Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner at the Campsite

On this episode of “What’s Cookin?” we show you how we cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner at the campsite! From fried turkey, and homemade mashed potatoes to corn and stuffing, we had an amazing meal.  And it was surprisingly easy! Watch the video and maybe you will want to opt outside and try cooking Thanksgiving dinner for your family at the campsite!

The key to making a turkey at the campsite the easy way, is to fry a turkey! Frying a turkey is easy and safe, provided you get a bird that isn’t too big for your fryer, you don’t overfill the fryer with oil, and most importantly, the bird is completely thawed and dry before you put it in the fryer!

The Turkey Fryer

Here is the fryer we use! This fryer is capable of handling an 18lb. bird, but we typically don’t cook anything near that size. The bird we cooked this year was 12lb. That’s the perfect size for our family of 4. Remember if you have lot’s of left overs at the campsite, you will need containers and cooler space for all of it!

The larger the bird the less oil you need.  It is very important not to fill the fryer with oil past the capacity line on the pot or to where oil will overflow once the bird is dropped in.  Turkey cooks at 325 degrees F at 3.5 minutes per pound.

Champ Chef Camp Stove

The next piece of equipment we use all the time at the campsite and one I wouldn’t want to make this dinner without, is our 2 burner camp stove by Camp Chef!

This is a free standing stove with 2 large burners that runs on a 20lb propane tank.  This stove has multiple accessories like a grill box, reversible grill/griddle as well as carry bags for the stove, griddle and more! In this video we use it to boil the water for our mashed potatoes.

Coleman Camp Stove

For the corn and stuffing, we used our smallest camp stove, our Coleman 2 burner propane stove! I love these table top stoves and for our short camping trips, sometimes this is the only stove we take! These can either be run off 1lb. propane bottles or we use an adapter hose to run it off a 20lb propane tank. Also check out the nesting cookware we use by Faberware!

There are lots of other little things that make cooking this meal at the campsite pretty easy! As tent campers, we don’t have the luxury of bringing a whole kitchen with us, but we do bring as much as we can.  To save space we use these kinds of strainers and cutting mats! They really save space and are easy to use! To run as much as we can off our 20lb. propane tank, we use a propane  splitter, adapter hoses, extension hoses, and adapters depending on what we are cooking.