While I was writing about my camp at home over Easter, I wrote in a bit more detail about all my cooking and eating stuff – enough that I realised it should go in its own post. This is that post.
This is my stove. It’s a really small basic screw-on gas stove with little wind-reducing baffles and three little serrated arms to hold a pot. This is what it looks like whole.
It screws onto a gas canister. This is a C300 canister. I used to have a C100, which kept it lower to the ground and fitted in my cookpot to carry it all together but they only do the Xtreme version which is about 10% more expensive than the Performance version. I had a Campingaz version of this setup once and I was always terrified of it – I’m pretty sure it didn’t feature a screw but this is so easy. The website says it boils a litre of water in four minutes. I find that depends whether you remember to turn the gas up to maximum after you’ve lit it.
This is the cookset I mentioned. The stove and C100 canister used to fit inside this. The stove alone still does – it’s in there in that picture. The big pot is about 800ml, those rubbery handles fold out and the base has a waffly heat exchange thing that should make it heat up faster. The lid also functions as a tiny frying pan. I find it’s perfect both for pasta and for hot chocolate. The coating makes the outside make horrible noises if you touch it with your fingernails but the inside is fine for stirring with a fork.
This is my other cookset, although I find the first one more convenient. This one doesn’t come with volume markings so all I can be specific about is that there’s a larger pan and a smaller pan and a frying pan. The saucepans have lids and there’s also a plastic cup. Small catch: for ease of packing, nothing has a handle so it comes with a separate one that can be attached to any of the pans. Don’t leave it on, it’s metal so it gets hot. This whole lot packs down basically into the larger pot and then it has a storage bag. Because these pans aren’t as tall as the big pot from my first set, they’re a little more stable on the stove and they’re copper bottomed, which I think means they should heat up faster.
These are my camp cooking knives. They’re both Opinel No. 7s, the round-ended and pointy-ended variants and both are extremely sharp. Both are also illegal to carry under UK knife laws, unless you have a good reason because they have a locking ring. I find that the pair of them are pretty much all I need for camp – they cut cheese, they spread butter, they peel apples. What more do I want? They do not get lent to Guides or Rangers and definitely not Brownies.
This is my newest camp kitchen toy. I don’t need a colander. I can use a pot lid to strain the pasta or I can eat it straight from the water, which helps keep it warm but soggy – or I can invest in a collapsible colander. I just like it.
When it comes to eating, this is the contents of my plate bag. If you haven’t come across such a thing, clearly you haven’t been involved with Guides. In short, it’s a way to transport and store your eating stuff. I should have a second plate and I’m not entirely sure why I have a second bowl. The cutlery is wrapped in orange and glow-in-the-dark Fimo which makes it heavy but easily identifiable on a Guide camp. It’s quite old now. It’s breaking off the knife’s handle and I have to keep reglueing it. If you’re going to make a set yourself, roll the Fimo sausages out a lot thinner.
The first time I ran a Guide camp without a “real” adult present, we discovered why it is that the adults keep their matches in a plastic box. So this is my personal box of dry stuff. The matches, obviously. A tiny ziplock bag of sugar. A pot of salt for the pasta water. And however many sachets of hot chocolate I have handy at the time. A box with a clip-on lid to keep every nice and dry.
I spent a very long evening last year sewing this overengineered washing-up bag. It’s two tea towels sewn together at the bottom, buttoned up the side and with a drawstring at the top. You can untie the drawstring to open it out into an extra-long tea towel you can use for drying up. It contains a washing-up bowl, liquid and an assortment of cleaning utensils. After a couple of camps, I realised carrying my pot and plate to the sink and finding nothing there wasn’t going to work, so I put this lot together.
And this is all without the grater that I have yet to add to my camp kitchen and without any of the food. Actually, I have a handful of enamel mugs that fall into my bag on rotation too. The little mugs in my plate bag are a bit too little. I’m not going to get those mugs out and photograph them but I have a dark blue Moomin one, a white Stephenson’s Rocket one, a white Viking Helm of Awe one, a big aqua Senior Senior one, a big yellow campfire one and a light blue one with the Moscow skyline on.
So that’s my camp kitchen. It’s very much modelled on our over-the-top Guide camp cooking stuff and it’s probably far too much for most campers and definitely too much for backpacking but it’s what I use.