Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game What is your best and worst camp grub?

Ugh.
Ranier beer. I toured thier brewery once when I was working on the docks in Seattle.It was so bad, we each drank about 1/2 a glass in thier pub room and left.

Best, fresh pheasant and ribeyes over a fire. Worst, when a guy decided to cook smoked oysters and fried potatoes together...

Best - a camp cook had access to a propane stove/oven, and spent 16 hours a day cooking, nearly every day. Everything from pike that tasted like lobster, to fresh caribou, to fresh home-made pies and other pastries, etc. That was the best I've ever eaten in my life, anywhere!!

2nd place - after a long day of hiking and packing camp into our remote elk hunting area (no motorized or horse travel allowed), half of a venison backstrap, slow-roasted over the smoky fire with salt and pepper until medium-rare. No wives around, means no vegetables! That steak simply melted in my mouth, and was some of the most succulent steak I've ever had!

worst - after lots of hiking, and arriving in camp well after dark, we often hit the sleeping bags after settling for some dehydrated goods like granola bars and dehydrated fruit. Sometimes sleep feels better and more satisfying than a nice, hot supper.

best....well most is great after a hard day, but

I made some bad hamburger helper this past year for elk camp in Colorado

I cooked it at 350 ft elevation a week before season then froze it here in southern Missouri then re-heated at 8000 ft in Colorado and burned the bottom and the noodles turned into a gravy'ish slime.....it ate and filled us up but wasn't to good.

Sorry guys in camp.....I'll do better

OK saddlesore - the knives are coming out!

My points of friendly disagreement are as follows:

You have horses, I have my back.

I have up to 16 hours of daylight to hunt in, and I do - which puts a serious crimp in camp/cook/sleep time.

I ain't out there to eat well - or drink booze, either. When I'm hunting, I'm hunting! Top Ramen for supper, instant oatmeal for breakfast - tho I load up my quart sized zip-lock mid-day bags with cheese, sausage, pilot biscuit, gorp, pop-tarts and candy bars.

Of course, riverhunting out of the boat or road hunting out of the camper improves the diet- and sometimes personal hygeine -over backpacking it...

After a week or 10 days of back-pack hunting, I'm definetely ready for a 14 oz T-bone, baked potato with butter and sour cream, salad, and maybe a bit of lobster or crab.... And beer. Definately a few brewskis....

And I like SPAM - it would be a treat oftentimes...

Don't eat GRUBS.

And you know this because.......????

Quiet simply.

The best is anything you're eating in camp cooked over the fire.

It is really hard to say "the worst" even outta a bag or can.

Some of the best things we had whilst in our base camp.

BBQ ribs
Cole Slaw
Fired potatoes and onions
with
Peach Cobbler with Vanilla Ice cream for dessert.

after you spend a few weeks at a time then next time you go in we always tried to be a bit more creative.

We've done a Lasagna and a 3 layer cake.

Then the typical's..

tenderloins, steaks...

For dessert, peach or berry cobbler done in a dutch oven, and topped with sweet cream and then whipped cream while the cobbler is still warm.I don't have the means to keep ice cream in camp. Either way sure is good though.

There are several parameters that limit what we can eat in camp. However, I have always subscribed to the notion that I don't like to change my diet too much just because I am camping /hunting. Even if I packed a camp in on mules,we still ate good,but I can see if one carried everything on his/her back, some alterations have to be made.Precisely the reason I don't do that. I have always have two requirements, good food, and a good warm bed. With those almost anything else can be tolerated, with maybe the exception of poor hunting partners which I don't tolerate.

In my younger days, I have heated a can of pork and beans over an open fire and considered that ok. Not so much any more. Leaving camp in the morning with a full belly of good food that will stay with you and sitting down to a good evening meal after a hard days hunt will let you go longer and hunt harder, rather than getting back to camp and crawling into the sleeping bag dead tired.

If I were to pay some one $5000 for an elk hunt,I would expect good food,I expect no less from myself.

Don't recall ever having a bad meal. The best, by far, was a wonderful mix of mtn goat, stone sheep, moose and elk tenderloin. The stone won, unanimously, by a group of seven. All wonderfully cooked by this young lady.

SS,

We don't change the way we eat either. After all when you run a few stings of 6 there is lots of stuff you can get to camp.

Dry ice is easily packable and it's get stuff there super cold.

We also organize and pack coolers in layers according to days and meals planned. That way the frozen stuff is only open/exposed minimally.

Dutch oven cooking is a camp favorite we have many "walk away" meals that we plan. You know the type where you pack the dutch oven and the pack it in coals and cover it w/dirt to come home to supper ;-)

2 wood stoves with oven betwixed them in the cook tent helps. lots.

Well, frankly, I don't try to cook anything really tasty in camp. It needs to supply my energy needs, first, and other nutrional needs second.
I've eaten a few things that I hope I'm never forced to eat again. Spam because it's full of salty nitrites. Very bad if you are out in a really dry environment and fighting dehydration. Yeah, I know. It the only really effective way to make it keep way back then. We've come a very long way since then.
The other is Dinty Moore Beef Stew. Many a night, I've opened a can, thrown out a few potatoes, and gravy so I could heat it up on the camp fire grill, or on my back packing stove. Never again !
It's really amazing how stuff that doesn't taste good at home can taste so good out in the mountains. When I need to snack, I never eat Cliff Bars or Power Bars at home. But, in the mountains, those things have literally saved the day. E

ummm I u ummm what was the question?

Christ, she was only 16.

Best - Taters and Onions

Worst - Tag Soup

I learned to eat pretty much anything that was put in front
of me when I was in the USArmy.

Best- fresh elk tenderloin cooked "cowboy style" over an open fire after 7 days of crap food.

Worst- Mountain house, straight out of the bag with no water... crunchy! Didn't sheeot for a whole week.

Fresh grouse breast grilled as fajitas over an open fire,homemade tortillas and a big pot of good chili.Worst had to be my dads fried egg sandwiches with ketchup and a big slice of raw onion.They only got worse when served cold at midmorning in the duckblind !

Worst - a member of our hunting party who is not a very good cook thought my idea for precooking enchiladas/stew/etc. and only having to reheat to save time at camp without sacrificing deliciousness was wonderful. So wonderful that for his turn to cook dinner he brought out some precooked (dried out at home) low grade pork chops and reheated them (applied extra burn marks) on the bbq for dinner one night. Those chops were so bad it was hard to tell what was meat and what was bone.