An area with almost unlimited fawet potential is cooking. I'm camping this weekend and I've volunteered to cook for our patrol. I'll be making seven meals for six to twelve people (for some meals we'll have guests).

Here's the menu:

Friday lunch (9): Chicken curry salad sandwiches, dried fruit, coffee, juice.

Friday dinner (12): Tomato soup, sourdough bread, green salad, baked silver salmon with cherry tomatoes, coffee and vanilla instant ice cream, coffee, juice

Saturday breakfast (9): Breakfast burritos with scrambled eggs, sausage, green onions and sweet onions, yellow and orange bell peppers, coffee, juice.

Saturday lunch (9): Pilot bread, cheese, hard salami, vegetable tray, coffee, juice.

Saturday dinner (6): Vegetable soup, crusty bread, shepherd's pie, fudge brownies, coffee, juice.

Sunday Breakfast (6): Oatmeal with nuts, cranberries, honey, brown sugar, butter, sausage, coffee, juice.

Sunday Lunch (9): Cold cut wraps, ham and turkey with pesto or cream cheese, dried fruit, coffee, juice.

I'll pre-prepare as much of the ingredients as I can. The chicken curry salad will be made at home and transported in a big ziploc bag and stored on ice in a cooler for assembly at lunch. I'll do this same thing with the dinner salad (bagged salad), the wraps (all prepackaged, more assembly than cooking). The dinners will be cooked though. I'm a little anxious about that prospect. I'll be baking in dutch ovens, but no charcoal, only monster propane stoves (car camping scale gear). And I have a very short timeframe to get the food ready. That's why the lunches for example are fix eat and go. The coffee will probably take the longest.

So, gear fawet... I'll need (for example, working through a meal)

a big stove for the main courses -- salmon two dutch ovens, two burners on the big stove

a campstove for coffee
and a ten tin

a campstove for soup -- can I use them sequentially? No, I'll want coffee with my dinner.
and a pot for the soup

two one gallon jugs for the juice -- wait, divide the juice mix so I can get away with only one one gal jug. good. divide and ziploc.

teflon wok for ice cream -- don't forget secret ingredient from Central Welding Supply, and gloves and goggles/safety glasses

big bowl to serve salad

cutting board to cut bread, prepare sandwiches. what about using the top of the coolers, covered with .. with.. foil / paper towels

ok, paper towels, foil, serving spoons, tongs, TRASH BAGS, could use a handful of ten tins for water carrying, salad serving, soup prep / serving... bring nesting pots and pot lids pot grabbers...

I think this will be enough for me to organize the mountain of food in the kitchen.

Wow. I want to go camping with you.

Count me in too! :D

I enjyoy cooking myself, but in my kitchen - and usually for one or two persons.
Respect for your enterprise, BigV & good luck.

Here's my indispensable tea brewing equipment when I'm on holidays, usually up some hill or mountain,
sometimes in the city parks and once in a telephone booth during a heavy downpour.

We have not used it much -which did not keep the tent stakes from disappearing- but we have a big White Stag canvas tent. It encourages one to explore the outdoors because it gets so stifling inside and I suppose that's good. We have little other equipment left but can't seem to give up our tent. Reading the posts make me want to to camp again. Guess it's time to cure that by re-reading Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. ;)

Always buy combination tools, so if you lose one, you've lost it all. :lol2:

Nice timing on the topic! Going camping this next weekend. Three days/nights. No backpacking, traveling by car. 7 people - two adults, 1 20yr old, 3 12yr olds, one three yr old and one dog. We'll be staying here and tubing down the Ichetucknee River on Saturday. Playing in the headspring and hiking the nature trail on Sunday. It's my version of a birthday party for my D12 and my partner (both have birthdays in the next 10 days).

I lost custody of all my camping gear in my divorce 8 years ago, so I've had to replace it all in order to do this trip. Ok, some I borrowed...Bought two Coleman tents on Ebay, camp chairs, fire grate, sleeping bags and borrowed the Coleman stove and some lamps. Went to a thrift store and bought throw-away pots and pans and a tea kettle.

The plan is to put up the two tents facing each other, placing a tarp over the opening between them, then putting the chairs under that. We'll do a combination of campfire and stove cooking. The dog will be staked out nearby with just enough rope that he can reach us but not drag down the tents or get into the fire (he's hyper and stupid).

I'm not obsessive about camping - ie: doing everything correctly or a certain way. I want to have fun mostly, away from tv's, computers, phones, and routine work.

We'll see how it goes this time...

I love camping. I learned a lot of survival stuff in my years in the military. We "camped", if you can call it that.

