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Growing up in Olivebridge with parents who owned a pizza and barbecue restaurant on the banks of the Ashokan Reservoir, Lee Kalpakis knew two things and she knew them well: cooking and the woods of the Hudson Valley. But it wasn’t until she gave up a hectic career and life in New York City to hunker down in a vintage Fleetwood Power RV, did she realize how much both loves fed and fueled her soul.
Kalpakis had been “going really hard,” as she puts it, juggling freelance gigs as a food writer and stylist, recipe developer, and private chef, when Covid hit. Already enjoying frequent weekends back home with her partner Sean, a carpenter, and their poodle Mac, the couple acted fast and hatched a plan to buy land in the Catskills and build a house on it with their own hands—even though she had “zero skills” in carpentry.
“We had no money, no jobs because of lockdown, and we were not planning to buy a house,” she explains. “But we pooled our funds and bought five acres in the thick, raw woods.” Needing a place to live while constructing their home, they decided an RV parked on their property would be the right way to go. “We found a 1976 retro camper in Roxbury on Facebook for $1,500; it had wood paneling and mice in it at some point.”
Kalpakis and her handy partner gutted the camper, renovated it, and “made it beautiful inside.” She acknowledges it was “an adjustment going from a 700-square-foot loft in Brooklyn to a 22-foot-long camper, but there we were living in it,” while learning to subsist on food cooked in a tiny kitchen space and, most significantly, in the embrace of nature’s silent serenity.
“I think the first meal I made over the campfire was pasta with sausage, peppers, and acorn squash,” Kalpakis recalls. “It was messy,” but it’s how her “deep love for cooking outside” began. “Every night, I couldn’t wait to wake up and try it again.”
During construction and cooking breaks, she foraged for ramps and golden oyster mushrooms while dreaming up recipes for simple dishes with few ingredients—a cooler and a mini fridge were the only means of food storage out there in the woods. Her campfire shrimp with ramp butter calls for just four ingredients (plus cooking oil and salt and pepper). “I like meals that come together quickly and aren’t complicated, allowing you to slow down a little.”
When she tried open-fire pork ribs with five spices, she eased into a pace she never expected to relish so much. “There’s something really special about cooking low and slow on a campfire,” she says. “You’re making more than a meal; you’re making a memory.”
On the back burner, Kalpakis always dreamed of creating a cookbook, but figured it would come later in life. They say when a pandemic gives you lemons…
Out There. A Camper Cookbook (published in 2024, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble), features nearly 80 recipes for easy, satisfying meals—from breakfast to dessert—that can be cooked over a fire, on a grill, or in the oven, plus must-have tools of the trade, tips for leaning into a slower way of life in the great outdoors, and vibrant pictures of Kalpakis in action—the camper and Mother Nature as a compelling backdrop. The book even includes cocktail recipes suited to outdoor preparation.
After two years savoring a life lived mostly outside, Kalpakis and her partner are now settled in the home they built entirely on their own (except for the concrete foundation poured by a friend). “It’s 600-square-feet with one big, open space, but coming from the camper, it’s palatial!” She feels fortunate to share the property with the animals that call her beloved Hudson Valley home—coyote, black bears, barred owls, and a 250-pound pig (“hairy with tusks!”) that grazes on her highbush blueberries—while the camper remains on-site, awaiting its next inhabitants.
Kalpakis has gone back to work and is currently the culinary director at Camp Kingston, but “every chance I get, I’m cooking over a campfire,” she says. “It’s never not going to be a part of my life.” Nor will small-space living, as she and her partner talk about renovating an Astro van and slowly driving it around the country cooking up super-simple open-fire recipes intended to nourish both body and soul.
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