I learned a lot about cooking on our recent trip to Yosemite. The first thing I learned was that fruit doesn’t travel well to the Sierras. Hard fruit, like apples or oranges, maybe green-ish bananas – but if you’re doing tent camping, not backpacking, not in a camper or a winnebego or pull-out trailer, you’ll have to put your food in either a cooler or in the bear locker. If it goes in the bear locker it bakes all day long in the hot sun. If it goes in the cooler it sits in cool water for a lengthy period of time. Peaches, apricots, cherries were rotten by the third day. It’s tempting to get them but think about storing them. The other thing is, you don’t do a lot of snacking – you eat three meals and that’s pretty much it. If the meals are filling you won’t need anything more.

Here is one dish I cooked – a chicken dish with some sort of Indian sauce, like a korma or something – I don’t even remember. I sauteed onions and garlic before simmering the potatoes, carrots and chicken in the sauce.

The kitchen situation and the bear locker. And that pineapple was toast by the third day:

Our sleeping arrangements on the first night (we had a great site – the next day we had to move to a more crowded, less pretty site for the remainder of our stay – you can’t have everything!

Here is our second location kitchen set-up (photo by our friend from Florida, Robert) – the pancake batter is just waiting to spill over, ain’t it?

The bottom line here is that if you’re cooking for others, especially a kid, you have to think about what you’ll be doing and when. Having a lot of extra fruit around is a waste of money and, like they say in The Edge, what do we die of if we’re stuck in the wilderness? We die of shame. Shame that one doesn’t have the smarts to plan ahead and thus one buys a ton of fruit that then ripens and rots.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4-M__xOtv0[/youtube]

Of course, if you’re actually “camping,” as in – it’s just you, a burner, a sleeping bag, a small tent and the great wide open you’re going to need a lot less. Doing the 1950′s style of tent camping, however, requires planning. When I was a kid my sister and I took camping trips every summer with the Birdsalls. They had the camping thing down. I will always be amazed at people who do things well, whether it’s something small like keeping the kitchen floor clean, or something big, like planning a camping trip with lots of kids along and having it all go off without a hitch. I’ll never be that person.