Only a couple of hours away from Chicago, we spent the weekend over at Kettle Moraine State Forest. There is A LOT to do here…swimming, archery, hiking, camping, volleyball, etc. We dedicated the bulk of our time to stepping up our in-camp cooking, hiking, and relaxing.
For a quick view of everything, checkout the youtube vid!
Food
I think one of the best things about camping is the outdoor cooking; car-camping allows for a lot more flexibility compared to backpacking! Being able to cook something in the middle of the forest comes with a sense of pride, adventure, and challenge. It could be ANYTHING and it will always taste better in the outdoors!
Pizza
We wanted to do something quick the first night (again, since we got there a bit late), so we decided to make some pizza. The ingredients were all pretty simple: the crust, pepperoni, and sauce were all from target (small amounts) and then we just picked up a banana pepper from the local grocery store.
Classic Breakfast
For breakfast, we decided to ALSO keep it simple, yet, delicious. Pancakes, crispy bacon, and some eggs! This might seem like your typical every day breakfast… but it wasn’t. Like I mentioned, something about not just being in the outdoors, but also cooking outdoors makes everything much more fulfilling.
Of course, we also had some coffee and tea.
Crunchwrap Supreme
This. This right here was the meal to take home the gold (and of course my girlfriend, the real chef in all this…). This is the dish that was new to us to make outdoors and one we thought about on how to make it easy, yet packed with flavor and even better than the Taco Bell one (which is already pretty delicious). We picked up a tomato, shredded lettuce, a small package of Frito nacho cheese, some shredded pepper jack cheese, ground beef, medium size tortillas, taco bell seasoning, and of course, the Diablo hot sauce packets.
This one really blew our minds. We will definitely be adding this meal to our outdoor-cooking tool box.
Hiking
On day 2 of our stay, we decided to hike a nearby trail that was connected to the famous National Ice Age Trail!
We took a wrong turn…pretty much at the start and ended up hiking about 7 miles. When really, we wanted to hike between 3 – 5 miles.
The trail was pretty great though. Lots of up and downs, so it does get tough at times…plus, it was pretty humid. But if you embrace the sweat, drink plenty of water, and enjoy the views, it’s a good time.
There were TONS of different kinds of mushrooms.
