Quick and Easy Camping Meals on a Budget

There is two criteria for a good camping meal: quick and easy. When you are out in the middle of nowhere, having had a hard day hiking/wrangling children, the last thing on your mind will be cooking a five course meal or worse: dishes without a dishwasher. Thankfully, we at the Inspiration Edit have ten meal ideas for budget friendly camping!

Breakfast Camping Meals

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially when camping. If children (and adults) are not fed with food that is energy rich, they will crash and burn later in the day, becoming inhumanly cranky.

1 – Porridge

Porridge is cheap, easy, and hard to mess up while being energy dense, nutritious and tasty. All that is needed is oats, milk powder, and sugar. It only needs one pot to cook (less dishes) and cooking it is as easy as putting said pot on the stove/fire. Quick, and easy.

2 – Boiled Eggs and Fruit

As a meal, this one is relatively light. All the cooking it involves is boiling some eggs. Boil the eggs and give them to your kids with some fruit. They’ll take them and be ready to take off into the hills/woods/paddock yonder and eat them for a breakfast picnic.

3 – Eggs on Toast

This one is a little harder than boiled eggs and fruit, as you need to get the bread toasted. However, this isn’t as hard as one would first imagine – get your kids to toast the bread over the fire/stove on a forked stick. It’ll be entertaining for them, getting them out of your hair as you go about the business of poaching/frying your eggs.

Lunch Camping Meals

Lunch is when everyone gets back from whatever adventure they were on or stops temporarily to get some food in their bellies. Lunch is a necessity for functioning camp life. Living in the open air, away from civilisation requires energy, and lots of it. So, energy rich and simple camping lunch ideas!

4 – Toasted Sandwiches

Or cheese toasties. These are tasty, nutritious, and easily made on camp. Make a cheese sandwich, and then toast it over a campfire/ your cooker. While this method might be slow, it is certainly worth it!

5 – Blt Sandwiches

Three ingredients needed. Bacon, lettuce and tomatoes. The only cooking needed is frying the bacon, and that is easily accomplished over a camp cooker or campfire. When combined with crunchy lettuce, this is the camping meal that can single-handedly boost morale when things aren’t going your way.

6 – Ham and Cheese Sandwiches

Sometimes all that is needed is speed and nutrition. These sandwiches have got your back. They are easily made, and tasty. Perfect for the situation when all the kids want and need to be fed now and there is no time to get the campfire burning, or even to cook.

Dinner Camping Meals

After a long day exploring everyone involved in camping will be tired. They will need a meal to replenish the energy that they would have expended over the day. This is where dinner comes in. Camping dinners need to be simple, and they are also the perfect time for time saving hacks and methods to come into play.

7 – What Are Foil Packet Meals Anyways?

This is a broad category as it’s a way of cooking that uses tinfoil to recreate the conditions of your oven at home. All that is needed is tinfoil, food and a campfire. There is a large range of recipe’s that are suited to this method, from simple sausages and potatoes to the tasty (but not particularly budget friendly) Artichoke Salmon.

8 – Campfire Pizza

Did you think that you needed a pizza oven (or maybe just a normal oven) to cook pizza? Think again. Using just a frying pan, (and campfire) it is entirely possible to cook pizza while camping. Food that is fun to make (kids love making pizza,) tasty, and simple? Yes. Campfire pizza can easily be made with just a campfire, and a frying pan.

9 – Campfire Nachos

Nachos is a simple meal and easily made while camping. All that is needed is to boil beans, fry some mince, and that’s all the food prep needed, for a tasty and delicious topping. Corn chips add for a lovely crunchy texture that is everything that you and your kids need after a hard day playing in the outdoors.

10 – Black Bean Burritos

Black bean burritos are cheap, nutritious, tasty and above all else: simple. They are the perfect meal to cook when you are in the great outdoors and just need something easy to cook, because you used all your brainpower managing your kids all day. Add some cheese, some fried capsicum, some cut up tomatoes, and you will have a meal to be proud of.

Things to Remember

When you are camping, it is important to remember that you will not have all the cooking facilities of home. You may be tired. Or stressed. Food is one of the best answers to morale problems within the family. After a good meal, everything will be better for everyone.

We hope this article will help with planning your camping meal plan!