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I'm curious what you Campfire regulars do for vittles in elk camp. Myself, I like to keep it pretty spartan. My hunting time is limited, so I usually don't get back to camp until after dark and go to bed pretty soon afterward. My main criteria for food selection is how quickly I can cook it and how many dishes will I have to do when I'm done. I tend to favor meals that just involve boiling water.

I know many of you are probably the opposite, and if I had more time to hunt I would be as well.

JV

Early on we were pretty serious about our end of day cooking. Now a days we're more interested in gettin some grub and some zee's...

So, we grill every night and I normally do chicken breasts and stuff them in a tortilla and or pita. Normally someone will also do a couple of packets of noodles or rice and we'll just split it up.

Quick and easy and easy of the old stomach.

Dober

my hunting buddy and i usually eat mre's in the evening until one of us kills an elk. then, the lucky hunter becomes the camp cook and prepares something like fried fish, fried squirrels, or fried deer w/potatoes and onions. he also does any dishes, etc.

Lots of prepared stuff. Steaks and gravy and biscuits the first couple of days Beef stew (Elk if we have any left over from the year before) Chili, ect, and simple stuff like Rice and chicken and tuna mixed. (sounds crappy but actually pretty good and lights a fire in you)
Ground beef, cheese, tomatoes and onions with tortillas is fast and filling.
Instant oatmeal for breakfast, frozen burritos for snacks, cold cuts and stuff like that.
It's always cold enough that if we leave the iceboxes open at night and closed during the day things stay frozen.
That might have to change, last year a Fox(by the tracks) came in at night and carried off about three pounds of ground meat.

I make most of the food up before we go and freeze in ziplocks or vacuum pack. We usually do spaghetti, stew, chili. Then I'll make up rice like rice o roni and freeze and then grill chicken or pork chops or steaks. Meals take about 10 mins max to warm up and/or grill.

After a day of hunting, I'm usually too tired to get fancy. I normally take a big pot of stew (elk if there's any meat left in the freezer). I normally have some fresh veggies, tomatoes, carrots, etc. Maybe make a big plate of brownies.

Unless we have a motivated cook in camp (Not Me) we eat

1. Chicken Corn Chowder
2. Lasagna
3. Mild Green Chilli
4. BBQ country style pork ribs tators and veggies
5. BBQ pulled pork sandwiches and tator salad

or something similar.

These are preecooked at home froze in a disposable aluminum lasagna pan. Reheated on top of the woodstove in the tent with a bread rack or something to hold the pan off the top of the stove and covered with a sheetmetal cover. This works Awesome as long as the pan is on a rack and the cover is on, no tending or stirring is nessecary, So as you get out of your hunting gear get dry clothes, hang clothes, make a drink, etc. your food is cooking for you, and it is a deleicious home cooked meal.

The frozen pans stack real well in the cooler and keep nice.

Makes my life alot easier, except last year I didn't get to enjoy any of it - Bear ate it all -LOL

Long ago,I learned not to vary my diet very much from what I eat at home vs what I eat at elk camp.Rolling stomachs and rushes to the latrine when first getting up does not trump fixing good meals and eating right.
When have 3-4 in camp,each person brings a few dinners of thier choice.
Typical fair includes spaghetti,lasagna, fajitas, chili, rueben sandwiches,beef stew, stacked sour cream enchiladas, grilled elk steak, elk burgers.

Breakfeasts are usually ham ,eggs, hash browns.

On slow days or bad weather,we have done dutch oven cobblers, biscuits for biscuits & gravy, Chicken and dumplings. Sometimes we will take refrigerator biscuits and make donutts, or corn bread and differnt sweet cakes.

Ham and chilli beans with corn bread and honey are hard to beat.

If one is going to have a comfortable camp,good food ranks right up there with god beds and a warm wall tent.

This eating MRE's and dried stuff out of baggies that you just add water to don't cut it in our camps.While some one takes care of the livestock another couple can be cooking and every one chips in with dishes.

Like Saddlesore and many others, we try and have a great bunch of meals that are close to home food.

Grilled Steaks, fried potato's and onions
BBQ Chicken with Spanish rice (Lipton brand in a bag) Just mix and heat
Grilled salmon and Ribeyes. Easy to make and quick to grill
Chili and cornbread
Stew and Cornbread
Lasagna
Burritos with shredded beef. Made beef ahead of time so just reheat
Breakfasts of eggs, bacon, sausage, tortillas, salsa
Cinnamon Rolls, Donuts, and instant oatmeal.

Good food, warm comfy camp, nice bedrolls seem to be what the doctor ordered for our elk camps. We seem to be more energetic hunters and thus been more successful as of late. Wall tents with a wood stove are hard to beat.

We used to do the heat and eat meals out of cans while staying in nylon type tents with propane heaters. We were cold, miserable, and invariably hungry all the time. Not anymore.

Kelk, Saddlesore, Sounds like if you walk through our camps at dinner time you would be seeing tripple, (or maybe sixtle if you had been hitting the whiskey allready - lol)

Nothing like coming back to a warm woodstove heated wall tent with a good home cooked meal after hitting the hills hard all day.

