwards.  Or use plastic ware and just toss it for really labor-free meal.

Baking is often a big part of holiday meals at home.  Baking in an RV oven or on a camp stove or campfire will be very different.  Here again, you may have to scale back or make some substitutions to maintain holiday traditions as closely as possible.   Cooking times may be longer and/or temperatures different due to differences in elevation or the capacity of the oven.  We found it convenient to buy our Thanksgiving pies ahead of time instead of trying to bake them on site in camp.  That allowed us to have all our family favorites without giving up our activity time to prepare them.  Be sure to take elevation into consideration if you plan to bake in camp.  Many times we camp at elevations much higher than at home and cakes and other goodies often have special modifications required to the recipes to be successful at higher elevations.

If cooking a big meal isn't your thing you might substitute frozen TV dinners or frozen entrees instead.   Turkey TV dinners have graced the tables at many camp sites at Thanksgiving and I never heard anyone complain.  You may not be able to stuff yourself the way you would at Grandma's house, but maybe that isn't such a bad thing.  If continued munching is a big part of your family traditions, buy extra TV dinners you can nuke as needed like you would leftovers when appetites return.  For convenient snacks, maybe bring along some deli meats and sides.

Creative scheduling might allow you to have the best of both worlds.  When we did Turkey In The Dirt, our annual Thanksgiving Desert Rat outing, we scheduled our big potluck for Friday night so those who did want to join in traditional family gatherings on Thursday could do so without missing Turkey In The Dirt.  By the way, a potluck with lots of people (one year we had 175 show up) rivals even the largest family dinners for variety and quantity of food!  A little pre-planning and signup is needed so you don't end up with 150 bowls of mashed potatoes and nothing else to go with the turkey.

Eating out is sometimes a fun thing to do.  Many restaurants feature holiday meal specials that are worth checking out.  Eating out is probably not a very viable option if you're boondocking out in the sticks, but if you're staying in a full service campground you're probably not too far from quality eateries.   Maybe it would be a good time to check out trucker hangouts along your route.  Sometimes its kind of nice to enjoy a big, fancy meal without the tedious preparation and onerous cleanup.  Small, local "mom and pop" cafes can be an excellent value, often offering "home cooked" meals at modest prices.

Campground potluck dinners can be a fun way to expand your holiday celebrations beyond your immediate campsite.  You might make some new friends and the companionship may help alleviate the longing for traditional family get-togethers that many of us became accustomed to growing up. Whether your organize in advance and have people sign up for certain types of dishes to ensure balance or just have a real, spontaneous potluck where everyone just brings what they have on hand, it can be a fun and exciting activity.  You might end up with some very non-traditional foods to try out.

If alcohol is usually a  significant part of your celebrations, be sure to check the campground regulations so you don't run afoul of the law.  Getting arrested,  getting a citation, or being ejected ovwe the consumption of spirits will quickly dampen anyone's holiday spirits.

Eat up!