10 Easy Food Prep Tips for Camping

Here are 10 Easy Food Prep Tips for Camping! Simple and practical tips you can do at home to make your camping experience less stressful.

Getting ready for camping doesn’t need to be stressful! With some simple at-home prep, your next trip can be easier than ever. Here are some simple food prep tips, recipe ideas and more!

Use a Checklist

One of the things we find most useful when getting ready to go out camping, is to use a food checklist to make sure we have all of the essentials. We’ve put together a comprehensive list which covers breakfast, lunch and dinner…it’s a great guideline, and you don’t need to have it all. CLICK HERE for that checklist.

Meal Plan

Meal planning for camping is essential if you want a mostly stress free time! Get out a pad of paper and plan the meals for each day, then create your shopping list. It’s a bit of work ahead of time, but it’s worth the effort once you get out to your campsite! We plan general things for breakfast like eggs & bacon, oatmeal, pancakes and skillets. For lunches I plan for sandwiches and wraps. And for dinners we do a lot of skillet meals, campfire barbecuing and easy dinners. Once you have a plan, when meal time arrives you know what to do! CLICK HERE for some easy and delicious meal ideas for your planning.

Wash All Your Fruit and Vegetables

Washing your fruit and vegetables ahead of time seems like such a simple thing to mention, but it’s one of the things that I find so helpful. Just wash you fruit and vegetables, let them air dry, then pack in bags. It just makes everything more easily accessible and you’ll be glad you took the time!

Take Pre Made Meals

I like to do a lot of the meal making for camping right at home. That way, once dinner rolls around all you have to do is reheat and enjoy!

• I like to take things like chili, pulled pork, pasta salads, and lasagna.
• Make a batch of homemade pancake mix, and just add eggs and milk at your campsite. Or even easier, take a box of store-bought mix.

Remove Store Packaging

Food packaging takes up a lot of valuable room, so get rid of it. Not only does removing excess packaging free up a lot of room, it also reduces garbage while you’re camping. I find once I remove packaging, I’m able to get most of our food into 1 or 2 tubs.

Prep Your Meat at Home

Handling raw meats when camping is tricky, so I try to prepare them as much as possible at home. I also like to freeze them first, so they stay nice and cool while we travel.

• Marinate chicken or pork chops and put them into easy to access ziplock bags and freeze.
• Make burger patties at home, freeze them and put into ziplock bags.
• Cook your hamburger for Tacos in a Bag, at home. That way you don’t have to worry about handling raw meat in your campsite.

Grate Cheese at Home

Grating cheese is messy, so why not grate it at home and put it in a ziplock bag? This is also great because having pre-grated cheese around is handy for campfire nachos, a topping for chili and on scrambled eggs.

Pack Double Duty Foods

If you’re making campfire mac & cheese, cook extra noodles for a pasta salad for lunch the next day. Make a big batch of pulled pork and have pulled pork buns one night, and pulled pork over baked potatoes the next night. Take a big batch of granola and use it for both breakfast and snacking on hikes.

Prep Snacks

If you really want to get ahead of the game, prep all your snacks at home. Chop carrots, celery and other vegetables for dipping. Put together a snack kit that’s easy for the kids to access, and fill it with granola bars, trail mix and other snacks that are easy to eat. Make a batch of cookies or muffins for mid day snacks, and freeze them ahead of time.

Label Everything

After you’ve done all of your food prep, make sure you label everything so you don’t forget what it is! And make sure to use leak-proof bags and containers.

We hope you found these camping food prep tips useful! The goal of camping is to have a great time, so anything you can do ahead of time helps to make that happen!

Do you have any food prep tips you rely on? Share them in the comments for everyone to read!

PIN IT!

Let’s Adventure!