Camping Ramen Noodles

If you've never been camping with 5 kids ... then you don't know our pain.  This weekend we only had 4 out of 5 and luckily, we have a camp stove.  This trip, we brought hot dogs to roast, of course and sandwich fixin's to make sure we were prepared.  But we always make camp spaghetti and I am just sick of the idea truthfully.  So this year, I had read a blog someone posted about their own family tradition of making Curry Ramen Noodles when they go camping and how the tradition got started.  I thought:  Ramen!  What a perfectly awesome camping idea!  Plus, it's inexpensive and with 4 kids ... you get the idea. 

I can't in good conscious feed our kids merely noodles, but they argue over which cooked vegetables are edible.  So we opted for raw veggies!  Brownie cut up three bell peppers and put them on a plate with some raw carrots and heirloom cherry tomatoes.  The kids munched on (and nearly finished) those while I concocted the noodles with what we'd brought.

What we brought was very little.  I am allergic to MSG.  The packets in Ramen Noodles with all those salty spices? They get tossed. Knowing how they make me feel, I can't put that into our kids' bodies.  I had brought some vegetable broth leftover from making our Jambalaya with us and a handful of jars from the spice cupboard, knowing the spice packets would be useless to me.  There must be others out there who can't stand those packets, so I will share. At home, I will sometimes use cumin or curry or wherever my intuition leads me, but ... in the spirit of camping I kept it simple.  My skeleton recipe for camping Ramen with no spice packets? Here ya go:

Ingredients:

6 packets Ramen Noodles
Water
Broth (doesn't matter what kind - I have to use specific brands and usually vegetable to avoid MSG)
Garlic Powder
Salt
Pepper
Poultry Seasoning
Chives (dried from our garden)
Dried Basil

Directions:

Boil water and broth, add noodles, add everything else until the taste is just right for you.  You know how to make Ramen! :-)

Once the kids were fed and full, we still had noodles left for us.  I stirred in a little more water, chopped up the rest of the Jerk Chicken from our Jamexican Tacos that I'd put in the cooler on our way out of town, threw it in and warmed the noodles up again.  Yes!  This may be a new favorite. Did I mention we're packing Jerk Chicken with us no matter where we go now form now on?  Yup.

We even had enough noodles leftover to store in the used chicken container to heat up for breakfast!  I will never camp without Ramen (and 1/2 my spice cupboard) again!