Eating in the Rockies: Part 3
Posted by Stephanie Simpson on
This post is part of a series! Read the other two installments of Eating in the Rockies here:
Eating in the Rockies: Part 1 (Introduction)
Eating in the Rockies: Part 2 (Essential Cooking Gear)
In last week’s installment of Eating in the Rockies, I shared with you the contents of our camp kitchen – what essentials and little luxuries we were happy to have toted around mountain campgrounds.
Now that we’ve laid the groundwork for good eating, we can (finally!) get to the food. In this week’s post – the last of this little series – I’ll share our strategy for choosing ingredients that kept us well-fed and away from grocery stores for seven days, without requiring that we pack the entire contents of my pantry or rely on canned chili and hot dogs.
I’ll also share our favourite recipes from the week, plus a few handy tips that saved us from soggy sandwiches and other mealtime tribulations. Ready? Let’s get to it!
In general, we tried to bring ingredients that were:
- Relatively hardy. Choosing ingredients that will stand up to a week in a cooler means you won’t have to constantly design your dinner menu around stuff that’s about to spoil. Cabbage was great, spinach not so much.
- Multipurpose. When you’re away from a grocery store for a week, it’s helpful to have ingredients on hand that work in multiple kinds of dishes. For example, things like crushed tomatoes, chickpeas and thai basil will come in handy whether you’re having pasta or a curry.
- Staples, with variety. We opted to bring a few kinds of starches (rice, pasta, potatoes and tortillas) and proteins (canned chickpeas and beans, dried red lentils, eggs). It’s more work than packing giant quantities of a single type of starch or protein, but when your options are already limited by what you’ve stashed in your car, it’s worth the extra bit of effort to give yourself some variety.
When camping, my general strategy is to keep the cooking mess to a minimum in the morning, so that we don’t start our day off doing a giant pile of dishes. At the same time, part of the idea behind going camping was to go on vacation and break from the normal routine, so we snuck a few nicer morning meals in there too. Here’s what worked well:
- Emergency cereal: Most mornings, we ate muesli with fresh fruit, but when the muesli ran out, we topped a box of crunchy cereal brought along for snacking with a handful of nut-and-dried-fruit trail mix. Heartier than cereal alone, and tasty too!
- Pancakes: Before we left home, I tossed all of the dry ingredients from this recipe into a large reusable container. At the campsite, I added to the container the wet ingredients (melting the required butter in the same frying pan I’d be cooking the pancakes in). We topped ours with chocolate chips and bananas that we warmed up in tinfoil over a morning campfire.
- Scrambled eggs: We added a bit of chopped cheddar (no grater on hand) to the frying pan while the eggs were cooking and served the finished eggs with sliced tomatoes and store-bought tortillas warmed in a dry frying pan. This was especially nice on chilly mornings!
Most of our lunches were eaten on the go – either on a hike, or at a roadside pullout as we made our way from one destination to the next – so convenience was key. And so: Sandwiches. We prepped our fillings in the morning and kept them in a container separate from our bread/tortillas, then assembled everything at lunch time. Sogginess, averted!
While I’d be happy roasting veggie dogs on a stick over a campfire, my travelling companion takes great pride in making a good meal while camping, so I had no choice but to eat well. These were some of our favourite dinners:
- This lentil recipe, tomato paste omitted (didn’t bring any) and fresh tomatoes swapped with whatever veggies needed using up. We served ours with rice.
- A simple, flavourful coconut green curry, made as follows: 1) Heat a big spoonful of prepared green curry paste in a pot with a bit of oil for 30 seconds; 2) Add 1 can of drained chickpeas and 1 can of coconut milk, along with a big handful of fresh vegetables (we used sliced purple cabbage, spinach and diced zucchini); 3) Simmer until the veggies are tender, salting it along the way; 4) Serve atop hot rice and sprinkling with a big handful of thai basil. Serves 2-3.
- Speedy pasta with spicy tomato sauce, made as follows: 1) Cook capellini (angel hair) pasta in salted boiling water until nearly done – it takes only 2-3 minutes!; 2) Pour off the cooking water, then toss into the pasta some crushed tomatoes, hot chilies, salt, a bit of red wine (if you’re already drinking it) and a can of chickpeas, drained – quantities will depend on how many servings you’re after; 3) Heat for a couple minutes, until the sauce is hot and the pasta is cooked; 4) We served ours with some of the leftover thai basil, but it would also be tasty with some crumbled feta or grated hard cheese, or a bit of extra virgin olive oil, if you’ve brought things like that on your trip!
- Pseudo chana masala, made with the extra crushed tomatoes from the pasta and the same spice mix we used to make the lentils (we premixed the spices at home and brought along enough for a couple meals), plus some cayenne from one of these handy gadgets.
- We brought bagged tea and a little container of homemade cocoa mix (just cocoa powder and sugar, essentially) for chilly nights and mornings.
- We pre-washed all of our fruits and veggies before leaving home (except for tricky stuff, like cabbage). It’s a little time consuming, but it makes it a whole lot easier to snack/cook at a moment’s notice and lets you save precious drinking water should you find yourself without other sources of potable water.
- We found it worked well to chill our cooler with consumable icepacks, like frozen cartons of milk and bottles of water. It saved precious cooler space, and let us take ice-cold water on long day hikes. Just over halfway through our trip, we refilled the cooler with a block of ice, which lasted us until we got home (admittedly some of our campgrounds still had snow on the ground, so it wasn’t too difficult to keep food cool).
- There are few disappointments greater than getting a nice fire going and being unable to crack into your corked bottle of wine. When you’re camping, choose screwtop!
This post is part of a series! Read the other two installments of Eating in the Rockies here:
Eating in the Rockies: Part 1 (Introduction)
Eating in the Rockies: Part 2 (Essential Cooking Gear)
Breana –
steph@foodhappy –