Car Camp Kitchen Skillet Breakfast
Potatoes, sausage, and eggs in one cast iron pan on a two-burner stove.
- calories
- 720
- weight
- 11 oz
- cal / oz
- 65
- protein
- 32 g
- serves
- 4, scales
- prep
- 10 min
- cook
- 25 min
- total time
- 35 min
- water
- none
- cost
- $$
Calorie and protein figures are my own estimates, good enough for planning a food bag and not meant as precise nutrition data.
- Breakfast
- Liquid fuel
- Campfire coals
- Grill grate
- Car camping
- Basecamp
- Gluten free
- One pot
- Pre-mix at home
- Needs a cooler
- Basic
Ingredients
| Yukon gold potatoes | 1.5 lb | diced small at home, they cook faster |
|---|---|---|
| Smoked sausage or kielbasa | 12 oz | fully cooked, so it only needs browning |
| Yellow onion | 1 medium | diced at home into a bag |
| Bell pepper | 1 | diced at home |
| Eggs | 6 | cracked into a jar before the trip |
| Cooking oil | 3 tbsp | |
| Smoked paprika, garlic powder, salt, pepper | 2 tsp total | |
| Hot sauce | to taste |
Method
- Heat the oil in a 12-inch cast iron pan over medium. Give it two minutes to come up to temperature or the potatoes will stick.
- Add the potatoes in one layer. Leave them alone for five minutes, then stir. Repeat until the edges are brown, about 15 minutes.
- Push the potatoes to one side. Brown the sausage rounds in the open space, then stir everything together.
- Add the onion and pepper and the spice mix. Cook five more minutes until the onion goes soft.
- Make four wells in the hash and pour the eggs in. Cover with a lid or foil and cook until the whites set, three to five minutes.
- Pull the pan off the heat and hit it with hot sauce.
Car camping means you get a cooler and a real pan, so the constraint is not weight, it is burner count. This is built for one pan and one burner. The order matters more than the recipe: potatoes take three times as long as everything else, so they go in first and everything else joins them as they finish.
Most of the work happens at the kitchen counter. Dicing potatoes on a picnic table with a dull knife and no cutting board is the part of camp breakfast people quit over. Prepped vegetables and pre-cracked eggs turn this into twenty-five minutes of stirring. The sausage is already cooked, so it is there for fat and salt rather than food safety.
Packing
Dice the potatoes, onion, and pepper at home and bag them separately. Potatoes go in water in a sealed container so they do not brown, then drain at camp. Crack the eggs into a wide-mouth jar and keep the jar and sausage in the cooler.
Variations
- Skip the eggs and add a can of drained black beans for a version that does not need a cooler run.
- A handful of shredded cheese over the eggs before you cover the pan melts in the residual heat.
https://lunolife.com/en-ca/blogs/journal/a-guide-to-the-ultimate-car-camping-kitchen