Hi everyone, I’m Kate Dunbar, the creator of the Campground Gourmet website and cookbook, here for “Rollin’ On TV.”

Today, I’m camping in beautiful Texas, and I thought I’d come to you and show to you some tools that I would never leave home without. And hopefully, they might make it on your list too, so let’s get right to it.

The first one is a knife sharpener. Of all the things that we always forget whenever we’re camping, it’s to sharpen our knives. They get dull, they get banged up in a drawer, and they need to be sharpened. So this, this is a knife steel. This is also a knife sharpener, so either/or. This is what you want to carry with you so you can keep your knives perfectly sharp for slicing through meat and vegetables or fish. My knives are right over here, back behind me on the magnetic strip behind my stove. That’s where they stay, I know they’re there. After I finish washing them up, I sharpen them really quick, and then pop them right back up on there so they’re ready to roll for the next use.

Mixing bowls. Now, I have a set that are all the same size. I have four of these and I love them. One, they’re multi-purpose. These also are my family’s popcorn bowls. But I love them because I can have sliced vegetables, I can have meat in here,
I can have all the ingredients that I need to cook. If it falls on the ground, it’s not gonna dent, it’s not gonna break, it’s not gonna chip. They’re fantastic, I can fill a bunch of things with it. And I can cover it up and keep it in my fridge, or keep it in my ice chest. So, a good set of metal bowls is essential.

Next to those essential bowls is something that I think a lot of people forget or they misplace, and it always seems to be the cover to any of their bowls. I don’t know about you, but I lose mine all the time. That’s why I found these. These are silicone lids, and all you do is just hold it on one side. Going to do this one-handed, so you never know how that’s gonna go. And you just stretch it right over the bowl, and you just go around just like this, just pulling it right around the bowl. And they’re great because they stretch to all sizes. And look, totally covers it, you could have a bunch of berries in here, you could have some cut vegetables. You could even have stew meat in here before you do a dutch oven meal. These are fantastic. The silicone lids, they’ll save you. The next thing I always have is a squeeze bottle, but a squeeze bottle with a cap on top that locks in really tight. I keep oil in here.

Whenever I’m using my griddle or my cast iron pan, instead of pouring out a large amount of oil, I’m able to squeeze on just a tiny little bit onto my griddle top, into my cast iron pan, everything. So, a squeeze bottle with a good locking lid. And the final one, this is something that I think is absolutely essential, and it’s a really good set of measuring cups. We all need to measure out ingredients, whether it’s pancake mix, or milk, or oil, or salad dressing, or something like that.

OXO puts out a fantastic product. These are the cylinders, and there’s measurements on the side, and you can easily read it when you’re pouring into the container. This is their one cup, then they have a half cup, quarter cup. And then they go into all the teaspoons and tablespoons, but look at that, they stack perfectly. This is exactly what you want, and it doesn’t take up that much space. It fits right in one of our drawers here. And if you really want a good size measuring cup, they have those too. And even better, you can read the measurement right on the inside. So, as you have this on your counter, you can just look inside and you can pour your liquid into it, and you won’t worry about adding too much or too little because you can see the exact measurement on there.

So, those are five tools that I like to use when I’m here camping. And I’m going to go get to cooking. I’ve got to go prep some vegetables and put them in those metal bowls, and get them outside and get them on the grill.

So again, I’m Kate Dunbar, The Campground Gourmet, for “Rollin’ On TV.” I’ll see you soon, bye.