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?