3-Day Primitive Camping Meal Plan

Allie
Apr 20, 2018
3 min read

When we were invited to go on a three-day canoe and camping trip with our friends, I was put in charge of food by default (or maybe I volunteered... I can't remember 😂). Either way, I was 100 percent excited about it. I always love a new challenge, and this sounded like it could present some interesting obstacles that would be fun to try and figure out.

For starters, none of the food could be refrigerated. For this healthy eater, that was one of the toughest things to navigate. We don't do a lot of processed or shelf-stable foods in our house, so I was afraid that what I would have to resort to would be preservative-laden and unhealthy. I'll show you here, though, that I surprised even myself.

One huge benefit to canoeing over backpacking was that we weren't lugging all of our belongings around on our backs. I still wanted to keep the food as lightweight as possible because we would have to stop for camp every night and load and unload the canoes a bunch. But, I still brought along a cast iron skillet. I could have packed us even lighter by choosing some freeze-dried and dry-packaged options for things, but I'll go over all of that in another post this week!

Another challenge was packaging everything water-tight because there's always the possibility of flipping a canoe. I'll go over how I packaged everything last year and what I intend to do differently.

So, what did we bring?

After doing some research on what types of foods people bring backpacking and what they say can be kept out of the refrigerator, here's the meal plan I created.

Breakfast - Friday

Campground breakfast before leaving on the canoes

Breakfast burritos with fresh farm eggs (not washed... once they're washed, they need to be refrigerated), jalapeños, hot sauce packets, sun dried tomatoes and garlic and herb laughing cow cheese.

Lunch - Friday

Starbucks Bento Box - inspired protein pack, with Babybel cheese, multigrain mini bagel with honey peanut butter for dipping, baby carrots an apple and baby carrots. The baby carrots were a bad idea... they got soggy and weird so we ended up throwing them out.

You can see in this picture that I packaged our lunches in plastic gallon storage bags, which I will try really hard to avoid this year.

Dinner - Friday

Packaged tortellini with sun dried tomatoes, pesto, garlic and herb laughing cow cheese sauce (made with powdered milk), real bacon bits and butternut squash which started out frozen and thawed as we went down the river. The squash tasted and smelled just fine once we got to camp, and it added lots of nutrients we would have otherwise been missing. I was nervous about it, but I think on Day 1, it's okay. I wouldn't try to use a frozen-thawed veggie any later on in the trip than that.

Dessert - Friday

Skookie

We deserved a treat after rowing 10 miles that first day. never flipping over, arguing about who was ACTUALLY steering the boat, and successfully making camp.

We flattened out a frozen-thawed package of Immaculate Baking Co cookies into my cast iron skillet. We accidentally burned the bottom, but it was still good enough for all of us to scoop bites with our camp spoons!

Breakfast - Saturday and Sunday

Homemade instant oatmeal packets with freeze dried strawberries, brown sugar and chia seeds, topped with flax seed, pecans, and honey packets we got at Chick-fil-A before our trip. This was an amazing source of long-lasting energy every day of the trip and everyone seemed to really enjoy eating it.

Dinner - Saturday

Pizzadillas (basically a pizza flavored quesadilla) with laughing cow cheese, tomato sauce and pesto spread, cured salami, black olives, and pickled banana peppers. Some of these things were packaged in glass containers, which I'll avoid this year. I'll have more time to shop on Amazon for ingredients that are packaged in non-glass.