I've been making camping trips out west for around ten years now. In this time, I've discovered a number of things that work well (and some that don't) with regard to meals. Let me share with you several successful food strategies. What I've tried to do is strike a balance between the following:

• Pack as much food as you can to avoid shopping on the road.
• The weather out in the Great Plains can often be hot, and the interior of the minivan even hotter.

There are several reasons for wanting to avoid on-the-road shopping excursions. Perhaps most obvious is that in some out-of-the-way parts of the West you may not run across any reasonable grocery stores. ("Trading posts" are far more common...) Even if you do find one, our attitude has always been that it's more fun to hike in the grasslands than push a cart down an aisle — we try to avoid people and towns as much as possible. And, of course, you'll save quite a bit of money by shopping at home, before your trip, since you'll be able to take advantage of sales in stores you know well. Little bitty grocery marts out in the boon docks have no competition and can pretty much charge whatever price they want. Putting these all together, then, you can see why we travel with a very well equipped larder in the back of the minivan.

Conflicting with this self-sufficient approach is that the temperature inside a vehicle can easily rise above 100° in summer — perfect for spoiling your stored food in jig time.

Our solution is to split the perishables into three main categories. (See the sidebar to the right). In the first are those items which should be eaten within three nights; these include frozen uncooked meat products and fresh salads. At the start of the trip, your cooler will be doing its job well, hanging around 45°, say. The meats will gradually thaw safely over a couple days of travel, not much differently than they would have in your refrigerator at home.

After three days or so, the cooler has probably risen to the temperature of a display case in a grocery store. So, you switch over to cooked meat products in hermetically sealed wrappers, things like smoked pork chops, ham steaks and kielbasa. These items don't require that the cooler be absolutely frigid, and as long as there's a fair quantity of ice left, are probably good for five or six days into the trip.

The third category would be foods requiring no refrigeration at all, like canned meats, chili, ravioli, etc. These can travel outside of the cooler, and can be safely prepared and eaten at any time.

So, the basic game plan is to start your trip with meals prepared from fresh items, gravitating to cooked meat products, and ending up with nonrefrigerated food stuffs. Just to make sure the concept is absolutely clear, all of the products in both Category 1 and Category 2 start out frozen. But since Category 2 includes fully cooked items still in their hermetically sealed factory packages, they can linger in the cooler longer than the Category 1 products. Naturally, though, you'll stop to pick up more ice whenever you pass a filling station along the way.

I mentioned salads. Bagged green salads are a great boon nowadays, and it's easy to pack a vinegar/oil type of salad dressing to go with them in the cooler — unlike creamy or egg based ones, you don't really have to worry about it spoiling. Several years ago canned salads, put out by Reads^®, appeared on our grocery store shelves in Mankato, Minnesota. These are delicious, and because they're canned, don't have to be refrigerated. Hey presto! You can have a decent salad many days into the trip. Read's^® 3 bean salad is the best anywhere, with lots of flavor. (Look out for the Green Giant^® variety — the sweet & sour dressing is watery, and salt is apparently the main "spice" used). Also excellent is Read's^® German potato salad, either hot or cold. Their pasta salad is a bit flat, but makes a good change every now and then. We usually splash on some Italian salad dressing to spice it up a bit. On the whole, I really recommend Reads'^® canned salads for camp cookouts. (I probably ought to mention one more time that this is a completely noncommercial Web site. I'm simply expressing some personal opinions and am not trying to drum up business for any company.)

Cooler Logistics

Here are some tips on how to best deal with a cooler. Using these ideas, we've been able to keep food going over the course of a two week camping trip, with only minimal runs to restock the ice.

Not all coolers are created equal. We finally settled on a stainless steel Coleman^® cooler, after several years of using plastic ones. What a difference this makes! First, it's only an inch or two larger in all three dimensions (compared to most of the plastic ones), but the additional volume is just enough so that store-bought ice blocks fit comfortably in any orientation. I find the extra room also permits us to carry more breakfast yogurts, sandwich condiments and salad dressings.

But the really nice thing is that the walls of our steel cooler are completely vertical. If you check out the less expensive plastic varieties, you'll notice they typically have sloping walls. This is a poor use of space; you can pack the contents tightly near the bottom (good), but an empty gap around everything is left near the top (bad). Not only is this unusable space, but the extra air promotes melting. Vertical walls, on the other hand, let you stack everything securely, consuming every last bit of volume with frozen goods.

I haven't actually performed any controlled experiments or worked out the mathematics, but it seems like there is a nonlinear relationship between the volume of the ice blocks and how long the ice lasts. There appears to be a magical "critical mass." We have found that by giving up some food space and using at least three large ice blocks, we can easily keep the cooler going for a week before replentishing the ice. Use less than this, and it fizzles out in a couple days.

You can make your own ice blocks easily. I save half-gallon milk cartons with screw-on lids and sterilize the dickens out of them. These are then filled three-fourths of the way with tap water, and the cap is lightly threaded on. After a day in the freezer, I've got a nice block and I finish tightening the lid for packing. Later on the road (and especially out in the grasslands where potable water may be scarce), we use the melted ice water for drinking.

