Cooking out of doors is one of the challenges of camping. In my experience, the best thing to do is go simple. Hot dogs on a stick are about as easy as it gets and the girls love them. Top it off with toasted marshmallows stuck between two graham crackers with a portion of a Hersey bar (s'mores of course) and you've got it made. The only trouble with this menu is that it really only works once, maybe twice, in a camping trip. So unless you've planned to camp for just one day and night, you might have to get a bit more creative.

My second favorite meal is called friendship soup. All it takes is hamburger meat and a can of soup (condensed) per person. Before you go, instruct everyone to bring one can of soup with the caveat that it cannot be cream soup. At camp, brown the meat, toss in the soup, add water and voila--friendship soup. It's different every time and it requires that everyone participate.

If you actually want to stretch the cooking into an activity, you can always add onions (brown them with the hamburger), and for some extra nutrition you can add veggies. If you want the soup to simmer, add fresh veggies, or if you want to eat and get on with knots, you can throw in frozen bags of vegetables. Potatoes are always a nice addition. For the gourmets, there is always the option to bring and add any variety of spices.

Friendship soup was always a big favorite when I was a girl Girl Scout because of the "surprise" element. In fact, I have some vague recollection of calling it Surprise Soup. The point is though, that you can't predict what soups people will bring and you have no idea how the whole pot will end up. Sometimes it's more like chicken noodle soup and other times it's more like vegetable beef.

This meal was generally followed up by banana boats for dessert. I have no idea why we always paired them, but we did, so in my world banana boats always follow friendship soup the same way that s'mores follow hot dogs.

Banana boats are a do-it-yourself dessert. Each boat requires one banana, a handful of mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, and hot coals. You cook the first three ingredients on the latter. To make the banana boat, slice open a hatch in the top of the banana and scoop out some of the banana. Eat the extra banana. Fill the resulting void with marshmallows and chocolate chips and then replace the banana peel hatch and wrap the filled banana in tin foil. Place the tin foil in the coals until the banana is soft and the marshmallows and chocolate chips are melted.

Eating this treat requires a spoon. Now that I think about it, maybe we always paired friendship soup with banana boats so that we only had to use one utensil to eat. The quicker we washed up, afterall, the quicker we got back to knot tying!