Travel Food

Last week we went to Hanging Rock State park to have a family vacation in a rustic cabin. It was basically like glamping! We had an old, 1960's cabin with a bathroom and a kitchen. It had 6 twin beds with summer camp style foam mattresses and it was kitschy, delightful and so, so cheap. No wifi. No television. Horrible 4G coverage. :)

One of the challenges of this trip  (because I don't consider the above list challenging when we have a lake, hiking out the wazoo, a fire pit, boat rentals, fishing, a dozen waterfalls, a screened porch and library books) was what to eat while we were there. The park has a concession stand but it's a few twisty mountain roads away from any restaurants and the park gate closes at 9 so it's not very convenient for dining out. The kitchen is stocked and adequate for making eggs and boiling water but I knew I didn't want to truck in a bunch of ingredients and spend a prime porch sitting time cutting veggies with dull knives on glass cutting boards. (This is B's absolute biggest vacation kitchen pet peeve.)

I used to pre-chop things and travel with our crockpot but now that I've left a crock at a beach house and a lid somewhere in the mountains I've decided that this technique isn't a good fit for me. This is why we can't have okay things.

So I planned ahead! Sunday before our trip, and before our kitchen was to' up from the flo' up for two days, I made and froze some food to bring with us.

I made this gumbo. I also added two teaspoons of Tony Chachere's to the gumbo and used spicy andouille sausage. Some like it hot. We packed a travel container of dried rice that we boiled while the gumbo was warming up.

I made these enchiladas, with corn tortillas and fat free jalapeno refried beans.

I brought spaghetti sauce and gluten free spaghetti which we had with a bagged salad and artisan bread. 

I used some of our eggs from chicken sitting to make a yellow cake with the best chocolate icing ever.

And we packed instant grits, eggs, Spam, just-add-water-pancake mix and Via coffee for breakfasts.

We still ended up venturing out into the world for provisions and eating out but these meals and the leftovers made our low stress trip even smoother. Since it was all frozen I didn't even feel weird about driving it around all day. (I'm notoriously picky about food safety.)