Here's a tip that might not have occurred to you. We like to have orange juice for breakfast. So what we do is buy a half-gallon of it in a plastic jug. Then we freeze it, too, like the homemade iceblocks just mentioned. Voilà! Another ice block, bringing the count up to four now and really achieving critical mass. Of course, you won't be able to have juice the first couple days until it begins to melt. Later on, though, the cold slushy orange beverage really hits the spot in the morning. Incidentally, since you're starting with a full jug, the freezing will distort the sides of the carton a bit due to expansion, but this is just a one-time deal and doesn't really matter.

The three ice blocks and the frozen orange juice are arranged in whatever manner works. Since cold air sinks, put all of the meats below the blocks. And you probably should pack the carton of milk touching one of the upright blocks. After packing all of the food, finish it up by slapping a bag of ice cubes on top of everything. Again, the cold air sinks keeping what's below more cool, and you can have iced libations during social hour in camp.

When preparing for a trip, freeze everything possible. This even includes things that really don't need to be frozen, like all of the cooked meats (smoked chops, ham steaks, kielbasa, etc.), bacon, margarine and so on. The goal is have the contents, as much as possible, solid as a rock when it goes into the ice chest.

Eventually, of course, you will get melting. So, it's important that everything be waterproofed, especially the uncooked meats. If necessary, double-seal the meats, cheeses, carrots, etc., in a pair of ziplock bags. You don't want an protected chunk of ground beef floating around in the water later on, spreading contamination. Even a soggy piece of cheese, while perhaps not deadly, is no fun to consume.

Along these lines, we like to use those new taller, squirt bottles of mayonnaise and flavored mustards. Because of the extra height, the melt water will take longer to reach the top of the lid. Speaking of mayonnaise, since this contains eggs it's important to keep it packed against a solid ice block at all times.

Finally, learn to distinguish between items that must be kept cold and things that are nice to have cold. We keep the stainless steel cooler strictly for the food stuffs, and use a separate, smaller plastic cooler for ice cubes, pop and wine. If this second cooler starts to loose it's oomph (from being constantly opened and closed), it's no big deal. Tepid beverages aren't life threatening, just a minor inconvenience. And oh, if you like those boxed wines, throw the cardboard container away and simply place the internal plastic bladder in the cooler directly. It will conform to just about any shape, fitting around whatever ice is left.

Dry Goods

Of course, you'll be packing a number of dry goods as well, things like fresh potatoes, canned goods and packaged food. These don't require refrigeration and can travel in a separate bin.

We use a blue Rubbermaid^® tub with lid. Check out the picture to the right. (Remember, you can click on the thumbnail to enlarge the photograph to full size).

This shows the back of my minivan, several days into our recent trip along the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. The brown wooden thing on the left is our custom designed chuck box, containing everything needed to cook outdoors. In the middle is the stainless steel Coleman^® cooler I mentioned above. Just above that, still in the middle, is the little red and white cooler which houses the pop, ice cubes and wine. Finally, on the right side is the blue bin with all of our dry goods. The tub's lid is recessed a trifle, rather propitiously, to hold the dishwashing tubs, sponges, soap, etc.

Let me mention some of the items that travel in the blue bin, just to give you an idea of what sort of cooking is possible on a camping trip to the Great Plains.

First, there are the canned goods. I mentioned some of the meat or main course items above, but here's just a bit more detail. After the meats in the cooler have run out, you can switch over to a fairly broad range of items in canned form. Chunk ham is great in jambalaya, while the chunk chicken breast goes well in oriental meals. I like the tuna in tetrazini; it's not real filling, but sure is delectable. The corned beef is fantastic in camp bundles, a recipe I'll be writing up here before long.

Of course, some canned products are complete and ready-to-go, like spaghetti and meatballs, beef and macaroni, ravioli, stew and chili. We usually save these for easy-to-make lunches, although one absolutely frigid day at Devil's Tower the chili was pressed into service for breakfast — we definitely needed something warm that morning!

And then we also pack a broad range of canned vegetables and fruits. For veggies, we like okra, black-eyed peas, Veg-All^®, green beans, sweet peas and water chestnuts. Canned fruit we take includes pears, peaches, tropical fruit salads and mandarin oranges.

As for fresh vegetables, bell peppers, carrots, parsnips, and celery need to travel in the cooler (in little Tupperware^® containers or ziplock bags). The same goes for fruits like apples, oranges and nectarines. But the onions and potatoes can be kept in the dry goods bin. Place them in paper bags only, so they can breathe, and keep the potatoes away from the onions. These two veggies don't care for each other.

The rest of the blue bin is topped off with packaged items. Besides things like breakfast cereal, we throw in some of the products listed in the sidebar to the right. But let me alert you to Zatarain's^® cajun mixes (jambalaya, gumbo, black beans and rice, etc.), since these may not be quite as well known as they should be. Most packaged mixes (like Hamburger Helper^®) are created with the typical American palate in mind, i.e., a total aversion to flavor or spice, unless you call salt a spice. But the Zatarain^® things, while equally easy to prepare, are high quality foods with an authentic cajun flavor. Wow! Talk about eating in style while at camp!

Last of all, we usually leave room for a few bagged things like chow mein noodles, uncooked rice, chips and soup crackers. Between the cooler and blue bin (not to mention a five gallon jug of water) we generally have enough in the minivan to keep us going for a long, long time. You'd be surprised at just how self-sufficient you can become with just a little bit of planning and thought. You might also marvel at how varied camp meals have become since the days of weiner-on-a-stick hotdogs.