Over the last few years, I've made several attempts to go camping but none of them became reality. It's a little embarrassing to admit, but after living in Canada for close to 20 years, I had my first real camping trip last weekend at last. EG booked a campsite at Rondeau Provincial Park for a week-long inline speed skating training trip. My plan was to join him from Sunday to Tuesday for a few fun days of skating and camping.
Being the discerning eater that I am, of course I refused to waste this opportunity of outdoor eating and cooking on just any convenience food. Fresh fruit is a must for dessert because it's refreshing. I packed some cubed pineapple and watermelon which stayed cold and sweet until the last day in my new cooler. Along with my portable mini gas range and anodized aluminum camping cookware, I practically had a complete outdoor kitchen at my disposal.
It's amazing what we could achieved when we pooled together our resources. With JS's rice cooker, KN made rice to serve with the very tasty bulgogi beef which he pan seared on the little gas range. It was a traditional Korean meal that we enjoyed with spicy kimchi. I must say I was very impressed with KN's cooking skill!
Without the foresight of how cold my first night turned out to be, I was glad that I planned for a hotpot dinner. We enjoyed a selection of thinly-sliced beef ribs, pork jowls, various fish cakes, chinese beef meatballs, oyster mushroom, daikon, baby Shanghai bok choi. It was not a particularly large variety but enough for two people not to get bored. For dipping sauce, I brought my favourite satay barbeque sauce and fried onions. Cooking our dinner around a piping hot pot of broth in the chilly evening alfresco was absolutely amazing. As an added bonus, clean up was a cinch.
For dinner number two, I anticipated that we would have left over sliced meat from the hotpot dinner. Instead of the predictable noodle soup, I thought that a curry would be the perfect answer to use up all those meat. With my connection to Salad King, I brought with me two tubs of their famous Golden Curry sauce completed with assorted sliced vegetables. It was a simple matter of heating up the sauce, meat, and vegetables before a delicious dinner was ready. For the convenience factor alone, this was definitely a brilliant idea.
After this short but fun trip, I think I caught the camping bug at last. I can't wait to go to my next camping trip!
