There are plenty of things you can live without when you’re on tour, but food is not one of them. And, with our trip to Cape York just around the corner, we have had food on our minds for months.
Cape York is not as remote as it once may have been – thousands of people live in the area and travel through every year. Supplies aren’t too bad but they are still limited and costly as everything has to be trucked in.
We will be spending 28 days in the Cape, and our plan is to take food for 20 days and buy local supplies and eat at roadhouses for the remaining days. This way we can stick to our budget with good healthy food while still supporting the local economy.
We have a fridge in Big Red and a freezer in the camper trailer and will load up the freezer with some pre-cooked meals and meat portions, all vacuum packed so they will last the distance. Both the car and the trailer will have a battery being charged by the car while we’re in motion and we’ve got solar backup when we stop for longer periods.
I (Jon) have spent some time working out a meal plan for the twenty meals I plan to take. We will keep a list so we know what we have left and don’t have to rummage around in the freezer too much, which is obviously a waste of power.
Below is my very basic meal plan; I will cook off large batches of the stewy stuff and freeze them in boxes in a home freezer then, when frozen, seal each family-sized portion in a vacuum bag – this way they take up minimum space and stack nicely like bricks in the freezer. I will also freeze our meat portions in square blocks and vacuum seal for the same reason.
All these are homemade, maximising on hidden vegetables to get some goodness into the kids. Around a litre will do our family of four per meal when served with pasta or rice.
4 x Spaghetti Bolognaise
4 x Bean Stew
4 x Chilli Con Carne
The following are frozen as portions of 750g, which is good for a meal for our family and can be made into something interesting or just eaten with veges, rice or bread depending on what supplies we can get on the way.
2 x steak
1 x pork
2 x chicken
2 x lamb
1 x silverside
For lunches we will use a selection of corn thins, Vitaweets, rice crackers, flat breads and wraps. All these can be served with cheese, tuna mayo, Vegemite, home-made humus etc. Simple, but will do the job.
Breakfasts are a bit harder as my family loves eggs. We will buy these on the way and serve with bread, hash browns, veges and whatever we can source. Otherwise we will also have porridge, cereal, Weetbix or pancakes – all of which are mostly dry ingredients and pack well.
Lastly and possibly most importantly for long drives with two young kids and a wife who is always hungry, is snacks. You can spend a fortune if you have to buy snacks from busy town servos let alone in the middle of nowhere! So we will take a small supply of stuff like dried fruit, popcorn, muesli bars, sesame snacks, biscuits, nuts, trail mix, and so on, and see how we go.
One thing we do have to be mindful of is how much we’re carrying – two full fridge/freezers plus batteries can take up a heap of space and take a chunk out of your weight allowance.
As you can see just the twenty evening meals in the freezer alone weigh more than 20kg, and when you add the rest it can add up really quickly.
Would it be better to just accept the higher cost on products you may not have chosen before rather than pay the extra petrol money dragging it around, I am not sure? We’ll be able to tell you in a couple of months’ time!
This is our plan, bu plans are made for changing and I would be interested to know your ideas on the subject of what food to take to Cape York.
Have you packed food for a long-haul trip? How did you do it? What works and what doesn’t?
On long trips now, we pack away enough food for a big meal every day (usually dinner) and also breakfasts (usually porridge in cold climate but always breakfasts that do not require a fry-pan). When we are settled for a while in a location, the griddle pan comes out for the “full English” and the like.
Like you, we love our eggs and have had trouble getting suitable containers. Because we like our scrambled eggs, I have utilised the Sunny Queen Eggs scrambled egg mix that we portion up before freezing. It makes a great french toast or “bread and butter pudding” base too..
We often freeze a joint of meat for roasting, or corned meat that can cook in the Dream Pot which gives us protein for a couple of main meals and also for lunch sandwiches.
Our biggest advance is cooking meals prior to departure and dehydrating them to reduce weight and to also give some longevity to make sure we have some “emergency rations” that will get us by if stranded for a period of time. We still keep these dehydrated meals in the fridge as my dehydration techniques are not as good as the freeze dried product.
There are only two of us, so menu planning is easier, but we always make sure we have food available for the rest stops during the day.
We do like to contribute to the economy of the remote communities, but like to have some backup food if the locally supplied product is a bit iffy.
Our 60l Trailblaza allows us to keep protein and prepared meals frozen for a 21 day trip. (The last 7 days we go to fridge mode as we consume the perishables). I have kept a couple of kilo bags of dehydrated minced beef in the van for emergencies and while they are great in a mince wet dish, they are not like using fresh. I probably wouldn’t do that again.
Awesome tips here Bob, thank you! We haven’t looked seriously into dehydrating yet but it sounds pretty good. Let us know once you perfect your technique! It was great having a freezer full of prepared meals for those night when we got set up late or were on the move. We didn’t take our Dreampot because we were a bit short of space, but it is great too. Have you ever tried making porridge the night before in the Dreampot? I liked it, but Jon thought it was the most disgusting thing ever 🙂
We would initially boil up half of the large container to give a heat sink overnight, and prepare (in the small pot), the porridge with sultanas/raisins and the equivalent amount of water that we would need .
The porridge mix will be bought to the boil and then put immediately into the Dream Pot over the top of the hot water (in separate pots of course).
In the morning, we would have warm porridge, complete with plumped up sultanas, and in the lower pot, a quantity of warm water which would be suitable for washing up with a little bit of a heat touchup on the stove.
The trick is working out the oats/fluid mix as nothing evaporates.