Packing the basics for family camping in a compact car: Food
Assuming that you don’t plan to eat out for every meal, you need the tools to cook in your campground. You can do this with a stove, over a campfire, or some combination of the two. To do both you need a stove, gas, and things to start and feed fires with.
We opted to buy a 2-burner stove, the GSI Selkirk 460, which uses the little one pound propane bottles. I’m still not sure about this. It’s good, but maybe a single burner would have been enough and taken up way less space. The double burner has been nice on occasion, though, and I’m glad we went with it. We tested the stove and reviewed it here.
We learned a lot about building fires during this trip and will have another post entirely about that, but you need a lighter and something to burn. We built fires about once every three days of camping, so in most of our campsites. By the end of the trip we were going with a combination of newspaper, fire starters, fire logs, kindling, small logs, big logs, lighter fluid, and a lighter.
However you are cooking, you will need pots and pans, and we brought my old MSR Alpine 2-pot set, which has served us well since I first got it about twenty-five years ago. We packed plastic and wooden spatulas and a big metal serving spoon as well as two hot drinks vessels (one for Vagish to have tea or coffee, and one for the kids and I to have hot chocolate). We also have two sharp knives, one serrated and one not, which we store with the silverware in a small cardboard box so no one reached in and cuts their fingers. We do not have a pocket knife.
We looked at camping dishes, but decided to go with paper plates and bowls in the end to save time and energy washing dishes. We brought a dish sponge and a 4 ounce bottle of Dr. Bronner's Pure-Castile Soap for washing dishes. This is safe for the environment, so we don't have to worry as much about our wastewater if there's not a designated dishwashing sink at the campground.
We packed a pretty big dry bin that the stove fits into, and with the pans, propane, dry food, aluminum foil, paper towels, and ziploc bags, this was mostly full. We ended up getting rid of the bin about a month into our trip, and I'll discuss that in another post about reorganization.
The stock things we always try to keep on hand include butter, olive oil, salt, chili flakes, Cajun seasoning, peanut butter, bread, ramen, granola bars, and Indian curry paste. Everything else can be bought within a few days of use. Our camp cooking is simple, especially compared to a lot of other folks, but I'll write more about that later.
