Camping Recipes

Food just tastes better outside. I love having epic meals to look forward to after a day of adventuring. These are my all time favourite outdoor recipes that I am excited to share with you!

Lori’s Famous Seafood Boil

This is definitely a frontcountry recipe - you’ve got to cook this on your first night and make sure to keep the seafood on plenty of ice in the cooler, but it is hands down the BEST camp meal to try on your next adventure. 

I want you to try making this so much that I’m going to put together a detailed tutorial on how to make it on YouTube. For now, the short version is to follow this recipe but with some tweaks. 

Recommended adjustments -> cook the corn separately as I swear there is no pot large enough to cook all of this in one pot. You can cook the potatoes separately if needed as well. You’ll want to bring a large cookie sheet to serve it up “family style” without all the juices dripping on and through the table making a mess.

This recipe is super easy to scale up for a larger group - just add more pots and seafood. The recipe is actually very simple - you’re really just boiling water with some spices and following the exact timing of when to put each seafood type in. I usually plan for one lobster tail per person, one bag of shrimp per four people (assuming ~16 large shrimps/bag), one bag of snow crab legs per two people, and four clams per person. I also always buy one more tin of old bay than I think I’ll need. All of the seafood gets cooked from frozen, except the clams (which I tend to skip most of the time anyways). 

This is a bougie meal at about $45/per person in seafood, but I keep an eye out at my local grocery and they often have Canadian snow crab legs on two-for-one specials so I stock up then which brings the cost down significantly. I highly recommend the lobster tails and clams from the Daily Catch in Vancouver and if you want to be really bougie, use BC spot prawns for the shrimp.

One Pot Pesto Gnocchi

This recipe calls for pasta but I replace it with store-bought gnocchi so you don’t have to boil anything.

Cook the bacon at breakfast and put some aside for this recipe.

The pesto, zucchini, tomatoes, and pine nuts don’t need to be kept on ice so this is a good recipe that doesn’t hog too much cooler space and can be made later in the week. Speaking of pine nuts, don’t you dare skip them in this recipe as they really bring the dish together. Pre-toast them at home if you feel up to it.

Smoked Salmon

Smoked salmon is my go-to on every kayak camping trip. It’s the real MVP as it doesn’t require refrigeration. It’s a thick piece of fish (not lox bagel style) and tastes way better than anything canned. I get mine from Longliner Seafood at the Granville Island market - look for the "packaged for international travel” foil packed salmon.

I don’t recommend taking this hiking as it’s quite oily - you’ll want to rinse out the packaging in the water before packing out so that you don’t smell like an all you can eat fish buffet.

Pair the salmon with your choice of side - for me, it’s usually uncle ben’s microwave rice (just add hot water instead) or instant mash, and a pre-bagged salad. The salmon is so good as-is, it doesn’t need a sauce and you don’t need to heat it.

Baked Brie

The easiest and most delicious camping snack. If you’re not making a baked brie at every campfire, what are you doing?!

I like to pre-prep this at home and it takes 90 seconds. Buy a wheel of brie, shave off the top bit of the white coating, put a big spoonful of jam and any random nuts you have kicking around on top, double wrap in tinfoil. I’m a big fan of spicy red pepper jelly on brie.

At camp just heat this baby up over the fire until soft. I may or may not have bought a folding fire grill/grate specifically for this.

Steak with Compound Butter

Literally every car camping trip I’m having steak. I usually pick up a New York strip but if I’m going with a friend we’ll split a rib eye.

I’m obsessed with this compound butter recipe my cousin shared with me. It makes a large portion that I then cut into slices, wrap in parchment paper and freeze. Then when I’m heading camping I just grab a little puck of butter from the freezer (obviously one per steak, who doesn’t like butter). Make sure to wrap each puck in parchment paper separately before freezing or else you’ll get stuck with a massive log of butter.

My typical steak pairing is potatoes and a pre-bagged salad. I like to pre-cut the potatoes into small pieces, add white onion, garlic and olive oil, and wrap in tinfoil to slowly cook over the fire. Sometimes I’ll do an instant mash like pictured here but it isn’t as good.

I cook the steak on a cast iron pan on the coleman stove. The key is to remember to bring butter as frying it in butter over oil is so much better. Add a spring of rosemary if you want to get extra fancy. I always season my steak with Montreal steak spice - so good on asparagus as well!

This compound butter also goes well with fish.

Ginger Soy Sablefish

I love seafood, if you can’t already tell. Sablefish is my favourite fish as it is soft and buttery in flavour.

This recipe is my go-to both at home and when camping. Just pre-make the sauce and bring it with you. I usually double the sauce recipe.

I find it can be easy to burn the sauce so I usually let the fish get closer to finishing before I add the sauce in, or prepare the sauce in a separate pan.

I usually pair the fish with rice and bok choy.

More recipes to come! What’s yours?