Great camp food, part II: Breakfast

Here is part II of my recap of camp food ideas that I was really happy with on our recent trip to Clear Lake. You can check out part I right here to read about fun gourmet hobo packs!

While a yummy dinner by the campfire certainly is a great way to end a day, I think breakfasts may be my favorite meal when we're out camping. It's just so lovely to climb out of your tent in the morning, find yourself in the middle of nature, get some coffee going, and start the day off with a hearty breakfast.

Since I was already experimenting with different types of tin foil-wrapped food combos, I decided to try and come up with a great and easy breakfast burrito. Great, because it's filling and delicious and you can completely adapt it to whatever you'd like to have in it. And easy, because you can prepare most of it at home; all you do at camp is heat up the filling, cook some eggs, and wrap everything in a tortilla.

To heat the filling packs, fill a pan with about 1" of water and set your packs on something that will keep them from submerging too much, you'll want them right above the water line or only slightly below. I made a big ring out of tin foil for this purpose, but you could use a small heatproof dish or something along those lines. Cover the pan with a lid and bring the water to a low boil. Check after about 10 minutes and remove the packs once they feel nice and hot. Set them aside while you prepare a batch of scrambled eggs — which you can do in the same pan to cut down on dirty dishes. Nifty!

Scoop some filling and eggs on a tortilla shell, add garnish as you wish (hot sauce, sour cream, etc.), roll up and enjoy!

Here's how I prepared the filling:

Camper's Breakfast Burrito:

• Scrub, rinse and boil potatoes (I prefer Yukon Gold) until tender when pierced with a knife (~20 minutes). Let cool and cut in 1/2" dice.
• Heat some olive oil in a pan over medium heat and gently sauté whatever mixture of vegetables you would like in your burritos (and of course you could add meat, too — crumbled sausage might be nice!). I used onion, red and yellow bell pepper, jalapeño, and mushrooms, all coarsely chopped. Sauté until fragrant and lightly roasted, but don't overcook. Season with salt and pepper and let cool.
• Combine potatoes and vegetables and scoop portions onto lightly oiled sheets of tinfoil; wrap into a package that will fit your camping pan and make sure to tightly crimp your folds to seal.
• Refrigerate packages until use. Heat over water bath as described above. Combine with scrambled egg, garnish as desired and roll up in a tortilla shell.

Campside Pancake Breakfast:

On Sunday morning, we cooked up a batch of bacon, eggs, and... mini pancakes! I had come across this great idea of freezing made-ahead pancake batter in ziplock bags for quick and mess-free pancakes, and figured why not use this for camping? I made and froze the batter at home, then threw it in the ice box with everything else, where it had slowly thawed by the time I wanted to use it. Snip off the corner of the ziplock bag and squirt the batter right into your pan. My advice: cook the bacon first and fry both the eggs and the pancakes in some of the bacon fat. (You can always eat healthy the next day.)

I brought some syrup in a small squeeze bottle, and a bit of butter to finish off those darling little pancakes. Yum... Give it a try the next time you're camping, it's so easy and fun!