It feels like 104ºF outside right now. It’s been hot all week, and as you can imagine, there isn’t much cooking going on. We’ve been existing on salad and melon all week. Fortunately, one of the local grocery stores is having a huge sale on melons, so Sunday I went and picked up a whole pile of assorted melons. It’s been pretty fun cracking one open each day and enjoying it. Our favorite so far has been the Santa Claus melon, which we’ve never had before. Later today we’ll be enjoying a Crenshaw, along with some breakfast for dinner. (I think.)
Anyway, when we went camping a few weeks ago, it took me awhile to come up with some fun new meal ideas for this year’s trip. And then, once I figured out what we wanted to try, I was worried that I would forget to pack some of the ingredients, and then we’d be stuck in the woods missing ingredients. So I came up with the idea of “kits” to keep everything together that is needed for one dish. It really worked great, so I thought I’d share it- it would work great in any situation where you need to take raw ingredients with you to prepare a dish.
Basically, I bought a package of those 2-gallon zipper bags, and then I printed out the recipes I was going to use. I slid each recipe into a page protector, because we were going camping- there are elements involved, and I wanted the recipes intact. Then, these protected recipes went into the zipper bags, along with all the room temperature ingredients. If it called for a seasoning or something else that required measuring, I did that and put those into small storage containers right in the big bags. If the recipe called for anything refrigerated, I wrote those specific ingredients right on the large zipper bag- so I knew what to grab out of the cooler. In the case of multiple refrigerated ingredients, I also grouped those together into a zipper bag. Here is one sample of one of my kits:
This is a kit for Pineapple Dr. Pepper Beans from Byron’s Dutch Oven Recipes. These were delicious, by the way, kind of a sweet-and-sour baked bean, totally different and very well received. I put all the cans right in this bag. You can also see a smaller zipper bag in there- that contains brown sugar. You can’t see them, but there is also an onion in here, as well as a bulb of garlic. You can see in my notes on the front of the bag that I also needed bell pepper, mushrooms, bacon and sausage- those I put in their own zipper bag in the cooler. This really made meal time so much easier, because everything was right here in this one bag. All I needed to grab was the cooking implements and utensils.
Here’s another bag. This one is for an Apple Cobbler that we tried out for dessert.
This was also from Byron’s recipes, and was also delicious. You can sort of see that I simply dropped in a whole bag of apples and some evaporated milk. Then, I took the flour, sugar, leavening and salt and mixed that all together in it’s own small zipper bag and dropped that in. I also needed a separate package of cinnamon and sugar. In the cooler went a stick of butter and two eggs, which I’d beaten and froze prior to our camping trip. Again, it was a simple matter of grabbing this bag and following the directions on the recipe.
I have one more. I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of the completed dishes, as I somehow managed to take a camera camping that had no charge. I got to take one picture, and then it died. But here is my last camping kit for Dutch Oven Potatoes:
Oh, these were really good too. Again, I dropped in a bag of potatoes, the onions, a bulb of garlic, and then two cans of creamed soup. (Something I don’t normally use, but for camping, we make an exception. I’m not about to make homemade bechamel over the fire.) This recipe called for both soy sauce and Worcestershire, and rather than haul both bottles along, I pre-measured them into a small storage container and dropped that in as well. Into the cooler went bacon, mushrooms and sour cream, and once again it was a simple matter of grabbing the kit and assembling. I packed this up a full week before we needed it.
This is an idea that I plan to play with further. I’ve had it in my mind to try and work out a system of assembling meal kits for food pantry use, but haven’t actually taken the time to sit down and plan out what all that would require. But could you imagine the potential in that setting? Instead of going to a food pantry and getting a bag of random grocery items, a needy mom could drop in and take home a collection of shoe-boxes or zipper bags- and each one would contain the complete workings for a meal for the family- including, of course, the recipe and instructions, as well as ideas for leftovers should there be any. This is a very close cousin to the idea of Once A Month Cooking, only instead of cooking and stocking the freezer, I’m trying to figure out how to pre-assemble a non-perishable kit that would be both delicious and sustaining. I’m sure it’s entirely possible, I just need to figure out a few things yet.