Here to help is our new cookbook, available now! It’s filled with more practical camping recipes for any type of trip. Here’s a favorite recipe that you can make right now while you’re waiting for your book to arrive!

Even around the holidays, Brussels sprouts can be hard to sell, but this recipe will do it, and it will be wonderful to have something fresh and crunchy to add to your menu.

No cooking is required for this recipe, making it an easy side or appetizer. We like it best on crackers, hearty bread, or Melba toasts.

The celebration of the actual holiday in the outdoors adds to the revival of what truly matters about it- bonding with the people you love.We have heard many stories of Thanksgiving camping trips, and love spending it in our local wild areas ourselves. Even more exciting are the trips venturing deeper into the backcountry. In these cases, it is important to keep the logistics of food simple to allow you plenty of time to reach your destination and enjoy a relaxing time with your loved ones. Keep the meal confined to the essential dishes, and spread out the work among all the guests.

We thought through a few of our must-have dishes and adjusted to make them possible in the backcountry. Cranberry Bourbon Compote is simple and perfect to accompany any other Thanksgiving dishes. It is not as saucy as a standard cranberry sauce, but has the same flavor profile and is lightweight and non-perishable. It is delicious spooned over your other Thanksgiving dishes and would also be a great addition to a breakfast made out of leftovers.

At home, we place the whole eggplant in the oven, but at camp it can be wrapped tightly in foil and tossed directly in the embers of your campfire. Roast it until it’s very soft and finish the dish in a skillet on the grate of your campfire or on a camp stove.

I’ve had it both with and without peas mixed in, but I definitely prefer it with peas. I brought a bag of frozen peas and they were fine even after defrosting in my cooler for two days.

Serve this as a healthy appetizer with fresh veggies, or make it a meal with flatbread and a simple pot of beans. Enjoy!

Aimee is the baker. Mai-yan and I like to bake for Aimee as a joke. You should’ve seen the soggy granola-crusted cheesecake we attempted for her birthday last year. (“Water bath? Springform pan? Wait-what? We have to chill it for 4 hours? It’s 10pm now and we are ready to sing Happy Birthday!”). So it was an equally funny joke when my friend from work brought me some sourdough starter. I kept it alive because I couldn’t let him down.

Aimee lent me her book, Josey Baker Bread, and I spent a day off following the rules and baking some bread. It came out “great.” Brown, sour flavored, bread shaped. I didn’t love it, though. There wasn’t anything special about it. So I gave it away.

I tried again when I visited my parents in Las Vegas a few weeks later. We were at the stage when you let it sit on the counter for 3 hours before shaping the loaf, and after 1 hour, it had blown up like a balloon and oozed out of the bowl all over the counter. My mom made me bake it anyway, and it turned out like bread again, and everyone ate it (I told them I was testing their politeness threshold).

It took me months to want to try again, and by that time, it was last week, and it was 100 degrees outside. I did NOT want to turn on my oven. I decided it was time to test this thing out as a Dirty Gourmet recipe, so I set up my backyard fire pit and got out some charcoal and a dutch oven. I followed the recipe for a “hearth loaf,” which is free form and you get to slash the top of the bread with a scalpel, leaving that beautiful crack in the top. I followed the Dutch Oven Temperature Chart we often use, but it doesn’t go high enough in temperature so I added a few extra coals. The first loaf baked quickly and burned all across the bottom, but I’ve never seen such color and texture on a homemade crust before! The coals had died down significantly by the second loaf’s turn to bake (have an extra batch ready), so it took longer, but it still baked up crusty and sour like I wanted.

This is how I’ll be baking my bread from now on, and I’m going to be baking a lot more often now that I can avoid turning on my oven.

Camping and baking can be more tricky. I recommend doing the whole process at camp, rather than trying to travel with shaped loaves. Start with your backyard. That still counts as getting outside in my book!

This recipe has been campified from a traditional Armenian dish called ghapama featured in Issue 14 of Lucky Peach magazine.

Everyone loves pie and potatoes on Thanksgiving, so we put them together into one dish. It’s a rustic, free form pie that is hard to screw up. Cook it in your dutch oven over the campfire. We roasted the vegetables a bit before our trip, so assembling and cooking pies takes very little time. This is helpful if you have only one dutch oven and lots of hungry guests.

