If you missed my most recent post about our fun camping trip at the Texas State Railroad, go HERE to read it!
The next most important thing after planning our camping trip and figuring out where we were going to sleep was planning out our meals for the whole trip. This made it easier to make sure we had everything we needed and left the guesswork out of what I would be making for dinner every night.
If you know me, you know I hate wasting any food so I made sure to plan meals where leftovers could be used for another meal on another day. We had minimal cooler space and a refrigerator that basically froze everything but I was able to make it work just fine!
Here is what my meal plan & menu looked like:
Wednesday dinner: Hamburgers with Baked Potatoes
Thursday:
Breakfast-Egg, Ham, & Cheese Bagel Sandwiches
Lunch- Sandwiches
Dinner- Chicken & Veggie Kabobs with baked sweet potatoes, plus link sausage for the kids.
Dessert-S’more cones & campfire banana s’mores
Friday:
Breakfast-Pancakes (never happened because of an eventful morning, see previous post)
Lunch-Cheese Quesadillas and leftover baked sweet potatoes
Dinner-Cheese & Veggie Pizzas
Dessert-Graham cracker s’more packets. I also planned on making cinnamon/sugar pineapple over the fire for the hubby but that never happened.
Saturday:
Breakfast-Cinnamon Sugar Crescent Roll Ups over the fire for the kids and breakfast burritos for the adults.
Lunch- Sandwiches and snacks
Dinner- A special Chick Fil A treat thanks to gift cards on the way home.
There you have it. It wasn’t very fancy and the only thing I had never made before was the Chicken Kabobs. I tried to keep the meals fairly simple so I didn’t have to bring an excessive amount of ingredients. Someone suggested to me to prepare meals in advance and just have them ready to warm up. This was a fantastic idea! Plus, I also made sure to plan meals that had ingredients that could be used multiple times. Read on to learn how!
Sharing snacks while the camper gets set up. 
We got to the campsite in the afternoon on Wednesday and had snacks until we got a fire started to make an early dinner. Snacks that I had packed for times like this included pretzels, frozen yogurt tubes, granola bars, banana chips, apples, breakfast bars, and I’m sure there are others I’m forgetting now but you get the idea. For dinner, we were going to have simple burgers with baked potatoes. P.S. I totally grabbed a package of frozen burgers from Aldi after reading the ingredients list a hundred times to decide if it was worth it and it was! I made the potatoes for the side for this meal in my Instant Pot back home the day before we left. This way I didn’t have to worry about waiting an hour or so for them to cook, and all I had to do was get them out of the cooler (already wrapped in foil), and put them on the fire to warm while the burgers cooked. Toppings for the baked potatoes included butter, cheese, and sour cream which were also the same ingredients that were going to be used in other meals but most especially cheese quesadillas for one of our meatless Friday meals. Packing minimal ingredients was so helpful!
For dessert on Wednesday night, we attempted to make s’more inside of a cone, hoping that would be less messy. Well, just so you know, a campfire is really hot and cooks things quite quickly and especially so when you can’t see how it’s cooking as it’s wrapped up in foil. Yes, our s’more foil packets got a little crispy, haha. But you gotta learn somehow. The kids ate the non crispified parts and loved it anyway!
No after pictures because they got really crispy. The kids ate the not too crispy /blackened part, haha. 
Banana Smore foil packet.
Thursday morning breakfast was super easy and something I just started making recently after discovering the super affordable Everything Bagel at Aldi. All it requires is ham, cheese, and eggs. You can also use bacon instead but I was looking for double uses for everything right?! so I used the same ham that I put in sandwiches. I cooked the ham on my cast iron skillet (cast iron is so versatile while camping!? and then fried eggs in the same skillet. The kids loved these super easy bagel breakfast sandwiches. I also used some of the leftover already cooked baked potatoes, cut a few slices and warmed them on the skillet and added those to whoever wanted potato on their bagel sandwich. Delicious! And this is now an easy go-to hot breakfast at our house.
Lunch was super easy sandwiches after our bike ride and dinner was something that I had never made before, chicken & veggie shish kabobs. I prepped these by cutting the chicken up in 2 inch pieces, adding homemade marinade (I think I just googled an easy marinade), and freezing this in a freezer Ziploc bag a few days before we left. Not only did this frozen chicken help keep other things cold in the ice chest (we never had to buy ice) but it also thawed perfectly in time for Thursday night dinner. I also chopped up red, orange, & yellow bell peppers, red onion, and zucchini ahead of time into 1 inch pieces to have them ready to put on the skewers with the chicken on Thursday night. It was super easy to assemble these right before we cooked them and I didn’t have to worry about cutting chicken and making marinade. Prepping meals really helps! I even brought pineapple that I had sliced at home for a campfire dessert (which never got made) and just chopped some of that up to add to my husband’s kabobs since he loves pineapple. Once again, this is another instance of multiple uses for different ingredients.
