Cooking for a Big Campout

 Camping is alive and well in our Pack!

... but the anxiety of cooking for a big group of people is always there. Meal planning is perhaps one of the biggest stresses a Cub Scout Leader has in my opinion. At the Troop-level, you just delegate all that stress to the kids and they figure it out (and own the failures). Cub Scouts is a much different beast because you are feeding K-5 kids (they are more picky) and a lot of parents who are new to scouting.

That said, here is Pack 948's magic sauce for success!

Establish your Camp Sign-Up Early

The quicker you can get a list of who is going, the quicker you can plan your meals. My spreadsheet that I create has the following key fields:

1. Scout - Who is coming

2. Parent e-mail - For very precise communication

3. Total Number of Campers

4. Den, Experience, Dietary, Comments, Experience

5. When they are arriving and leaving (important if this is a multi-day camping event)

Rough out your Meal ideas

This seems totally obvious, but having 15+ adults trying to determine what everyone should eat will not end well. Instead, realize that your power as a camping organizer is that you get to determine the meal.

Obviously, you have to understand everybody's dietary restrictions (You collected that in Step 1). Once you have that, it becomes straight forward to plan out meals. Remember that you can go as simple or as big as you want with meal planning.

Simple Meals

Sandwich Bar

Taco Bar

Pancakes

Harder Meals

Pizza

Dutch Oven Cooking

I create a sheet on my spreadsheet for meal sign-ups. 

Calculate your portions for sign-ups

The hardest problem is controlling waste. I always error on the side of having too much food. For instance, when calculating how many tacos you need for your Taco Bar, you can simply "guess" how many tacos the average person will eat.

Adults: 3 tacos

Child: 1.5 Tacos

... 2.5 tacos per person * 30 people = 75 taco shells

I would do this for most of my the important items. Things like onions and potatoes store very well so it is super easy to over purchase on those.

All these get added to your sign-up sheet.

How are you storing food?

Make sure that you know how you will store food. If your car is right next to camp, you should definitely leverage that for storing dry items. Cars can get hot so make sure you don't ruin anything.

Today's Bear proof coolers (straps to close the lid) are pretty amazing for storing food. Most of them can keep items cold for a couple of days if you keep the lid closed.  I'm a big fan of Grizzly, but any cooler that can keep ice cold for multiple days and can be secured against bears will work.

Cooking and Preparing Meals

Chili and Curry at camp? Yes Please!

For our pack, we created Patrol Boxes which are just storage boxes with cooking essentials:

• Propane 2-burner Cooking stove
• Bowls, measuring cups, knives, pots and pans
• tinfoil, can openers, etc
• Camp Tables - We typically want 4 of these for flexibility - cooking, serving and cleanup

Tinfoil pans are really useful, but also very wasteful. We try to use our own storage with lids when possible, but it can be hard with very large groups.

For eating, prefer mess kits over paper plates to be more friendly to the environment.

Cleanup

Our Cleanup uses the same setup as Troops which is similar to how restaurants clean. 3 washing bins:

hot soapy water -> rinse -> sanitize (water diluted with a cap-amount of bleach)

I highly recommend finding a way to rinse off food debris before washing or that soapy water can get really gross.

Hopefully this overview is useful!

Yours In Scouting,

Anthony

Cubmaster, Pack 948