Breakfast Tacos For A One-Night Camping Trip

I have this little cooler, like the kind a construction worker would use to bring lunch to the site where he welds big iron girders together all day. It's sturdy, it's compact, it keeps stuff cool, and I recently discovered that it's perfect for storing breakfast ingredients for a one-night getaway.

A one-night camping trip may sound like it demands a lot of prep work for a relatively small payoff, but it can be just the thing to break the routine of series of stressful work weeks and tide you over until you can fully satisfy your craving for time in the outdoors with a more substantial outing.

Prep work is easy, too. For a recent quick trip I took, I packed little more equipment than a tent, sleep roll, camp chair, stove, pan, and a few utensils, all of which was already organized and waiting to be loaded from the camping area of the garage. It was basically a grab-and-go endeavor.

Food can be one of the biggest logistical headaches for a trip, since you're not just packing the ingredients, you're packing everything you need to keep the ingredients fresh. This is the secret to a successful overnighter: There's no need to make sure milk or whatever stays cold for several days. In fact, you can bring up something simple for dinner with no cooler considerations, as long as you cook it fairly promptly.

For my trip, which I took with two friends, we bought some packages of sausages on our way out of town and roasted the links over an open fire after we set up the tent and relaxed a bit in the shade.

The only things we kept on ice were the few ingredients necessary for the next morning's eggs and tortillas–less of a breakfast burrito and more of a breakfast taco–all of which fit into my little cooler. I'd bet that even these ingredients would have been fine if left out in the cool of the night, but I went the 'better safe than sorry' route, and the cooler kept it all contained anyway.

When it comes to the organization, here's how it all fit: I put an ice pack at the bottom of the cooler, then cut an egg carton down to size to hold six eggs, which was the perfect size for the space with room for a smaller ice pack on the side. I put a few string cheeses on top of the eggs, along with a section cut from a stick of butter and a little baggie of crumbled bacon. I'm really lazy and buy pre-cooked, pre-crumbled bacon pieces, which is actually about the same as raw bacon, cost wise.

That's it. Actually, I put a small bag of crushed ice on top, too, just because, and that was still mostly frozen by the time the sun was up the next morning.

Scrambling eggs is a simple enough task, but I've included a recipe here anyway, since it's so easy to make this meal?maybe easier than you think.

BREAKFAST TACOS

What you need:

Ingredients

• 1 pat of butter
• 6 eggs
• 1 Dozen tortillas, corn
• 3 Sticks of string cheese
• Several handfuls of crumbled bacon
• Hot sauce packets

Tools:

•  camp stove (if desired)
•  small pan
•  spatula

The cooking:
Start a pan heating on the stove or over a fire. Toss in a pat of butter so that it melts but doesn't turn brown. Once the bottom of the pan is covered with melted butter, crack in the eggs and break the yolks with the spatula, then push them around to scramble them. Once they start to solidify, throw in some ripped-up bits of string cheese and keep scrambling. You can also add the bacon pieces now, but I prefer to wait until the end and sprinkle them on top. Remove the pan from the heat. If you're using a stove or have a grill over a fire, heat the tortillas one by one by placing them over the flame for a few seconds on each side. Scoop a handful of eggs and cheese into each freshly hot tortilla, sprinkle on the bacon, and add hot sauce if desired. Consider stashing some spare packets from a fast food restaurant.

Once you're done cooking, give the pan a good scrape with the spatula to get off any stuck egg, but don't worry too much about washing it. You're going home today anyway–sigh–and you can give it a good scrub once you're back in your own kitchen and the routine of daily life.