This Roasted Potato Squash Galette should be finished with a drizzle (or generous dollop) of Cashew Garlic Sauce. It’s a simple sauce that is creamy, yet vegan, making it less perishable than a dairy option. The sauce makes this dish. The recipe included makes a full mason jar, which should be enough for the galette, along with all the side munching of extra butternut squash pieces going on around you while you’re cooking it. If you’re lucky enough to have leftover sauce, it’s also great as a sandwich spread or vegetable dip the next day.

And where would Thanksgiving be without a good stuffing? Bird or no, the stuffing is an important staple on every Thanksgiving menu. Our friends at Fresh off the Grid created this gorgeous Apple Fennel Stuffing that adds needed heartiness and fall flavor to the table. I’m already imagining my day-after leftover squash, stuffing and creamy garlic spread sandwich on my hike. Click here to check out their recipe.

While you may be trying to figure out how to roast a turducken in the campfire, we decided to put more of our focus on the all important, but easily forgotten sides.

Some tips from our Thanksgiving to yours:

• Cook mostly in cast iron and foil for easy cleanup
• Use serving dishes that have lids, like Pyrex, so you can just pack them up in the cooler quickly at the end of the meal.
• Have everyone bring one extra storage container for the sake of a leftover swap the day after. Make sure they are backpack friendly (lightweight, crush-proof) so you can take your leftovers on a nice hike.

These Sweet Potatoes with Miso Scallion Butter are super simple but also very special. I find it really difficult to make sweet potatoes interesting. They’re kind of that obligatory dish on our Thanksgiving menu. I can’t not have them, but I never really want them either. This year, I think I found the answer to my sweet potato dilemma, and it works perfectly on a campfire.

I found these Japanese sweet potatoes at my local Trader Joe’s, but I’ve also seen them at Whole Foods and the farmer’s market. They have dark purplish skin and yellow flesh. They’re less sweet than most sweet potatoes, and they remind me of chestnuts.

Miso scallion butter is sharp and salty and is the perfect complement to the smokey campfire sweet potatoes.

If you want to do all the prep ahead of time, you can bake the sweet potatoes and make the miso scallion butter at home. Then just reheat the potatoes in your campfire. Either way, the best part is that you get to sit by the campfire while you cook them!

We’re pairing our sweet potatoes with this Coconut Butternut Squash from Fresh off the Grid. Butternut squash is another delicious and colorful vegetable that is perfect for the campfire, and it gets elevated in this recipe by a little hit of coconut from coconut oil. Click here to view the recipe.

Fritters are always fun in the summer. This recipe, another great one thanks to Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen, uses black eyed peas and peanuts as the base. These are fun ingredients that are easy to work with and less perishable than a lot of other options, which is wonderful for camping recipes. I prepared the mixture and put it in a zip-top bag before my trip. Then I fried the fritters in a cast iron skillet at camp. The leftovers took the place of falafel when combined with pita bread and hummus the next day. Thank you again to our friend Ryan Miller, who took this beautiful photo.

Did you get out for National Trails Day last weekend? If not, you’ve got National Get Outdoors Day to look forward to this coming Saturday. Find an event near you and go play!

Cleaning out your garden is a perfect time to also clean out your fridge. And cleaning out your fridge usually means making way too much food, so a picnic is a great way to share. We received spring onions and lots of little pink potatoes in our Farm Fresh To You box the past few weeks, so I couldn’t help but make a delicious, grandma-style potato salad. We usually avoid mayonnaise-based salads since we’re always focused on perishability, but we recently discovered egg-free Just Mayo. It works for our vegan family members, and we can worry less about spoilage. I made what looked like a huge vat of potato salad, but it was gone by the end of the evening.

Our picnic was wonderful. We walked down to the park closest to Aimee’s house, and family members showed up as they got off work or got sick of playing basketball. Babies and dogs ate straight from the serving bowls, a bottle of Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider exploded all over our (no longer) crispy butternut squash taquitos, and we had no regrets. We’re going to do this much more often.