Camping Food

For me, camping is one of those love or loath type experiences. With any spell of hot weather, the prospect of getting outdoors and sleeping under the stars easily triggers much excitement. Even in cold weather, there’s nothing cosier than being zipped up in a sleeping bag inside a tent, and when it’s stormy and blustery, as long as the little gang are tucked in under shelter, there’s the feeling that everyone is safe together. The sound of rain falling on, with wind blowing against the tent seems to resonate, playing on the slight concern that we should have opted for the next grade up for sturdier accommodation. I’m pretty lucky that I don’t have to deal with the issues around equipment and setting up. For us that’s the husband’s department, the packing before the trip, pitching the tent at the site, the packing away at the end, then the cleaning process and tidying away on returning home. (Although I don’t escape from my usual battle with laundry, which seemed three-fold after our trip away last week). Finally, there are the hygiene issues. Once you’re over the initial slight discomfort of personal grubbiness then you’re in for a great time.

Nonetheless, it’s quite good fun to cook outdoors and nothing beats the smell of bacon frying or sound of sausages sizzling after waking up to the morning dew following a night zipped in under canvas. Particularly when sleeping outdoors, you convince yourself that you need the extra calories but you also crave comfort food to boost the feeling of cosiness. Somehow camping trips can easily be all about trashy food, although I wouldn’t go as far as eating Baked Beans cold, straight from the can as I did once as a teenager on the train home after a trip to Rye. That food memory still seems pretty vivid alongside my Drama A level mate singing, ‘I’ve got a ticket to Rye’ adapted from the Beetles song.

Nowadays, we’re pretty much the sensible thirty-somethings, ahem…hitting forty, with kiddies, and so we take our granola for breakfast, with bananas and apples for snacks alongside the single packet of oatmeal biscuits and Tyrells crisps. My husband also likes to prepare a homemade Thai green curry sauce, which stays fresh long enough in a cool box, for our first night, which can be easily heated in a saucepan with a can of coconut milk before chicken bought from the campsite shop, is added. At Trevedra Farm Campsite in Sennen, there is the added satisfaction that the shop stocks up on local produce, ie. from local farmers, reasuringly with all the concerns with supermarket chicken. The rice is fairly straightforward to make, and without the electronic rice cooker that all Chinese families have at home, I go with a recipe from the popular cockney Celebrity Chef, maybe now more famous for his battles for healthy school dinners and decent chicken. His recipe involves boiling the well rinsed rice in excess water for 5 mins, pouring off the excess water, then covering the rice and allowing it to steam for another 5-10 minutes off the heat. Outdoors, I prepare the rice, then wrap the covered saucepan in a teatowel and maybe a sweatshirt to continue cooking and keep warm, whilst cooking the chicken.

During our trip down to Cornwall last week, we enjoyed fresh Mackerel bought from a couple of young lads selling their catch from a bucket carried from tent to tent around the Campsite. They’d had a successful trip fishing at Penzance. The fillets were delicious pan-fried in a little olive oil, a little crisp around the edges, and were enjoyed even by 4 year old and Littlest, now at 7 months who can now manage little morsels. It reminded me of a trip whilst pregnant, with now 4 year old, to the Outer Hebrides. Husband and Brother in Law, following the advice of a local to look out for Ganets diving headfirst into the sea, indicating a shoal of sand-eels, surely closely followed by a shoal of mackerel, caught a bounty of fish on that trip away, off Port Ness near Europie on Lewis. A bit of a gruesome task, gutting around 20 Mackerel fish, but worthwhile for the food experience in both eating and to humble ourselves in appreciating the origin. We were grateful that the Bed and Breakfast owner allowed us the use of their freezer, so we had plenty to take home with us but we were humbled in the sense of appreciating the flesh of a living creative but also the work of fishermen. And so, we were more than happy to go along to the Newlyn Fish Festival taking place on August Bank Holiday, to support the celebration of community and seafood, the 25th annual festival, but our second in successive years. Having enjoyed it so much last year, it drew me in to book our camping trip to West Cornwall this August.