Sunday, June 17, 2007

Camping menu

We went camping from Monday, June 4 to Friday, June 8. That's four nights of vegan food, plus 4 breakfasts and lunches. We camped in a tent this time, so we had to keep our cooler stocked with ice, but it turned out pretty well.

For lunches, I brought tofurkey lunch meats, peanut butter, and tortillas for the kids. We had a lot of fruit all around, and some baby carrots, too. For myself, I made a curried chickpea salad to replace my old favorite of curried chicken salad. It was good, but I added a bit too much curry powder. Next time I know how to make it better. We also took some Lara bars--oh my goodness, these are so good! Cashew cookie is my favorite, and they have only two ingredients, cashews and dates. Convenience food made out of real food and nothing else? Heaven. The kids loved the cherry pie and apple pie flavors. Checking out the website, I see that they have even more flavors that I didn't know about. I am definitely going to have to hunt down a Key Lime Pie bar to try. Oooo, and ginger snap. And cinnamon roll. (I'd link you directly to these flavors so that you can easily see the wonderfulness here, but they have one of those websites that I hate, where you click around and it puts up content, but the page address never changes. I don't get their blog, either. The description makes it sound like if you click on their link to launch their blog, you will be generating the content--"A new window will appear and you will be bloggin' in no time at all!"--but it seems that they do in fact write the blog themselves. Maybe you can email them stuff to post, or maybe they don't get that blogging means writing a blog, not any generic activity associated with blogs, like reading them. Odd for a group of people writing a website.)

For breakfasts, it was mostly whole wheat mini-bagels and Tofutti Better than Cream Cheese. I know, that isn't terribly healthy, but the kids love the stuff, and it is vegan. We also ate a lot of fruit, and I brought some cereal and rice milk.

Dinner menus:

Monday: Pizza! I made the Basil-Tofu Ricotta from Vegan with a Vengeance before we left, and brought along a premade whole grain crust and some pizza sauce from Trader Joe's. When we got there, I assembled the pizza and wrapped it in aluminum foil and cooked it over the fire. It turned out pretty well, but we are thinking about bringing charcoal next time to get a hotter cooking fire. We had salad on the side with this. Well, the kids didn't, but I shared with my friend.

Tuesday: Tofurky Italian sausages on whole wheat buns with a little cream cheese, new potates and asparagus roasted in a foil packet with olive oil, thyme and parsley

Wednesday: Beanie Weenies, recipe from my McDougall Quick and Easy cookbook, leftover asparagus and potatoes, fruit

Thursday: Falafel, tahini sauce that I made before we left, roasted garlic hummus, all wrapped in whole wheat tortillas and served with grape tomatoes on the side, salad, fruit

The kids weren't as thrilled with falafel night as they were with all the other choices (especially the beanie weenies, when they eagerly sat at the table and ate seconds), but they were fairly content with the choices. As always, I wish they would eat more vegetables, but they did eat a LOT of fruit. One day for lunch, we did whole wheat tortillas spread with peanut butter and wrapped around bananas, which is one of their favorites. Overall, I'd say this longer vegan camping trip was a success. The key was planning ahead, and making the basil-tofu ricotta and the tahini sauce at home before we left. That way I had everything I needed and didn't need to spend a lot time sitting at a picnic table getting the meals ready to be cooked.

If anyone has any other great ideas for vegan meals while camping, please let me know--we will be doing this again!

2 comments:

It's OK to be WEIRD! said...

We're going camping for over 2 weeks, and I've been trying to be creative with our menus. We'll be doing a lot of travelling (travel, camp, travel some more, camp for a few days, etc.) all the way to Alaska, so that makes a bit more of a challenge. ALSO the fact that my daughter is allergic to peanuts and I have a wheat intolerance makes things pretty tricky. This is the first time we've camped like this since I have had to eliminate wheat (and most dairy), so I'm having to rethink camp food. Thanks for the ideas here. They helped me think outside the box.

Anonymous said...

Very great camping blog. Thank you for sharing.