I hope you are getting to see the leaves change where you live, because it is one of creation’s most spectacular displays.

Every year I am newly amazed.

How can the death of something be so beautiful?

Of course, one of the very best ways to enjoy fall color is to go camping.

And while I really love camping at all times of the year, autumn camping has a special place in my heart.

I don’t know if we are going to make it out for fall camping this year, but we are taking in as much color as possible by lacing up our boots on the weekends.

However there are still a few fall weekends left, so here is a little gift to get you going!

Our Chino House Camping Checklist.

This list is for car camping and camper camping.  One page is for your camping gear and the other is what you need for your camp kitchen.  Just download, print it out and get packing!

You might also find these camping menus helpful for planning a weekend getaway!

I know it’s Monday, but now you have all week to get yourself in gear for Friday afternoon.  So dig out that dusty tent and camp stove, and get ready to head for the hills.

Do come back and tell me all about your camping adventures!  And let me know what you think needs to be added to the checklist!  We’re forever evolving it!

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More about camping here.  More recipes here.  Also, find me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram!

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 Happy Summer Holidays, Friends!! 

Are you going camping this summer??

Well then, I think you might find these Weekend Camping Menus super helpful!

Friday Night Dinner: Creamy Pasta, Baguette (torn into pieces), Veggie Skillet (onions, spinach and zucchini sauteed in a little oil in a cast iron skillet)

Saturday Morning Breakfast: English Muffin Egg Sandwiches with Sausage

Saturday Lunch: Sandwiches, Chips and Salsa, Carrots and Hummus (This meal can also be packed up for day hiking!)

Saturday Night Dinner: Beef STEW! Yum! We serve this stew over mashed potatoes. It’s a favorite for sure!

A little red wine, a book and a bowl of beef stew is the perfect way to kick back after a day of hiking trails!

Sunday Morning Breakfast: Swedish Pancakes

These buttery almost crepe-like pancakes are served with lingonberries traditionally, but you can use any jam!

After breakfast, we usually break camp, go for one more hike, and eat lunch on the way home (either sandwiches or a stop on the way).

We LOVE to get outside for a weekend, and these menus make it easy to plan ahead and enjoy your time away!

Happy Camping, FRIENDS!!

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More camping menus here. More about camping here.  More recipes here.  Follow our camping, hiking and travel adventures on Instagram!

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Last summer, when we went on our annual two week camping trip to Colorado, I really tried to document our Camping Menus.

We are always so hungry at camp from hiking and being outside, so the food is one of our favorite parts!

This first picture is a standard lunch meal for us: a little canned vegetarian chili with grilled summer sausage, crackers, brie and cheddar cheese and a generous spot of Dijon mustard.

We usually cook hot breakfasts and dinners, and then we eat sandwiches or other cold, picnic items for lunch.

Here are a few of our favorite camp meals!

Breakfast: Bagels, Eggs and Sausage Links

Bagels travel better than bread, as they don’t tend to squish in the box quite as much.  Plus of course, sausage and eggs are a staple camp breakfast!

Dinner: Pasta Carbonara and Grilled Asparagus.

This creamy pasta with bacon is so yummy and it’s easy to throw together.  I think all veggies taste better grilled, especially if your griddle is already all salty and greasy from cooking bacon.  A little grime on your griddle is just part of camp life.  Add a little red wine and breadsticks and this one feels like a fancy camp dinner!

Recipe for Pasta Carbonara

Ingredients:

2 eggs

1/4 cup cream

1/4 cup butter (half a stick)

1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated

8 slices thin bacon, cooked and crumbled into small pieces

1 pound fettuccine

Directions:

Boil water for pasta and cook al dente. (a couple minutes shy of being done)

Drain pasta and then put it back in the pot, return pot to stove on low heat.

Add butter, stir until the butter is melted and pasta is all coated with butter.

Beat egg and cream together in a small bowl or glass with a fork.

Pour cream and egg mixture over the pasta and stir until it thoroughly coats the pasta.

Season with coarsely ground pepper.

Serve immediately.

Breakfast: Homemade Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes

We mix our dry ingredients at home in a ziplock bag instead of buying pancake mix, which makes our camp pancakes so much yummier!

