Back-Country Kitchen [Paperback]

After a lot of research, I bought this book. From first glance, I knew I had the right book. Recipes run the gamut from simple and tasty Maccaroni and Cheese to more complex Sweet and Sour Chicken. The book contains recipes for breakfast, breads, soups, main & side dishes, fish & game, international, beverages, and desserts & snacks. One chapter covers equipment and camp cooking techniques. At just over 200 pages, it's chocked full of great camp cooking ideas.

Many of the recipes call for dried foods, some of which may be hard to find in smaller towns. However, there is a chapter that explains the basics of home food drying.

This is a great resource for anyone who enjoys camping. Whether you camp in a backwoods primitive camp or a more modern setting, you're certain to find plenty to enjoy from this cookbook!

I read many reviews and purchased a couple of books on camp cooking, and if I were only allowed to have one, this is it.

When looking for books on camp cooking, one must align their type of camping with that addressed by the book. This book is subtitled CAMP COOKING FOR CANOEISTS, HIKERS AND ANGLERS. The rather varying needs of these types of people are well addressed. The canoeist, or someone camping by car, will carry more pots and pans than the hiker, but with over 150 recipes, all can find something. My wife and I currently only camp by car, but hope to start camping by kayak, and this book was right down our alley.

The recipes are good and are rather "normal" foods like you'd have at home. (Some camping books promote some pretty strange things.) The emphasis is on preparation at home, using ingredients that are light, easily packed and travel well. Most of the recipes require a little more preparation time and are more sophisticated than what you'll find in other books. (If you want quickly prepared, but plainer (stranger?), meals for hiking, see BACKCOUNTRY COOKING by Miller.) The opening chapters discuss the selection of camping food ingredients, and includes a substantial description of home drying which rivals the information in books devoted exclusively to the subject such as HOW TO DRY FOODS. You will probably find having a home dehydrator will be beneficial to get the most from this book. The author describes selection of camp cooking equipment such as stoves, cookware and eating utensils, and briefly discusses camping over an open fire, or with some of the camp ovens available, although most of the recipes are for a camping stove. Then there are ten chapters of recipes, such as "Soups," "Breakfast," "Main Dishes," and "Beverages." Each recipe is marked by icons indicating how many pots are needed, if the ingredients are readily available at grocery stores, whether it requires home drying, or if it requires canned foods. Clear black and white photos are interspersed throughout the book, and there are two sections of color photographs.

I found the first part of the book to be very valuable on its own. By knowing how to prepare ingredients for camping, such as clarifying butter, you can adopt your own recipes or dry mix foods for camping. I tried the upside-down sloppy Joes and beef stroganoff, and later, my wife informed me that mixes were available in the grocery store, so rather than collect all of the ingredients called for in the recipe, I adopted the prepared mixes. Unlike some other camp cook books that rely heavily on freeze dried foods sitting in some general store in the wilds of Colorado somewhere (or require mail ordering), most ingredients are available at the average supermarket (although despite seemingly having EVERYTHING by Knorr, my local Publix does not seem to have the mushroom SAUCE [not GRAVY] called for by the beef stroganoff recipe!).

If you only want one book on camp cooking, want to be rewarded with a satisfying meal, and don't mind a little preparation in camp, this is the book to have. It will take many years of camping to try all of the recipes in this book that interest us.

I was looking for a book to start out a libriary for back-country cooking. I stumbled upon this one. I even use these recipes at home and they are very good, so you can amagine how good they taste on the trial. Simple and easy to prepare from start to finish.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 12 reviews  5.0 out of 5 stars