My wife and I tent camped when we first met. And I camped by myself before that. Later in life we got a great poptop coleman camper for the family and took the kids camping often in their earlier years. Later I did more survival style camping with the Army and learned an appreciation for backwoods arts and how to do with nothing or less. But on that note I still overpack when I go to the woods by myself now.

When we camped also ate lot of soup. Packet soup, but it was the 70s and people thought additives were a good thing. At home we never had starters (entrees?) but on holiday it was always a bowl of soup and a couple slices of bread before dinner.

We were active kids at home, but swarming over a campsite playground or running shrieking up and down a beach or just for cover when it next rained (and even walking to the toilet block numerous times a day) were things that needed extra fuel in our bellies.

We used to have a big bag for water. When my sis and I went to the standpipe we'd do our best to fill it with as much as we could, and struggle gamely back to the tent. Dads would always fill it to the top on his late evening water collection, sigh - daddies are so strong. It had a tap on it, which we all delighted in turning, making things like cleaning teeth exciting.

My backpacking days are pretty much beind me, but in the 80's, we did quite a lot of it. My best trip was with my then-wife, my best pal Dan (jarfmon), and my friend Glenn and his then-wife. We did five days in the Sawtooth Wilderness, departing from the Powerplant Campground in Atlanta, Idaho, and working our way up to Leggit Lake.



It was probably a good one day hike, about eight miles and about 3,000 feet uphill...the last quarter mile to the lake itself rising 650' over broken rock. We could have made better time, I think, but it started raining as soon as we got out of the cars, and it poured like mad. We made the first decent elevation change, but it was slogging all the way, and by the time we got to the first good camping area, we were sodden to the core. We pitched camp halfassed and slept, then spent the next day drying everything out around the fire, and started over. Its a decent story, one I should write, I guess.

We also did a lot of Missouri backpacking the Mark Twain National Forest back in the day. My normal camping experience was car camping for years and years, but age and hard ground persuaded us to buy a popup camper ten years ago.

Still love the outdoors, though. Probably the biggest reason Paganism makes so much sense to me, in fact.

Posted without explanation:

Annotated:

I was gonna comment on the thread since I have spent over two years of my life in total camping, canoe, bike, hike, car, all the permutations.
I used to love it and now it fills me with dread.

We went last weekend and I had an epiphany:

For the last decade all my work either carpentry, photography, or gaffing has involved FAWET to an order of magnitude greater than any camping trip I've ever been on. Now on my time off I want to sit in a place like Scriveyn's photo and have someone hand me a cup of tea and then take the empty cup away.

The sad part is that I used to LOVE FAWET and I am an inveterte gear head. I
m just tired. I
m sure I'll like it again someday.

Experienced camper--check.
Recent camping experience--check.
Tea drinker--check.
Sublime sense of humor--check.

Friend, we need to go camping. I'll FAWET enough for the both of us. I have to say at the outset that the first pot of water is for COFFEE, but your tea/cocoa water will be following immediately. I'm a fine cook, on the trail and in town. I think I can manage a cup of tea.

As promised, some gear tips.

I have a stand alone tent. That means the tent can be erected without staking it down, relying instead on the tension of the tent fabric resisting the springy bent tent poles trying to become straight again.

In almost all these designs, the end of the straight pole is poked into a pocket or a grommet, bent in some way, and the other end similarly secured. Then the top part of the tent is clipped to the pole, or the pole is slid through a sleeve along the top part, then clipped into the ends. In any event, it's tough to get all the things that connect to the pole ends to be exactly at the same tension, meaning something sags or falls off.

I have had a recurring problem with my little REI Chrysalis, but the problem can affect all tents that have a footprint (the flat waterproof fabric sheet that acts as a groundcloth for the tent), a tent body, and a rainfly. I would clip the poles to the corner of the tent body (and the wall clips too), then attach the footprint, then the rainfly. All these elements stack onto the end of the poles, and in that order. But I would have trouble when I was moving or using the tent without the rainfly. The footprint would fall off the pole ends since it wasn't quite as taut as the tent body. Grrrr.

But I learned a new way to do things. Assemble the tent as before, but when it comes to clipping the pole ends into the grommets, just put the looser footprint on the pole end first, *then* put the taut tent body on the pole. Now the footprint can't fall off, because it's held on by the tent body tab/grommet.

I learned this trick by observing RG, who was putting up his new tent, and he did this to the corner tabs on his tent. I thought he did it wrong, accidentally, and so I brought it up to him. He explained that it was I who was mistaken, that he had done so on purpose, didn't everyone? Huh? Yeah, it keeps the footprint from falling off. Who says old dogs can't learn new tricks?

I can see I haven't consumed my thousand words yet, so here are a couple pictures to illustrate.

Makes a great parasail.;)