Stocking the Trailer Pantry

  Five years ago, Marie and I started using this method to make evening meal prep in the trailer easy. The link below talks about it, and also shows you the inside of the trailer before I did anything except make curtains. What a difference!

Anyway... I wanted to start this adventure with some of these meal bags on hand in the trailer. Here's how it works. I buy shelf-stable products that can be made into a meal without adding much- maybe some sauted onion, or extra veggies. Originally, I put in a can of fruit and maybe some crackers. But we found that we always had some crackers open, and usually ate fresh fruit rather than canned. So now, each bag just has a main course. You can see the bags are labeled.

Here is one example. It has a box of Suddenly Salad Sweet Basil Pasta. The items added on the bag in lower case are things that could be added: tomatoes, cheese, etc. You can add meat to these as well. They are designed to be refrigerated and eaten as a salad, but they are also good as a hot meal.

Some of the bags just have cans of soup. Some have a sauce packet, some carb (rice, noodles, etc), and a can of meat (chicken, tuna, vienna sausages, etc). I ended up with 21 meals. My first helper, Sue, is comfortable with cooking without this level of preparation. That means these won't be used up in the first 21 days. And these kinds of meals are easily replaced at the grocery store. Some on my support team are not as confident of the kitchen tasks, so this kind of setup relieves them of figuring out meals. The bags store nicely in a box in one of the under-seat bins.

I usually have yogurt for breakfast, and lunch for me will be crackers with cheese and peanut butter, some vegs and a treat. As you know, the snack packs are already made up.

My needs for the evening meal are simple. Fill me up, give me carbs, maybe a cookie at the end. I love having a big salad for dinner, but we've found that lettuce doesn't keep all that well in the cooler. We might treat ourselves to a bag of mixed greens sometimes. Then we'd eat it all up quickly enough.

I bought a lot of discount stuff across the street over the last month as I saw things that would work for these meals. Last night, I organized my pile and made a list of things I need to add to call this job done. That is four cans of stuff. They go in the bags with the white tags. I'll get them tomorrow. So, I can't cross this one off yet (it's a BIG ONE), but I'm showing you now because there may be another BIG ONE done tomorrow too.

By the way... I did add up all that I've spent on food for this trip so far. I have 56 days of backpacking food. That is 3 meals and 1 snack pack (containing 2 items) per day, an additional 336 snack packs for day hiking, and now 21 trailer meals. That's a total of 581 meals or equivilents. The average cost per meal/equivalent is $1.30. I'm very pleased.

In other news: I was working on things that count by 10 am again. Worked on the trailer all day because the weather was reasonably mild. I'm getting really close to done on the "construction" items! Stay tuned.

20 BIG ITEMS to complete- (42 done). 45 small ones to do (38 done). 10 days to go. Very soon, I'll offially drop some of the BIG ONES off the list, but I'm not dumping them just yet.

See Pretty Much Ready to Go