Camp cooking and cult classics - how to cook outside

Just because you’re in the wilderness doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat well.

I say that to myself every time I head outdoors for an adventure, whether it’s an afternoon angling on the Salmonier River on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland or a week-long trek into the alpine to climb mountains in the Rockies of British Columbia. As someone who loves both the kitchen and the outdoors, you could say the combination of these two passions presents a unique challenge. 

This post is all about cooking in the wild. I’ll share tips about what type of foods go best in the outdoors and I’ll tell you about the camp cooking equipment I use. 

Me enjoying the fire on a recent camping trip in Flatrock, Newfoundland. Photo cred: Sarah Parisio.

And to teach the tenets of camping cooking I give a special nod to a cult classic novel written by Jack Kerouac. In it, Kerouac describes his account of the “most delicious meal of all time,” cooked at the base of a mountain in the high Sierras of California the night before attempting to climb it. In homage to this story, I recreate the meal before the biggest climb of my life, which I completed in the Rocky Mountains just a few weeks ago. Cooking and the outdoors, in turns out, go hand in hand.

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