These kabobs were super delicious and will definitely be made again at some point in the future. I wasn’t going to bother feeding the kids something new so I brought link sausage and pre-made Instant Pot Baked Sweet Potatoes as well. I just had to cook the sausage over the fire and heat up the sweet potatoes and the kids had their quick and easy meal. Sweet potatoes topped with butter and brown sugar were also a great side to the kabobs for us! It was a delicious meal for sure!
Friday was freezing cold and rainy and, if you saw my previous post, didn’t go exactly as planned because of that. I was going to make pancakes since Friday is the day we eat meatless meals but that obviously didn’t happen since our propane stove that had worked fine at home wouldn’t work at the campsite. This is why it is always important to have some quick snack or breakfast options that don’t require heat! The kids snacked on some homemade cinnamon bread that I had brought for this reason and we were able to make it to Walmart and back to get a small propane burner and a heater.
By the time we got back, it was time for lunch so I made cheese quesadillas on my cast iron skillet with my new propane burner. I even heated up a leftover baked sweet potato for myself which is what I had planned to do when making the meal plan if we had any leftover from Thursday night’s dinner. It worked out perfectly.
Friday night, I decided to plan something easy and packed some premade mini pizza crusts from Aldi. I rarely buy premade anything because I always look at the price and decide it’s not worth it. Honestly, I debated a long time whether the 2.49 or whatever it was per pack of 3 crusts was worth it but I decided it was a treat and would make things easier so I splurged. Yes, $3 for a one part of a meal is splurging for me, haha.
All I needed to make this meal was the cheese (which I already had from our quesadilla meal) since the crust packs came with sauce packets for each pizza crust. Plus, I got to use the leftover veggies from the kabobs to make our veggie pizzas. These were cooked over the campfire that my husband was kind enough to get dry wood from the park store for. They were a little crispy cooked in my cast iron but they were super delicious and a fantastic meatless meal for camping. For dessert, we attempted to make graham cracker s’more packets with marshmallows, chocolate chips, and Reese’s Pieces but they got a little crispy once again. The kids ate whatever part of it wasn’t black though, haha!
Saturday morning breakfast was actually one of the things I had originally planned for a dessert but ended up working out perfectly for the kids for breakfast. We used crescent rolls and added chocolate chips, cinnamon, sugar (brown sugar also used in the baked sweet potatoes), and marshmallows. Then I rolled them up as best I could and put them on our homemade clothes hanger skewers to be cooked over the fire. They didn’t look very pretty but the kids LOVED these and ate every single one!
Not very attractive looking, haha, but the kids loved them! 
Cinnamon sugar crescents cooked over the fire were gooey and the kids loved them!
Matthew and I ended up having leftover chopped baked potato, leftover veggies from the kabobs, and ground sausage cooked with some eggs in the cast iron. Then we added some cheese to this and put it in tortillas for our breakfast burritos. This actually ended up being perfect since I could wrap them up in foil as we were running a little behind to get to the train. P.S. We still got there in plenty of time but if I’m not early to events, I consider myself late and I hate being late! We ended up eating our breakfast burritos on the train and they were still warm so it worked out for us. Shhhh, we weren’t supposed to bring our own food on the train but I wasn’t about to spend $12 for a pretzel, ha!
After the train ride filled with plenty of candy for the kids, we had a quick lunch of sandwiches or leftovers before we packed up everything and headed back home. Thank goodness for friends who gifted us Chick Fil A gift cards after Victoria was born so we could grab a special treat for dinner on our way back. And yes, my husband did in fact pull the pop-up camper through the drive thru lane at Chick Fil A. That’s just another benefit of pop-ups, they can fit into small spaces!
If you’re wondering about drinks, we kept it pretty basic. We brought our huge 5 gallon jug of water with pump (like THIS) and refilled our reusable water bottles and cups during the day. This way we didn’t have to worry about the kids wasting bottles of water or having plastic bottles strewn throughout camp. Plus, a 5 gal jug of water is so much cheaper and better tasting than a case of water. As a special treat, usually with dinner, the kids did get one juice pouch per day and the hubby and I got whatever alcoholic beverages we had in the fridge. I think we had an assortment of alcoholic root beer, flavored seltzers?, and Twisted Tea. Nothing fancy obviously but it was definitely fancier than our usual water at home so the kids loved it.
I’m super happy with how our meal plan turned out and would definitely make any and all of those meals again the next time we go camping. The only thing I might have to change up would be the desserts but sweets are not required so I can just skip them completely. In reality, the kids would be fine eating just a marshmallow or chocolate chips out of the bags but that’s not as much work, not as much fun, and doesn’t make as many camping memories as burnt desserts, haha.
Gabbie helping cook with her oven mitt. 
Also, always make sure you have a backup plan in case you can’t cook over a fire for some of your meals, like if it rains, for instance. But if you are like us and your backup propane stove plan resulted in going to Walmart to get a different propane burner then sometimes you just have to make the supplies you have work and have snacks for breakfast.
I hope this helps someone who needs easy camping food ideas! I’m always open to new camping food and meal suggestions so let me know if you have any tried and true recipes or tips!
