I especially love waking up early to make the morning tea. When we were camping, I would rise just before dawn, sit on a woven mat outside the tent, light up my tiny gas stove, and watch the sunrise while bringing a kettle of water to a boil.
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| perfect setup for a cup of tea |
It's the perfect way to wake up, especially in the winter when the morning air can be quite chilly!
I wanted to do something special for breakfast on our first day, and so I prepared a sweet potato and chorizo hash. It was delicious, hearty, and filling - great for a day of hiking around the park!
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| making breakfast |
This was probably the best dish that I made on our trip. It was made from high-quality chorizo, an imported Japanese sweet potato, a green bell pepper, a sour green apple, a yellow onion, salt, pepper, and garlic, and topped with a few eggs scrambled into the pot.
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| sweet potato and chorizo hash |
It was so good that I think it might be a new go-to dish when camping!
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| delicious! |
Another morning I made a hearty fried spam and egg breakfast sandwich with cheese and German whole-grain mustard on fresh bakery bread.
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| spam and egg sandwich |
Nowhere near as healthy as breakfast the day before, but it's hard to beat such a delicious sandwich first thing in the morning.
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| fried spam, egg, cheese, and German mustard |
Dinners were a bit more simple - we only had the little gas stove to cook over, and it was difficult to cook once it got dark.
One night, we cooked some black pepper German sausages on the stove, and prepared a tasty side of potatoes and mushrooms with garlic in a cream and cheese sauce. It was so simple, but really tasty.
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| sausage and mushrooms in cream sauce |
Of course, you can't go camping without making s'mores!
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| toasting marshmallows |
We couldn't have a campfire, so we made do with toasting the marshmallows over the stove's flame.
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| making s'mores without a fire |
It wasn't ideal, but it got the job done.
I searched, but couldn't find graham crackers anywhere. In a pinch, Digestives work just fine!
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| we couldn't find graham crackers so we used digestives |
You won't hear any complaints from me!
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| camping tradition |
I wanted to do something a bit special for Christmas, and prepared something of a backpacker-style Christmas dinner on the evening of the 23rd complete with a (precooked) smoked chicken, a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce, and a box of Stovetop cornbread stuffing. It was simple, but a nice way to celebrate while out in the countryside, and perhaps even more than I would have done had I been back in the city.
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| Christmas Dinner |
The next day, I wanted to have a sort of Christmas (Eve) morning breakfast. I couldn't find any tubes of croissant dough like you can get in the US, but I ended up making a type of pigs in blankets out of flattened pieces of white bread and small smoked sausages.
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| Christmas Eve breakfast |
They went especially well with some more of that delicious German-style stone ground mustard.
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| pigs in blankets |
We also improvised a sort of breakfast-dessert one day. I had bought a bottle of that pancake mix where you just add water to the powder and shake it up. It was chocolate chip pancake mix, so we decided to make s'mores pancakes.
I made one big pancake, then topped it up with the leftover marshmallows and chocolate. It looks like a huge mess, but it was amazing!
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| s'mores pancakes - it looks messy, but it was excellent |
Things were great! We were eating like kings of the campsite!
But then disaster struck in the form of a thieving macaque who got his grubby little hands into our cooler. If you thought that raccoons were hard to deal with when camping, imagine trying to protect your food from a monkey!
This monkey lives at the national park. The rangers and national park dog work valiantly to keep him away, but it's a 24-hour job. Mostly he sits over at the trash bins gorging himself on leftovers, but sometimes he feels emboldened to venture into the campsite.
One day, upon returning from hiking, the ranger told us that the monkey had gotten into our food, stealing all of our eggs and produce, and ruining pretty much everything that was partially opened or unwrapped. We had to throw away almost everything, which made the monkey even happier.
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| our nemesis |
Fortunately, the park had a small made-to-order restaurant as well as a tiny shop where you could buy water, snacks and supplies.
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| the small camp store |
Luckily, the shop even carried a small selection of basic cooking ingredients.
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| basic supplies |
A vert nice and easy camping lunch is a chili paste and pork floss sandwich. Even after the monkey had taken most of our food, we were still able to make this! It might sound odd to you if you aren't used to Thai food, but it's really good! This is one of the meals that we made on our very first camping trip a few months ago, and it's becoming one of my traditional Thailand camping meals.
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| chili paste and pork floss sandwich |
Post-monkey, we had to cook a bit more simply. We picked up a few packages of instant noodles from the shop along with a couple of cans of pickled mustard greens, mackerel, and baby clams.
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| chopping up some mustard greens |
This was able to make a very nice (and very makeshift) bowl of Thai tom yum soup.
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| tom yum soup with clams |
It doesn't have to look beautiful to taste good, especially after an exhausting day of hiking and exploring in the woods!
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| noodles with clams and pickled mustard greens |
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