Rookie Camp Meals

[HethSlaton]

Thanks so much everyone! They attended their crossover campout and one prior to crossover where they prepared the meals and did good with cutting the veggies, hobo meals etc.

 

I should’ve clarified this campout isn’t a traditional campout. Our district is putting on a camporee type event for a Friday night and Saturday night. The dining hall won’t be serving meals and the troops have specific scheduled events they’ll be doing that the district coordinates.
 

We basically will setup camp and be responsible for meals between their activities so they need to be able to fix them quickly and clean up as well to be back to their events that they’re participating in. 
 

It will be our recent crossovers and just a few of the older boys, so I want to make sure it’s something they can do that’s still camp cooking for outdoor skills they need to learn, but not so complicated that they miss out on the events they’re doing with other troops.

one of the older boys going along is a troop instructor so he does have enough knowledge to help them through most of it so we intend to step back as much as we can.

with this being mine and my husbands  first event as any sort of adult leadership/help, I just want to make sure we don’t short change them in any way.

[DuctTape]

If you have access to pie irons, these can be great for young scouts to prepare and cook their own. Basic premise is butter+ bread + filling.

As a kid, our patrol did an entire Fri-Sun campout with just pie irons and a coffee pot. IIRC this was our menu:

Fri night: Pie iron PB&J. Pie iron Choc & marshmallow melts

Sat: (B) Pie iron sausage eggs and cheese. (L)Pie iron ham & cheese w/ tomato cupOsoup. (D) Pie iron pizza. Pie iron apple pies.

Sun: instant oatmeal. 

Tang, Hot cocoa and powdered milk always available.

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

10 hours ago, Armymutt said:

I'm pretty sure you'd have to eat a whole lot of oatmeal to get you through a 10 miles hike, upstream swims in 50F spring water, repeated rock climbs after quarry swims, etc.  

You should eat a full bowl, yes, but that is not only enough, but better than a protein-heavy and fatty breakfast, which is what I assume you mean by energy dense based on breakfast suggestions from this thread.

For endurance, you want to eat a ton of complex carbs for steady energy supply and have sugars of some kind (gels, dates, sports drink, trail mix) in your pocket during the activity. You don't want to run into the wall. Endurance is all about staying away from that wall with both your pace and your diet. 

I've done P90X a number of times, following the diet plans also, and I found that the fitter I got, the worse I felt on the initial high-protein diet. Just didn't have any energy. When you're fit and active you need complex carbohydrates in volume on your plate.

https://www.outsideonline.com/2242911/oatmeal-still-worlds-best-performance-breakfast/

[Double Eagle]

This is sounding like a Wood Badge ticket item of putting together a "Feed-O-Ree" where units can show different levels and methods of meals.  A lot of good ideas out there.  And Scouts could knock out some cooking requirements.  

[Armymutt]

13 hours ago, HashTagScouts said:

If these are kids who just crossed over, those aren't activities I would expect to see on their first few campouts. 5 mile nature hike, some orienteering skill activities, totin' chit and just general fun getting to know the others in the troop would be about what I'd hope to see them working on before summer camp.

That was literally my first campout.  Swollen Current River, Big Spring, innertubes, lots of walking to get there.  We did that otherstuff on meeting nights.  Was an old school troop.  Still played Star Gazers, even in 1990.

[qwazse]

On 4/4/2023 at 7:39 PM, AwakeEnergyScouter said:

This must depend on the families in the troop, because that is absolutely not what happens at our house 😱

Shouldn't we model and teach good, healthy food?

Half the fun of scouting is learning what passes for food at other people’s houses. (For me, I realized that my friends had no idea what garlic was for.)

[InquisitiveScouter]

3 hours ago, qwazse said:

my friends had no idea what garlic was for

And yet, you named them "friends"... the horror 😛 LOL

Edited April 8, 2023 by InquisitiveScouter

[AwakeEnergyScouter]

4 hours ago, qwazse said:

For me, I realized that my friends had no idea what garlic was for.

Are these Westerners who have never made Bolognese sauce? 😯 Who are these people who don't cook with garlic?? You have to tell us more about this.

[qwazse]

On 4/8/2023 at 1:33 PM, InquisitiveScouter said:

And yet, you named them "friends"... the horror 😛 LOL

Among us Mediterranean types living just north of the Mason-Dixon line west of the Appalachian hills, there were two kinds of people: friends (largely ignorant of spices like garlic and anise) and cousins (people whose plain cooking was high-end restaurant fare in them big cities).

On 4/8/2023 at 2:02 PM, AwakeEnergyScouter said:

Are these Westerners who have never made Bolognese sauce? 😯 Who are these people who don't cook with garlic?? You have to tell us more about this.

@AwakeEnergyScouter, you don't even want to know what folks in my town would associate with that fine city in northern Italy! In pockets of this country, there still remains a dearth of experience with European cooking. (For fun, check out the PastaGrammar series on YouTube.) I love my high school classmates dearly, but I may very well be the only one among them whose first introduction to Swedish meatballs was courtesy of a roommate from that country and not from a furniture store!

PA and WV are well known for ramps and other edibles that are about to spring up along the stream banks and ridge lines; however, there are still scouts who stare at me blankly as I pick the fare for my next salad while hiking.

We have a lot to learn from each other. And, if we do, our palates will be very happy.

Back to the OP. We aim to have some sort of basic ingredients that scouts can safely cook, then we try to teach them how to add the things that boost flavor and nutrition. I often will challenge our boys to think of their favorite meal that their parents make at home, learn how they make it (possibly inviting their buddies over so Mom and Dad can teach a half-dozen of them at a time), and try to replicate it at camp.

Edited April 10, 2023 by qwazse