Food for the Road

Going on a road trip is pretty exciting, but the idea of eating junk food or even super market food while the garden is full of all that lovingly grown produce is almost enough to make me change my mind and stay at home. The challenge then was how to get as much of the garden into the van and as possible!

In the weeks leading up to our big “up north “ adventure we put as much time as we could into drying, fermenting and storing foods so that we could pack them for the trip.

The drier was going pretty flat out with apples and pears, but as I got braver I dried pesto, pumpkin leather, broccoli and zucchini.

The carrots, beetroots and brassicas made delicious kimchi and we had plenty of jars of pasata and dried tomatoes from our autumn harvest.

Pumpkins, potatoes, sweet potatoes and garlic went into a hessian bag to store, and I left it to the last minute to uproot lettuce and other fresh greens, wrap their roots in newspaper and stash them in the camp fridge along with some frozen home grown beef.

Fresh apples, mandarines, lemons, feijoas and sapotes filled up a box and our neighbour gave us some avocados which slowly ripened over the first week.

I went to the market and bought some good local pecans, macadamia nuts and eggs (our girls were off the lay) and we had plenty of dried herbs from home.

The rest of our food consisted of bulk staples like rice,  chickpeas, sunflower seeds and olive oil.

Time to hit the road!

The first week we really wanted to eat all of our fresh food, eating fruit for breakfast as we drove and stopping to make  great salads for lunch, in the evenings we had fresh greens and home grown amazing beef.

Avocados slowly ripened over the first couple of weeks and went well with home made pesto (fresh pesto lasted a week in the camp fridge , dried pesto lasted the rest of the trip).

By the end of the first week we were out of fresh greens but the carrots, beetroot, choko were lasting well, so as our fridge emptied of greens we filled it up with root crops. Just as I started to wonder if we were going to have to buy supermarket greens we had a lovely catch up with Judith from Earth Garden magazine who gave us a big bunch of rocket and we were happy again.

By now we had hit the coast and enjoyed some fishing. There’s nothing quite like fresh fish with rice and kimchi. We also enjoyed scaring salt from the rock pools. Around this time we opened our packets of dried broccoli and zucchini finding them quite good in stews …..especially with a jar of tomato pasata and a scoop of dried pesto..

During our final week we were pretty excited to drive past an “organic veg” farm and once again we had fresh food including corn which I love best roasted straight in the coals. We still had too much food though with jars of tomato, pumpkins and dried fruit to find room for when we arrived home.

Overall we loved our food journey on the road and although we ate super well from our home produce we did enjoy a bit of wickedness here and there….(though we often regretted it).

For savoury road snacks pumpkin leather with sunflower seeds were the best!

Having ample tomato pasata , tomato kasundi and dried tomatoes was fantastic!

Our supple of dried garlic was the best to sprinkle on top of anything.

We still had fresh apples with us when we returned!