Menu - canoecouple

How do you plan meals for 60 days?

It's taken us years to perfect a menu plan that provides meals which are nutritious, filling and not boring.

While you can get by for a week or two on almost any meal plan; the rigors of an extended outing will require more consideration of caloric intake to prevent the huge calorie deficit that will occur as over 3000 calories are expended on a daily basis.
As well, an adaquate intake of protein is required to insure that muscle mass and tone is maintained. Overlying these needs are the requirements of portability, taste and the quality of the calories to be consumed.

Cost was also a concern for us since one of our goals was to keep expenses in a range that most people could afford while still doing a multi-week trip. While the taste of freeze dried meals has improved a lot over the years and their portability has never been a problem the cost of these meals could be a problem on a longer trip.

A number of years ago we purchased an American Harvest dehydrator with the goal of improving our meal variety and it has worked wonderfully; enabling us to purchase fruits and vegetables in season and to dry them for later use.

While we'd encourage you to make a like investment if you are considering either multi-week trips or a multitude of shorter trips we have found that there are some things that are better purchased at your local bulk food emporium or purchased frozen and then blanched before drying. The former is best exemplifed by trying to dry onions (you'll cry for hours) and the latter by mixed vegetables where the labor entailed in preparation is offset by the reasonable price of larger quantities of the frozen variety.

Fruits dry very well and are nice additions to a hot breakfast cereal or as an after dinner sweet.

Ground meat dries and keeps well if you fry it well (keep it crumbled) with some salt, pepper and minced garlic. Drain off any accumulated juices and dry according to your dryer instructions. We use ours in pasta, sheperds pie, some curries, chili and some soups.

It's pretty difficult to get fresh veggies on any extended trip so we decided to experiment with sprouting at home to see how it works ... well, it worked so well that we devised a sprouting system that we carried with us for the whole 60 days ... and we never had any sprouts go bad.

All you need is a mixture of beans and seeds that will all sprout in five days ... a method to keep them separated into each of the five days and then you need to keep them moist.

Kathy made five small muslin bags with drawstrings and a larger muslin bag to hold them. The large bag tied under the bow seat during the day so we could check to see that it stayed moist ... use potable water for soaking and wetting the beans so that you don't introduce any unwanted bacteria ... and in five days you've got the makings for salad ... the rotation of the bags insures that you've got sprouts ready every day.

We've experimented with various ways of packing our meals and for us the best way seems to be a meal in a zip lock bag. We package all the items that can be cooked together in a zip lock bag. Any items requiring rehydration before cooking or spices that get added during cooking get packaged in a folding sandwich bag - sealed with masking tape - and added to the main bag - which is also sealed with tape and the name of the meal as well as any cooking instructions are also written on the tape. Using this method you'll always know what's in each package as well as how to prepare it.

Use some of your pre-trip time to experiment with quantities and spices ... there's nothing like finding out on day three that you don't like that special mac and cheese ... especially when you know that it's planned at least once a week.

Be sure to include as many nuts and seeds as you can in your hot breakfasts and snacks ... they're loaded with vitamins and those good fats.

Plan a treat on your layover days. We often bake a breakfast cake made from muffin mix with lots of nuts, seeds, raisins and cranberries. It makes a great start to a day around camp and we munch it as we go about our layover day chores.

Another hint ... buy some of those colored mesh bags and designate one of them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Place enough of each meal in them to get you to your next rest day. Then all you gotta do is to remember that the brown bag is breakfast ... or is that magenta and morning?

We use one of our 15 gallon barrels to carry our food ... the menu is taped to the inside of the lid and it gets re-organized on every layover day.

So ... after all that ... here's a link to our menu sheet.