A Campsite Cook Out!

A few weeks ago now Jonathan and I took our first ever trip to the amazing Algonquin Park!  It was SUCH a fun trip, different to our whirlwind East Coast trip last year (arriving at a different campsite each night after dark!)... So great to set up our things and know we were staying there for the whole 4 days!!  We did a bunch of fantastic hikes, seeing the landscape and amazing ecology of Algonquin.  Super fun was our canoe rental for 24 hours, taking a long paddle out, as well as an evening trip and also a REALLY early morning one!  (That's right, 6.15am paddle kind of early!)

Sadly we didn't see much wildlife - nothing big - I was really hoping for bears and moose, but the 40°C heat might have had something to do with that!  An amazing trip however, and we can't wait to go back (...at a time with less bugs that's for sure!).

Something we don't do enough in our lives is plan our meals, but packing up the car for a 4 day trip meant we had to!   We planned everything out, and got it all ready... However it did mean we ate a lot, almost everything we took hehe!  We do love food after all :-D

Here's a little blog post to show some of our meals and how we cooked with our new Coleman stove (yey!).

DAY 1:  Dinner ~ Hot Dogs and Caesar Salad

Nice and simple right?!  We arrived at our site about 3pm and got set up, went on a few short hikes - exploring Beaver Pond, Spruce Bog and Lookout before cooking dinner.  Nothing fancy tonight - cheese hot dogs cooked on the grill side of the stove, buns, ketchup and a bag of caesar salad.  Definitely the easiest way to eat salad while camping!  Just shake the mix and croutons all in the bag - no bowl needed which reduced our washing up to do!

DAY 2:  Breakfast ~  Bacon and Eggs on Toast

A nice hearty breakfast of grilled bacon, fried eggs (sunny side up to start off the heatwave of a day!) and toast along with kid's juice boxes!  To cook the bacon we made sure to put foil underneath the grill part if the stove - this definitely helped with clean up!  Eggs were done in a small non-stick frying pan (thank you IKEA for this $5 purchase - it was perfect!) - 2 eggs fit nicely together in the pan but the toast was more troublesome.  There were slightly warmer parts of the grill than others, so some rotation was needed but although it looks a little black in parts - the toast itself was delicious and didn't actually taste burnt!  And believe me, I hate burnt toast!

Lunch ~ Sandwiches on the hike!

No pictures of our lunches I'm afraid - but they were the same each day!  Delicious challah buns filled with ham and cheese, or chicken and cheese - with some chips, granola bar and a mint kit kat!  Just a few snacks to keep us going on our Mizzy Lake hike!  The amazing forest didn't keep the heat away and we really needed lunch by the time we found a good place to sit (away from black flies!)... However we definitely should have taken more water that day :-S!

Dinner ~ Chicken and Pasta Alfredo with Garlic Bread

Quite honestly we ate better (not healthier) on this trip that in our normal lives!  Definitely not healthier, but I figure we were walking and canoeing - that balances out the s'mores and snacks right?!  But our meals were much better planned out and it was just so much fun cooking outdoors and getting everything ready al fresco!

This evening's dinner was well deserved (in our opinion!), and the pasta was the perfect thing after our day's hiking.  We boiled water on the burner side of the stove, added the shells and cooked until softer than al dente!  Then we did some jiggling around with a too small sieve and a bowl which had the pasta sauce in but Hannah to the rescue and it all worked out!  We had already pre-cooked 2 cubed chicken breasts on Sunday night before we left, and kept it in a ziploc in the cooler until the pasta, sauce and chicken were ready to be combined to heat it all through.  Meanwhile a frozen garlic bread wrapped in foil was placed on the grate of the fire pit which was burning away nicely.  It was perfect!  Around 20 minutes on the grate with a fire underneath was all it needed - pretty happy with that!

It was DELICIOUS!  The mushroom alfredo sauce was nice and creamy, and it was a good mixture of store-bought, pre-cooked and cook out camping style!

DAY 3:  Breakfast: Sausage Waffle Sandwich

Super yummy and kind of fun!!  A different twist on breakfast today!  Pulled out of our freezer was 4 leftover waffles, and a pack of brown sugar and maple syrup breakfast sausages we had stored in there from a while ago.  Nice and easy - two things we already had and didn't need to shop for.

The waffles had thawed slightly, but toasted up just fine on the grill, and the sausages we cooked in the pan, and also cooked and saved some to have cold in a sandwich!!  YUM!

The sweet breakfast flavoured sausages paired so well with the waffles slightly buttered, we'll definitely make this again :-)

Lunch ~ Packed lunch again!

Today was our canoeing day, we enjoyed our picnic lunch on an amazing little section of beach just for us!

Dinner ~ Leftovers!  

We had originally planned corned beef and jacket potatoes (cooked in the fire) for this evening, but we had a couple of hot dogs leftover and another caesar salad bag so we just did that!  This meant we left lots of room for a lot of s'mores!  Roasted marshmallows with chocolate digestives YES!

A terrible photo I apologise!  I just wanted to get them eaten :-D

DAY 4:  Breakfast ~ Pancakes and Maple Syrup

Our final cooked meal of the trip :-(  Pretty sad to leave our little campsite home!  We picked a great spot, pretty private from other campers, nice and quiet and very close to the beach!  Just steps away which was perfect.  We'll definitely book that spot at Pog Lake again :-)

Our final decadent breakfast was pancakes and maple syrup.  Using our wee little frying pan on the burner we made delicious fluffy pancakes (thanks to the powdered mix from Loblaws!).  I am not a cake mix kind of person, but this time - for camping we thought we would try out a pancake mix, and for this it worked perfectly and I'd definitely use it again - they were delicious!

The box came with way more powdered mix than we actually needed on the trip, so in a tupperware box we measured enough to make 8 pancakes (hehe)... there was a lot of extra room in the tupperware but we wanted to use the box as a mixing bowl when we added the water!  2 birds with 1 stone here - storage for the mix and a mixing bowl on the day we prepared them :-)

Yummy fluffy American pancakes with some maple syrup (that had definitely leaked out of it's container, but luckily not the extra ziploc...I had a feeling it might happen!) was such a great way to end our campsite cook out!

Another reason this was our final day's breakfast was as this meal required no cooler to keep anything cold.

Lunch ~ More sandwiches then home!

We did another couple of walks after packing up our campsite and even caught a tiny far-away glimpse of a moose before heading home.

So there you go, our 4 day getaway to the incredible Algonquin Park - what we ate and how we prepared it.  Nothing too fancy or too crazy, but delicious nonetheless, and definitely simple to prepare and cook :-)

Hope you're all having a great Summer, thanks for reading today!!