Healthy, hearty and delicious, what more could you ask for in a camping meal? I can’t eat this meal slowly at home or on the trail – which makes it the best kind of fast food.
This recipe will feed 4 hungry campers.
Ingredients
1-2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic cut into small pieces
28 oz can of diced tomatoes
1/2 tsp dried basil or Italian spice
1/4 tsp fresh ground pepper
Salt to taste
1 can chickpeas drained (rinsed if you are at home)
300-400 g of any type of pasta – we have used macaroni, small shell and tubetti (at home we use Casarecce)
Parmesan cheese for sprinkling on top
In Camp
Cook the pasta. Pasta will continue to cook in hot water, so you can bring it to a boil and set it aside. When you are ready to use it, test it to see if it needs to be returned to the heat. Drain the pasta into the fire-pit.
Feel free to check out our boiling lake water post for our pasta story.
Fry up the onion and garlic until softened. Add tomatoes and spices and simmer for about 15-20 minutes, stir often. Add chickpeas and cook until they are heated. Add the pasta and stir. Each person can add their own Parmesan.
Salt and Pepper
We always take our salt and pepper mills on our camping trips. They don’t take up much space and they are very light to pack.
We camp with people who loved our mills and went out to buy their own. On their first night in camp they couldn’t get any pepper to come out of their new pepper mill no matter how hard they worked the grinder. What we discovered was the pepper in their mill was actually just a picture of pepper, their mill was empty. They have yet to live this down.
Dehydrating or Going Can-less
If you are taking this meal on a trip where cans are not allowed, or you want to reduce the weight in your food barrel, you may want to make this entire meal at home and dehydrate. If you do, cut the onion and garlic into very small pieces and slightly mash the chickpeas.
You could also just dehydrate the sauce.
We had this great idea once, why not take dry chickpeas and place them in a Nalgene bottle of water in the morning and by dinner they would be ready to boil up. Great in theory, but as we paddled into our site late one afternoon, it dawned on us, we totally forgot to soak the chickpeas. We ended up eating Chickpea Pasta without the chickpeas. Very Boring!