I’m at Itasca State Park in northern Minnesota, the headwaters of the Mississippi River, it’s June, and it’s beautiful here.  It’s getting towards dinner time and I figure I should get the fire going, because if I don’t, I’ll go hungry.  Okay, that’s not exactly true, but it’s the spirit of the matter.  When it comes to food while I’m camping, it’s a strange mix of my foodie tendencies and nostalgia from when my family went camping when we were kids.

 

When I was a kid, our camping food was pretty simple.  It needed to be, for three kids and a 1972 Starcraft pop-up camper with a swing-out kitchen.  Breakfast was Rice Chex—the only cereal all five of us could agree on—and Tang.  Lunch was sandwiches (either meat and cheese or peanut butter and jelly) and Pringles, eaten on a picnic table at a rest stop somewhere along our route for the day.  Dad would cut slices of Colby from the block with his Buck knife on top of the red Igloo cooler, wondering out loud if he’d cleaned his knife since the last time he gutted a deer.  I don’t know how many times we heard that particular bit over the years, but it never failed to gross us out.  On these picnic tables was where we learned how great Pringles were inside the sandwiches.  Dinner consisted of Hamburger Helper and canned vegetables and if we’d gotten to our campsite in enough time, we’d build a fire and make pies for dessert.

 

Now that I have my own camper—a 13 foot Scamp—and I’m traveling alone, what makes for good meals has only changed a little.  Some of what I want in my little fridge is based in childhood, but there’s some I’ll cheerfully let go.  Hamburger Helper holds no appeal anymore.  I want to cook my food over the fire.

 

It’s a nice night out here, with enough wind to keep the mosquitoes busy with things other than my blood.  The plan for tonight’s dinner is simple.  I’m going to make pies over the fire with my pie irons and I’m going to have my favorite tomato-onion salad.  Usually, my standard dinner of hobos consists of wrapping potatoes, carrots, onions, and whatever other root vegetables I have on hand in tin foil with butter and herbs, and tossing them on the fire to roast, but I want to try something different.  Besides, last time I tried that with the cubes of meat Mom sent with me out of her freezer, they turned out to be applesauce.

 

My knives, purchased new for the Scamp, are almost better than the ones I’ve got in the house.  I’ve bought a pint of grape tomatoes and a medium-sized red onion, both of which are ready to get intimate with my knives.  My olive oil and red wine vinegar are ready to be mixed and I’ve got two bottles—one of freeze-dried garlic and one of freeze-dried salad herbs (onion, dill, etc)—ready, should I want to add them.  My friend Amanda gave me the recipe for this tomato-onion salad, which is nothing more than tomatoes, diced red onion, red wine vinegar and olive oil whisked together, and seasoned with coarse salt.  The first time I made it, I was on the shores of Lake Huron within view of Mackinac Island, and I cut my ingredients on a Scamp-sized cutting board and a Scamp-sized colander, whisked with a Scamp-sized whisk, all gifts from Amanda.  While I waited for the main portion of my meal to cook, I kept picking at the salad.  It was like vegetable candy, I decided.  When my dinner came off the fire, I was too full to eat it.  I’ve made this salad nearly every time I go camping and I never get sick of it.  Sometimes I’ll add the garlic to it, sometimes I’ll sprinkle it with those salad herbs, sometimes I’ll use some lemon juice.  This may be camping, but there are some things I refuse to leave at home.  Good olive oil, good vinegars, and herbs and spices are some of them.

 

Tonight, I decide to experiment a little with my pie making.  When we were growing up, we only used the pie irons for dessert.  Butter two slices of bread and place them buttered side down, then spoon some pie filling onto the bread, close the pie iron, and stick it in the coals.  Most often the pies were cooked in complete darkness, with only a battery-powered lantern on the picnic table to tell if they were cooked or not.  My brother in law got me these pie irons for Christmas last year and this is their inauguration.  I’ll have dessert later, but I’ve got a mind to try something different:  I want a Reuben for dinner.  I have the corned beef, fresh from the deli, Thousand Island dressing, and a can of sauerkraut.  When I take it out of the fire, I haven’t burned the bread and everything inside is nice and toasty and supremely tasty.  For dessert, I try to recreate in my pie irons a crepe I had a while back that had Nutella and bananas.  Also a success.  Later, I’ll combine the Nutella with cherry pie filling—what’s not to love about chocolate and cherry?

 

It’s true that I choose not to use the stove that’s in my camper and I only really use my microwave when I can’t cook outside.  What I’m learning about camper cooking is that it doesn’t have to be boring, it doesn’t have to be predictable, and there’s no sense in cooking anything that doesn’t taste good.  I still like my Rice Chex in the morning, for nostalgia’s sake, but I’ll be drinking my loose-leaf Earl Grey Supreme with it.  I may make hobos for dinner, but maybe tonight I’ll spice things up with sesame oil, rather than olive oil.  Camping is all about creating memories and even as it stirs up old memories in some of the places I’m visiting, the flavors of the food bridge the distance between child and adult.