I didn't mention breakfast, we bring bacon, sausage, egss, biscuits, tortillas (that is for after the kill when we have time to cook a good breakfast) before that we have homeade elk sausage breakfast burritos premade and frozen in aluminum foil that when you wake up you just through in the same rack on the wood stove and by the time your coffee is ready and your clothes are on you have a good hot homemade breakfast burrito.

Lunch I am lazy I just grab and MRE and go.

You haven't experiened it all until you are sitting in a heated wall tent in T-shirts. It's having a blizzard outside and you are eating peach cobbler, still warm out of a dutch oven, topped with fresh sweet cream with whipped cream. The entree was fresh elk liver smothered in onions, sides were baked potatoe with sour cream, chives and real butter, grilled corn on the cob still in the husk.

The real kicker is when the yahoos in the next camp, who are staying in those one man nylon tents, come over to BS and they are choking down an MRE and shivering. The look on thier face is priceless.

Opposite.... Bacon, sausage, hash browns, eggs, pancakes, or omelettes for breakfast with coffee or fruit juice. Lunches are big sandwiches, fruit, trail mix, jerky, and a candy bar. Suppers are grand affairs with salads, stir fries, grilled steaks or chops, baked spuds, stews, chicken or shrimp casseroles, chili, or burritos. Then some time for a fine drink and conversation around a warm stove. Can't get any better, and I still drop about 12 lbs.

I wouldn't call us "yahoos", but that was us last year. We stayed in our sleeping bags most of the time just to stay warm.

Not this year, we picked up a wall tent and have the material to make a wood stove. This year will be better, I hope.

It really depends on how many canyons we hunt. If I'm hunting with my wife we normally aren't too tired to do a pretty good spread ie. grilled steaks with spuds or something like that. But sometimes it's canned chili and a couple of tortillas.

While bow hunting me and my huntin pard have enough ready made food to get by for a week or more. Plus stuff to make some really fine meals.

My personal favorite hunting camp meal is fresh grouse wrapped in foil,so you can turn it, stuffed with rice-a-roni, done either on a grill or in a big dutch oven.

A few years ago, we had a decent camp set up. A couple guys showed up before daylight in a small foreign car and headed up a ridge where they killed a decent bull. By dark, they only had a half packed out. They had no camp and no food. They spent the night sitting up in that miserable mini-car and didn't even have coffee, let alone breakfast.
Why do some people go hunting like that? Even a half-wit stumbles across game once in a while.

My philosophy is that I am simply refueling and I want to do it as quickly and efficiently as I can with the least amount of mess. I don't spend time cooking because that takes away from time that I could be hunting. I eat lots of freeze-dried and dehydrated meals on many spring and summer backpack trips because weight is a serious consideration when you have to carry it all on your back. But when I setup a base camp I have the luxury of eating things that weigh more. I still try to choose items that will meet the criteria of easy preparation and little mess to clean up. My wife is an excellent cook and there's no way that I could replicate the meals that she cooks, so I can't eat the same as I do at home. I do the best that I can.

Often when hunting alone, I will have Stouffers lasagna or some other pasta dish for dinner. Can place the plastic bowl of lasagna in a covered pan of boiling water and heat for 20-30 minutes. Steaks, burgers, or polish sausage on the grill also work. While that is "cooking" is a good time to sit down and have a beer or glass of wine and some cheese and crackers. A piece of pie for dessert.

Breakfast is often a Danish, some OJ, and a piece of fruit. Sometimes I will have an egg/potato/sausage scramble already cooked and in a ziploc for heating in boiling water that will be used for coffee in the french press.

Mostly, anything to avoid making lotsa dirty pots & pans by cooking.

We eat very well. I go to hunting camp to enjoy myself and the company of my friends. No MRE's here.

Wall tents ? Wood stove ? Not me. I just set the termostat on the forced air heating system of my Lance Camper and I'm as warm as I need to be.
Breakfasts are double portions of Instant Oatmeal, a fat free w/ fruit Yogurt and a whole wheat bagel. And coffee, of course.
Lunches are a combination of Power Bars and Cliff Bars. "Lunch" is often at 9:00-10:00 AM, 1:00 PM and again at 4:00 PM.
Dinners are white rice, canned white chicken and italian style tomates all mixed. Fresh carrots and usually a sweat trail bar for desert.
Along with the forced air heating, I consider a hot shower every night a necessity. As do I consider the clean sheets I sleep in.
For bad weather, or rest days, there is the local restaurant where I can have whatever I want for a second breakfast or a very fatening lunch of say a juicy hamburger with all of the trimmings. A change of pace for dinner is also in order upon occasion. Those home made pies are hard to beat.
These rest days I've found very helpful. If I don't, I loose too much weight elk hunting.
Makes getting out of bed at 2:00-3:00 in the morning and being on the go all day much easier to do. E

E.Me thinks your weight loss is more from your diet than hunting.

Nothing in your list approaches 2500-3000 calories that one needs to sustain themselves while hunting and expending energy

Yogurt, oatmeal, and rice add nothing.While out working hard, hiking,climbing, etc, fat free is the last thing someone wants to eat.

Not picking on you or meaning to offend