Recipe for Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes

2 cups whole wheat flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon kosher salt

3 tablespoons sugar

2 eggs

3 cups buttermilk

4 tablespoons melted butter

chopped nuts (optional)

Scoop 1/4 cup batter into skillet or onto griddle.  Cook for 2-3 minutes.  Flip.  Cook one more minute.  Serve.

Makes about 20 pancakes.

You can add anything you like to this batter…blueberries, chocolate chips, cut up strawberries

Dinner: Spaghetti, Salad, and Baguettes Bread with Brie

Buy a pound of pasta and a jar of your favorite sauce.  Grab a little Parmesan to throw on your arugula (which keeps well if fresh) and spaghetti.  Bonus: bread with cheese.

Breakfast: Eggs and Bacon with Potatoes

Again, this is pretty standard fare.  But later in the week when your bread is gone, your potatoes are still good in the camp box.  Chop them small and fry them up.  So good.

Dinner: Cheddar Potato Soup and S’mores, Of Course!

The big bag of potatoes you used just a couple of this morning gets peeled and sliced completely for this very flavorful and hearty soup which includes in the recipe a full-bodied beer.  If you buy six bottles, you still have plenty left to drink with your soup.

Finish with S’mores which we actually eat almost every night while camping!

Recipe for Tomato and Cheddar Potato Soup with Beer

Loosely adapted from Crescent Dragonwagon’s Soup and Bread

2 cups dark beer

6 large potatoes

1 quart chicken stock

3 bay leaves

1 teaspoon basil

1 teaspoon oregano

½ cup butter

1 large onion, diced

2 ribs celery, diced

2 carrots, diced

5 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

1 28oz can diced tomatoes

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 tablespoons flour

1 cup milk

Tobasco sauce to taste, optional

½ teaspoon dry mustard

12 oz sharp cheddar cheese, shredded

Salt and pepper to taste

Bring potatoes to a boil in the stock and beer.  Add the bay leaves, basil and oregano.

In a cast iron skillet, melt butter.  Saute onion 10 minutes.  Add celery, garlic and carrot.  Cook 10 more minutes.

Add tomatoes and sauces.  Cook until most of the liquid evaporates.

Make a paste with the flour and then gradually stir in the milk.

Add mustard and tobasco (if using).

Stir tomato mixture into the soup pot and add the cheese.

Allow the soup to heat back up after the cheese is added before serving.

Serve hot.

Breakfast: Yogurt, Granola and Blueberries

After a few mornings of eggs and meat, you need a healthy breakfast!  This one is my favorite.

Recipe for Original Chino House Granola (which is also a great camp snack!)

2 cups rolled oats

1 cup sesame seeds (sometimes I substitute half the sesame seeds for flax seeds)

1 cup sunflower seeds

1 cup slivered almonds

1 cup broken pecans

2 cups dried fruit (I use a combination of cranberries, blueberries, cherries and mango pieces cut into thin strips.)

½ cup maple syrup

¼ cup blackstrap molasses

½ cup brown sugar

¼ cup canola oil

Mix all ingredients except fruit in large bowl. Spread granola on a parchment lined half sheet pan.  Granola should not be more than one inch thick. Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes, stirring every ten minutes. Toss in the fruit and cook about 5 more minutes.  Allow to cool completely before storing in air-tight container. Enjoy!

Camp Dinner: Pasta with Shrimp, Butter and Lots of Parmesan and Lemon.

This is not even a recipe.  If you put butter, garlic, lemon in a skillet with shrimp, you could pour it over freshly cut grass and it would taste good.  Seriously.

Camp Breakfast: Oatmeal

We’re getting lazy here.  It’s the end of the week.  We didn’t even take a picture.  Oatmeal with a little honey, cinnamon and nuts goes great with a Colorado morning though, especially if someone brings it to you while you are still in your sleeping bag.

Camp Dinner: No Cook Burritos

We might have heat up the beans for these and warmed the extra large tortillas on the griddle, but other than that we used salsa, cheese, tomatoes, avocados and raw onions for a Make-Your-Own-Burrito dinner.

Camp Dinner: Steak with Mushrooms, Leeks and Zucchini Compote

Taido marinates flank steak in a combination of fresh ginger, sesame oil, olive oil and soy sauce.  Grilled and sliced, it is probably the kids’ favorite dinner.  We had these veggies on the side cooked in the skillet with butter and oil.

