Camping- joys & challenges
I don’t know about you all, but I am a huge fan of camping! I love being in the outdoors, especially surrounded by trees, birds chirping, a campfire, and a beautiful lake. We’re actually heading out this morning to one of our favorite camp spots!
That being said, camping for someone with histamine intolerance presents quite a few challenges. First of all, pollen and other things in the environment can increase your histamine load. Campfire smoke can be especially irritating, as well as being in the sun all day. Add on to that insect repellent and sunscreen and you’ve got quite a few things adding to your histamine bucket. Not to mention the difficulty of keeping food frozen or cold enough.
Nevertheless, we still choose to go camping and though Rosie has a few symptoms, she LOVES it! Seriously, she is so happy, it’s like she’s living her best life out in the woods. It probably helps that we go camping with most of her cousins, so she’s having the time of her life playing with everyone every day.
Doing the best you can to keep histamine levels low
Because there are so many outdoor factors that can increase her histamine levels, I do the best I can to keep our food a level 0 histamine the week before and while we’re camping. With any area in life I believe there are good, better, and best practices.
The best practice with food and histamine intolerance is to keep leftovers and meat frozen. But when we’re camping, we don’t have a freezer, so I do the next best thing of keeping the meat as cold as I possibly can. I pack it right next to the ice in the ice chest.
We are fortunate enough to have a small tent trailer with a fridge, so when we get to the campsite I put the meat, nut milk, larabars, and GF baked goods in the fridge, with an extra ice pack next to the meat to keep it as cold as possible. I keep all of the produce and other items in the cooler, because they don’t increase in histamine as quickly.
Best practice with campfire smoke:
We try to park our tent trailer as far as we can from the fire pit, and to keep the windows zipped up as much as we can so that smoke doesn’t get on Rosie’s bed and blankets. We also use our camp stove to cook most of the time and only have one campfire a day, instead of having one at every meal.
Low histamine foods for camping
Daily cooking & eating a low histamine diet can be a challenge, so what do you when you camp? Well, last year we went camping three times, with a week at home between each trip. It was excellent practice for me to figure out what does & doesn’t work, and the easiest way for us to eat low histamine. A huge key to that was prepping ahead of time, which I’ll go into later.
Here are our 4 day camping menus for this week. Because Rosie and I eat slightly different things (aka I like more veggies & meat than she does) I made 2 different menus.
Other meal options we enjoyed last summer were cauliflower alfredo chicken and turkey meatball salad.
Prepping ahead of time
A couple weeks leading up to our camping trip I start to re-stock our freezer. I make sure we have baked goods like pancakes, bread, muffins, and cookies. I also start cooking extra meat at dinner and then freeze the leftovers to use for camping. Here are the specific low histamine things I made for the camping menu above:
Sauces
Snacks
Baked goods
- Bread- gf, df, yeast free, egg free
- Blueberry muffins- gf, df
- Zucchini muffins- gf, df
- Rice flour pancakes- gf, df
- Breadsticks- gf, vegan, yeast free
- Cookies- gf, df, egg free
- Cupcakes- gf, vegan
Meats
Other
- French fries
- Marshmallows– some modifications necessary. This will be our first time trying to roast them over the fire 🙂
Prepping ahead of time takes a bit of time up front, but it is so worth it because it makes camping SO much easier! You can actually do some relaxing instead of cooking the whole time ;). Although to be honest, I really love cooking outside. It’s so fun!
Camp cooking tools & hacks
Products
I’ve been super happy with our Coleman ice chest, it’s kept things cold and the ice mostly frozen on all of our 4 day camping trips.
I also love my Coleman camp stove. Having a camp stove makes it so easy to cook delicious food while camping and limits exposure to camp smoke.
Instead of buying a bag of ice that drips water all over everything as it melts, I like to fill up empty 64 oz juice bottles with water and then I freeze them a few days before the camping trip. They don’t leak and they stay frozen really well! Also when I get back home I leave the water in them and it doubles for cleaning water in the case of an emergency.
Cooking on the fire
My other kids don’t have any food intolerances so they get to roast biscuits and marshmallows over the fire. When Rosie got big enough I didn’t want her to miss out on the fun. That’s when I realized she could roast her pre-cooked pancakes (with help) over the fire! She mostly just warms them, but she is so happy that she gets to join in with her siblings. This year we are going to try roasting pre-cooked breadsticks and we’re excited!
The only other low histamine food we cook on the fire are the tin foil dinners. We always eat that on our first night of camp because then I can assemble it all in my kitchen at home, wrap it up, and cook it over the fire while we set up camp.