Thursday 5 June 2014

Feeding Our Families: Eating on the Road

Because we live on a remote island, our family makes several trips to the continent every year to visit friends and family, to do some shopping and stock up on certain things (we have very few stores on the island) as well as enjoy a change of scenery. We sometimes travel by plane, but most often we travel by car. Our road trips are quite long, we first have a five hour ferry crossing and then we usually have to drive for six to twelve hours depending on our destination. These trips always require lots of preparation ahead of time, especially when it comes to food. We like to have everything that we need with us in order to make fewer and shorter stops (we don't want to stretch our drive any longer than necessary) and we are often driving along long highways with not that many places to stop and not very many healthy food options. Therefore, we like bring along our own food for meals and snacks on the boat and on the road. Here are some of our favourite travel foods:

breakfast and morning snacks: muffins, cereal or granola, soy milk, chopped fruit

afternoon and evening snacks and picnic meals: pasta salad, bagels, crackers, veggie-pâté, chopped veggies and hummus, fruit, cookies

we always have plenty of bottles of water with us as well 

making homemade bagels for the road


banana bread, cookies and muffins

veggies, fuit and veggie-pâté

snack-traps for nibbling toddlers are great to avoid (some) spilling in the car

A veggie-pâté recipe

1 cup seeds or nuts (I use sunflower seeds and almonds)

1/2 cup spelt flour

1 tbsp nutritional yeast

1 onion

1/4 cup tamari or soy sauce

1 sweet potato

3/4 cup hot water

dried basil to taste

Grate onion and sweet potato. Grind seeds and/or nuts. Mix onion, potato, seeds/nuts with other ingredients (I do everything in my food processor, leaving some texture). Bake in a greased square pan (I use a pyrex dish) at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes to an hour (until it looks done, depends on pan and oven). Eat warm or at room temperature on crackers or bread. Makes great sandwiches too. Store leftovers in the refrigerator (and this recipe freezes well, just thaw or warm in oven when ready to use). 

I would love to hear what foods you like to bring or stop for while on a road trip… Please share in the comments section. You will find other Feeding Our Families posts on these wonderful blogs:

Melanie from Our Ash Grove

Jules from A Little Crafty Nest

Melody from Bespoke

Tonya from Joyful Living

Taisa from Small Wonders

Heather from Shivaya Naturals

Renee from Heirloom Seasons



4 comments:

  1. That all looks so delicious. We always take banana bread too but our road trips are rarely as long as yours.
    I've never tried making bagels - yours look amazing, are they multi-grain?

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    1. Hi Emma,

      banana bread is always good and yes, I use part unbleached white and part multigrain flour for my bagels. I like the recipe for Montreal Bagels in Artisan Breads in Five Minutes (a great book that I have mentioned here before) or the recipe in The New Vegetarian Farm Cookbook (I adapt it). I think the types of flour in France are very different from the north american ones though...

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  2. Your pâté recipe sounds delicious, I just need to find a source if nutritional yeast.......what else do you use it in? We don't make particularly long road trips either we tend to stay close to home :). When we go away I make all the food we are going to eat, or the ingredients to if camping, as I cannot eat food with preservatives in. I make my own pasties, veggie sausage rolls, cheese straws, savoury biscuits usually with cheese, vegetable sticks, couscous, pasta or rice salads, bread sticks, and lots of cake!

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  3. I'm impressed - your bagels look terrific - so 'real'! My husband's bagels were more like soft pretzels. We also take banana bread, normally with chocolate chips in as a treat. And some type of cookie - peanut butter chocolate chip is my favorite. We do a long drive to Maine at least once a year and that is 10 hours one way. Mason jars full of water and on this past trip, homemade humus with pita chips too.

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