Your Best Summer Camp Food Hacks, Snacks, and Treats
Calm yourself, former summer campers: On July 31, Netflix will release Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, the hotly anticipated prequel series to David Wain and Michael Showalter’s cult 2001 film. And as if you weren’t already foaming at the mouth, on Thursday Netflix unveiled a new trailer teasing the show.
Our first reaction: Where’s Camp Firewood’s shell-shocked chef Gene, expertly played by the ever-wacky Christopher Meloni? Anyone who’s ever been to summer camp (and thinks that Wet Hot American Summer hits almost a little too close to home) knows that food is a quintessential part of the summer camp experience. And we mean all of it: the good, the bad, and the I’ll-never-forget-it-for-as-long-as-I-live ugly.
As proof, we asked friends, writers, and Yahoo Food readers to share their most memorable meals from camp. They did not disappoint. Neither did Netflix — if you watch the above trailer all the way through, you’ll get a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flash of Meloni. Yep, he’s mercifully set to reprise his iconic role in First Day of Camp.
Some of the funnier recollections involved camp food hacks, dreamt up by campers at the end of their culinary ropes. There’s apparently a lot you can do with white bread and English muffins, apparently.
Read on for some of our favorite stories. Do any sound familiar to you? Share your own camp food memories in the comments.
Alana Horowitz, third from the right, attended Camp Pocono Ridge in South Sterling, Penn. Photo courtesy of Alana Horowitz
Alana Horowitz, Senior Editor at The Huffington Post
“[Every year,] I got my hands on some contraband Cup of Noodles and would make them using the hot water in my bunk bathroom for a midnight snack. I also made a sort of gross but passable pizza using English muffins, ketchup, and cheese from the salad bar and cooking it in the cafeteria toaster oven. I was an extremely picky and unhealthy eater back then. My main food groups were macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, ice cream sandwiches, and pizza. So basically, if the camp served any remotely normal and non-junk food for dinner, I had to improvise. I think [my English muffin pizza] actually tasted fairly decent. But then again, my metric for taste was very different from what it is now.”
Allison Adato, Editor at People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly Books
“I will never forget the young hippie rabbi at Jewish camp telling us during a moment of quiet reflection in the Friday night service (during which we were seated on half-log pews in the woods): ‘Please use this time to quietly reflect; not to think about whether there will be enough cheese to go around on the broccoli at dinner.’ After that, all I ever thought about during services was the cheese/broccoli ratio, which, if we’re being honest, could have been a little more generous.”
Arielle Feldshon, second from right in the first row, attended Herzl Camp in Webster, Wisc. Photo courtesy of Arielle Feldshon
Arielle Feldshon, Yahoo Reader
“My parents moved me to Minnesota when I was 8, and immediately enrolled me in the Y.M.C.A. camp. I had absolutely no friends. Because my parents are both doctors, my house was relatively ‘healthy’ all the time — camp was the first place I ever had an Oreo! And when the camp counselors passed out Fruit Roll-Ups, I had never seen one before. I didn’t know how to eat them, but I watched all these kids I didn’t know eat theirs and I so desperately wanted to be friends with them that I attempted to eat mine. It was super hard to chew, and took me over 40 minutes to eat the whole thing. I realized years later that I’d ingested an entire sheet of plastic, because I didn’t realize it was attached.”
Toby Shepard, Yahoo Reader
“I went to camp in Maine, and I remember that on special occasions (like the 4th of July or someone’s birthday) they would give out these candy bars called Sky Bars that you can still only really find in New England. We would just hoard them. It’s a chocolate bar with four separate sections, each with its own filling: fudge, caramel, vanilla, and peanut butter. People would trade the little squares so they could get more of their favorite. Whenever they gave out Sky Bars, it was the most exciting thing to ever happen. I think something about the fact that you could only get them at camp made them extra special.”
Photo courtesy of Casey Barber
Casey Barber, Food Writer
In the mid-‘90s, I spent one single glorious summer at Interlochen Arts Camp, where they turn all the art (and music, and theater) nerds loose in the woods of Michigan for six weeks. Though we stayed in cabins and not air-conditioned dorms, we still got access to an actual cafeteria for all our meals instead of being forced to grill all our sustenance over an open flame. (I mean, we were theater geeks, painters, and double bass players! We didn’t get out much.)