Camp Snacks

We carry nuts and trail mixes of all kinds on our hikes.  Plus carrots and popcorn (popped at home and carried in an old extra large Animal Cracker bin).

I really love snacks, so I throw lots of extras in the cart when we shop for camping!

What are your favorite camp meals and snacks?

Are you so much hungrier when you go camping?

Did you enjoy this post ?  Maybe you’d like to subscribe to the Chino House via RSS feed or by email. 

More camping menus here. More about camping here.  More recipes here.

Follow our camping, hiking and travel adventures on Instagram!

The post Camping Menus appeared first on Alison Chino.

If you are going camping this weekend or sometime soon and you happen to be near a Trader Joe’s, as I happily happen to find myself again, then you might like to discover, as I have, that you can get several days’ worth of relatively easy and healthy camping meals in one quick stop.

Cooking on a camp stove is of course different from being in my kitchen, which I love and miss, but I think I have finally settled into sort of a happy compromise between what I am used to and what is possible for an entire summer of camping.

Still, Trader Joe’s has made some of those compromises much easier. For example, letting the children roast hot dogs over the fire once a week is much easier to do when I am buying all beef nitrate free Trader Joe’s hot dogs, Trader Joe’s whole wheat hot dog buns and Trader Joe’s organic ketchup.
So the routine is that I usually roll up to a Trader Joe’s after we’ve set up in a new town and have pretty much used up all our groceries. It seems like it is usually in the afternoon. And the kids have to help or wait in the car. For their trouble, we usually get a box of dark chocolate ice cream bars or ice cream sandwiches made with two chocolate chip cookies. Both of these novelties come in boxes of four and are a deal at $1.99 when you consider that everyone is begging to go to the Cold Stone next door which would cost us our dinner.

So after the ice cream, we have…

Dinner:
2 packages frozen gyoza (they come in pork, chicken, shrimp and vegetable)
1 bottle gyoza dipping sauce
2 packages prepared sushi

1 box organic ginger snaps

I fry the gyoza in a couple of tablespoons of oil in my cast iron skillet on the camp stove. Dinner is served.

Breakfast:
Coffee
1 package whole wheat bagels, sliced and toasted on the griddle
Organic cream cheese
Angelcots (a rare apricot in season right now that my kids are gobbling)
Apple Cereal Bars
Greek Style Yogurt (We LOVE this stuff. It is so creamy. And we love all the flavors, which include honey, fig, strawberry, apricot-mango, pomegranate and blueberry.)

Lunch:
Baguette
Cheese (goat cheese brie and sharp cheddar)
Raspberries
Fuji Apples
Sesame Pita Chips and Dip (We alternate between hummus and cilantro-yogurt dip)

Snacks:
Bananas
Cherry tomatoes
Organic animal crackers

Dinner:
Whole Wheat Organic Penne Pasta
Organic Marinara Pasta Sauce
1 package fully cooked meatballs
Packaged Caesar Salad or Spinach Salad
Charles Shaw Shiraz

Breakfast:
Coffee
Whole Wheat Buttermilk Pancakes with Chocolate Chips
Maple Syrup

Lunch:
Whole Wheat Crackers
Blueberries and Cherries
Cheese
Whole wheat pita pockets with Tuna Salad (made with white chunk tuna, organic mayonnaise and hard boiled eggs)

Snacks:
Flax seed tortilla chips and salsa
Roasted almonds
Any number of trail mixes

Dinner:
Various Canned Soups for the kids: the boys pick chicken noodle, Mary Polly picks an Udon Noodle bowl
Instant Indian Food (curried lentils) and whole wheat tandoori for Taido and me

OR
Hot Dogs for the kids and Cilantro Chicken Sausages for Taido and me, which I save half of for my eggs in the morning.

Random red table wine

Dark Chocolate, Cinnamon Graham Crackers and Homemade Style Marshmallows

Breakfast:
Eggs, Bacon (nitrate free) and Skillet Potatoes

Eat lunch out (Baja Fresh, anyone?) and then go back to Trader Joe’s again….everything listed is Trader Joe’s own brand right down to the marshmallows.

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