Thanksgiving: Campfire Edition
What’s better than a home-cooked meal on Thanksgiving day? A campfire-cooked meal, obviously. This year for Thanksgiving my husband and I (that’s new and fun to say) disappeared into the woods and spent the holiday alone with our van and our dog. We cooked up a great Thanksgiving feast based on recipes from Delish that we tweaked to work with our campfire cooktop. It was a bit chaotic, as all van things are, but completely worth it.
On The Menu
Our dinner lineup included holiday roasted vegetables, baked sweet potatoes, seasoned and seared turkey, and a salad. For dessert, a vanlife-friendly no-bake pumpkin cheesecake.
Shockingly, I didn’t forget any ingredients on my day-before-Thanksgiving grocery run despite the absolute mayhem that was happening in the store. What I did forget, however, was the fact that our campsite had no cell service. Meaning I couldn’t actually look at any of the recipes I was planning to follow.
For the most part, this was no big deal. As far as roasted veggies go you can mostly just season and taste-test to your liking. With a generous amount of balsamic vinegar, you really can’t go wrong. Baked potatoes in the campfire are easy as well. Lather them up in butter and salt, double-wrap them in aluminum foil, and sit them down in the hot coals for a while. Luckily I had written down the best turkey seasoning recipe on my grocery list. Since only one of us eats meat, we opted for pre-sliced turkey cold cuts and just seasoned them up and seared them in a frying pan. Expectations were low for the turkey but honestly, it turned out great!
As for our dessert, we waited to indulge until Black Friday. We were pretty excited to try out this recipe and didn’t want to risk it by just guestimating measurements with no recipe. Let me tell you though, it was worth the wait! This pumpkin cheesecake is delicious, and even better if you store it in the freezer instead of the refrigerator as recommended. We chose to double the recipe for the crust and would definitely recommend you do the same.
The Vision vs. The Reality
The plan was to get to our campsite in the early afternoon, start cooking, and have our dinner during sunset. Then we could spend the night sitting around the campfire, eating pumpkin cheesecake, and reflecting on all that we are thankful for this year. The reality is, things rarely go to plan.
As per usual for Nick and I, we were running an hour or so behind schedule. The race against time is real when the sun sets at 5:30 pm. We weren’t really stressing about this part at first. It’s not like we had any epic sunset views to enjoy. But when we realized we had showed up to camp with wet firewood, we started to hustle a bit more. Thankfully Nick was able to nurse the campfire well enough to cook our dinner. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really big enough to give us much light or heat. We sat around the fire while the food was cooking but once our plates were made, we took our dinner inside.
Our Improved Plan for Next Year
Next year, we are going to plan ahead a little more and extend the trip a little bit. We want to get to our campsite on Wednesday night so we can have Thanksgiving brunch! Growing up, my mom always made French toast on Thanksgiving morning and I would watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade with my Grandma. That used to be my favorite part of the whole day, so I want to keep that tradition going. Hopefully, in the future, we can spend the long weekend off-grid instead of having to work on Friday.
As for the dinner, I will use the same recipes for sure, only next time I will screenshot them before losing cell service. I also want to work on the timing of everything so it’s all ready together. This year Nick was snacking on turkey while we waited for the veggies to get done cooking and the potatoes took so long they sort of acted as a dessert.
Even with a few hiccups we truly had such a good time celebrating Thanksgiving with just our little family in the woods. We’re going to make this our new tradition and I’m so excited about it!