The food overall was typical cafeteria food, kind of a pre-introduction to the kind of stuff we’d all be eating a few years at our respective liberal arts colleges— I did a lot of cereal eating that summer — but its one saving grace was that every few days, I’d peer down the snaking dining hall line to see there was mac and cheese on the day’s menu.
And not just mac and cheese — mac and cheese with PEAS. This particular combo was a Casey signature hack at home, so to be able to eat it even when I was eight hours away from my own kitchen was glorious indeed. As a pseudo-vegetarian, I had given up my beloved tuna noodle casserole, but by adding peas to basic mac and cheese, I was able to do a (very) lowbrow approximation of that dinnertime staple — the sweet starchiness of the peas blending with the tangy cheese sauce, sometimes nestling in a pasta shell here and there. Even now, I’ll often throw a few handfuls of frozen peas into my pasta water while boiling up a box of Annie’s Mac. No guilt, all pleasure.
Hannah Sullivan, on the far right, attended the Summer Enrichment Program at the University of Oregon. Photo courtesy of Hannah Sullivan.
Hannah Sullivan, Events and Marketing Manager at Alma Chocolate
“At nerd camp (the Summer Enrichment Program at the University of Oregon) we collectively refused to eat anything that bounced from the college cafeteria, which pretty much necessitated that I eat fro-yo with Oreo crumbles three meals a day for three weeks.”
Jill Danielle Fisher, Social Media Manager at America’s Test Kitchen
“Went to horse camp. Ridiculously tasty cherry pies made with pie filling and Wonder Bread under the fire in a cast iron press.”
Dani Almany, Yahoo Reader
“I have dozens of summer camp food stories. But the first one that comes to mind is making MBBs (a.k.a. “mushy bread balls”). You take a piece of white bread, tear off the crust, and then mush and roll the bread over and over again in your hands until you get a solid pasty ball. Then eat!”
Beth Lipton, Food Writer
“My two partners in crime (identical twins who remain two of my best friends to this day) and I would frequently charm the boys who worked in the dining hall to give us a whole sheet of brownies in-between meals, which we devoured.”
Lauren Bloomberg, top left, attended Camp Pembroke in Pembroke, Mass. Photo courtesy of Lauren Bloomberg
Lauren Bloomberg, Food Writer
“I had a signature taco (at both all-girls Jewish camp and yearbook camp) which contained all of the accoutrements — olives, sour cream, salsa, tomatoes, cheese — but no meat.”
Melissa Robin Lang, Yahoo Reader
“We used to wear overalls every Saturday for ‘dairy explosion’ night” — a special evening of snacks — “so we could shove endless amounts of mini bagels in our giant pockets and sneak them out for late night snacks!”
Rachel Tepper, Yahoo Food Editor
“I went to a Jewish sleep away camp in the Poconos, and the food options weren’t very exciting. Think cold cuts, meatloaf, and fried chicken patties. It was as if the menu was stuck in the 1980s. To spice things up, I made 'doughnuts’: squished-up balls of white bread with grape jelly in the center that I rolled in sugar. They were not good for you.”
Jackie Alpers at the Jewish Center Day Camp in Columbus, Ohio. Photo courtesy of Jackie Alpers.
Jackie Alpers, Food Photographer
“I went to the Jewish Center Day Camp in Columbus, Ohio, from the time I was in pre-school through 4th grade. [Above] is a photo of me dressed as a picnic table. Later, I was a junior counselor during high school. I had my kids grow radishes in our tiny campsite in the middle of the woods. At the end of summer we had a small but exciting harvest.”
Donna Yen, Yahoo Food Assistant Editor
“I went to space camp. We would do hikes at night, watch the stars, and talk about constellations — and about what astronauts ate. The counselors fed us this freeze-dried ice cream that was strawberry-flavored. It would just disintegrate in your mouth when you bit into it. It was good! Also, we also made burgers on top of coffee cans using solar energy. I have no idea how those cooked all the way through, but it was a lot of fun!”
More camp-tastic stories:
Campside Sweets Beyond S'mores
Why You Should Be Grilling in Foil Packets
What’s your summer camp food memory? Share it below!
