Sarah recently shared detailed lists for setting up your camp kitchen and your backpacking kitchen. I think we can all agree that one of the most essential items on those lists is the stove. It’s essential for hot coffee in the morning, teas at night, eggs for breakfast, ramen for dinner. Should I go on?

We spent many years backpacking with our homemade beer can stoves (thanks, pop!). When we started car camping more regularly, the mini burner on a gas canister was a great option. Sarah’s a recent convert to the Jetboil system. The nice thing about each of these stoves is that they’re relatively small! They can easily fit in your camp box/bag, ensuring that you never leave home without them (bit of foreshadowing there).

Now that we’re a family of four, we’ve made the leap to a Coleman camp stove. It’s definitely not an option for a backpacking trip, but it’s perfect for car camping, especially with a group. You can use larger pots and pans, have multiple items cooking at once, and you don’t have to worry about balancing a tippy pot, which is clutch with a couple of crazy kids.

Unfortunately, we FORGOT THE STOVE on our last trip. I can’t remember when we realized our mistake. Maybe on the drive? Maybe when setting up the van that first night? Either way, with little hesitation we knew we could rise to the occasion and camp without the stove.

Whenever we’ve mentioned this blunder to people, they’ve all asked or assumed that we would run out and buy another stove. Admittedly it crossed our minds, and that’s because it’s so hard to imagine a weekend without a stove.

But really, it’s not that bad, and here’s how we handled it. The first step was to decide what we could live without and then find alternatives to the items that were absolutely necessary.

The Essentials:

• coffee : we can’t live without it. Sure, there’s the ritual of a warm cup of coffee in the mornings. That’s nice, but for us, caffeine was our main concern. We bought a bottle of free-dried coffee crystals and made Nescafe Frappes all weekend. Knowing this recipe is up there with knowing how to escape a grizzly bear attack or how to cut off your arm in an avalanche. Life or death.

• hot breakfasts : again, nice, but there are options. We bought a variety of yogurts and called it a day. This was particularly a hit with the kids because the sweetened yogurts are an indulgence that they rarely get at home.

• dinners : this is where we had to do a bit more thinking, but were still able to make it work. Almost all campsites that we visit have a removable grill that fits over the fire ring. We grilled hotdogs one night and chicken thighs another. With the chicken we heated up a can of baked beans, and together that was one of those dinners that tastes gourmet because you’re eating it in the woods have a long day outside. Other nights we made tasty picnic platters with hummus, salami, cheese, etc.

We often pack no-cook lunch options, so that was always an easy meal. The boys didn’t get their regular hot chocolates for breakfast, but they were just as happy with cold chocolate milks.

At the end of the trip, it was fun to have this little snafu success under our belt. On a personal note, it was nice to work through this situation in front of the boys, giving us a real-life “problem” to solve together.

And now we’ll always travel with a jar of instant coffee in our camp bag.