Anna’s Quick Guide to a Successful Camp Cook

By Anna

If you want to become an expert in camp food cooking,pay attention because by the time you have finished reading this your mind will be so bursting with information that it will be spilling out your ears(not literally).

So imagine, you are going on camp for 4 days and 3 nights and in your groups of 4-5 you had to come up with a menu for that period of time. This means that you have to cook 3 breakfasts,3 lunches and 3 dinners with a budget of $30 per person. This is the situation that we found ourselves in when we went on our camp to Omakau. I was in a group of 5 people which meant we had a budget of $150.

Looking back we probably were a little too serious about saving money and cutting costs. Now at this you might ask,why? Why didn’t we spend all of our budget? Now this is where our logic came in! We were allowed on one day to buy our lunch in town,this meant that we had to save enough money for 5 of us to buy lunch in the most expensive part of Christchurch!

Steps For Planning:

1. Talk with your group and discuss what food you like or dislike. Also discuss any allergies that might affect your menu.
2. Create a graph that shows what you will be eating and who will be cooking it. (Make sure your graph is easy to read)
3. Source any recipes(if you need) so that you can work out the quantities
4. Create a list of the ingredients that you are going to buy and price them out.
5. Add up the money you will be spending and compare it to your budget. You might find that you have to change some of the things you are buying so you are not overspending

My Top 3 Tips:

1. When you are deciding what to eat make sure that you keep in the back of your mind that you are not going on a 10 day tramp and need to pack lightly. Mrs Hannah kindly reminded us that we can eat like kings as long as it is within our budget.
2. It depends how confident your cooks are but we found it helpful when we had a assistant to help us out. This is helpful for things like setting the table for eating later on.
3. Have some basic kitchen rules for all groups to follow. Sometimes it can get a bit hectic in the kitchen so it is important to clean up after yourself.

If you follow all of those steps you will be able to have a successful camp cook! It is also helpful to check out your camp's facilities because who wants to get to camp and discover they don’t have an oven! Good luck and happy cooking,you will be creating masterchef dishes in no time!