Reptiles at Risk

Food

Posted by Jeff Hathaway on September 8, 2008 at 6:18 PM

Our funding for Reptiles at Risk on the Road includes a food budget of $10 per person per day. That doesn't seem like much, especially to people who are used to corporate budgets of $50 or more a day, however by following a few simple rules you'd be surprised what we can do with our gas stove and oven and a barbecue. There are just two rules: 1. Buy ingredients for meals rather than prepared foods; and 2. Buy what's on sale. Simple.

We've eaten exceptionally well on this trip. Everyone has contributed to cooking, chopping, shopping, or cleaning up after meals so that no one person is doing it all. A typical day starts with toasted bagels with cream cheese or cereal, then for lunch we have sandwiches or wraps or crackers and cheese, and for dinner whatever meat was on sale with a veggie and rice or mashed potatoes. These typical days don't actually happen all that often though, here's some of the other things we've had:

Breakfasts:
Bacon - yummy bacon! We even had Canadian Bacon, otherwise known as Back Bacon a couple of times.
Eggs - we've had scrambled and fried eggs. Jeff downloaded a recipe for eggs Benedict, my favorite type of eggs, which apparently we're going to try to make one morning.
French Toast and Pancakes - great receptacles for the raspberry syrup and birch syrup that we bought to try out. Birch syrup was interesting, but probably not something that any of us would buy again.

Lunches:
Smoked Salmon!! - We've eaten a lot of salmon and seafood since we've gotten to the west coast. Smoked salmon, or candied smoked salmon or lox style smoked salmon tastes great on crackers.
Tuna - not canned tuna - sushi grade tuna which we found at a couple fish shops on the coast, eaten raw.
Cheeses - We don't just stick to cheddar. We buy a lot of Havarti, but we also went to a cheese farm and bought some goat cheeses.
Macaroni and Cheese - Ok, I know it doesn't sound special, but when you add cut up hot dogs as we did, it becomes a super special reminder of what my Mom used to make me when I was young. We haven't eaten it much, in fact we found some bulk packages on sale a few times and ended up with 36 packages of Kraft Dinner, I think we still have about 33 of them left...

Dinners: Here's where it gets more exciting...
Seafood - we've had homemade stuffed fresh salmon, mussels picked off a beach, scallops, shrimp, and even fresh oysters (which we cooked).
Meat - the best tasting steaks ever - bison steaks cooked rare on our barbecue; plus Duck a L'Orange which James made with Orange Marmalade.
Escargot - Jeff made stuffed mushroom caps with escargot which were really good. Sounds expensive, but a can of escargots is pretty inexpensive.

Overall it's been a great summer of yummy food. There's a lot of canned food left in the trailer for our trip back which Jeff and I will try to eat, however I'm sure we'll have a hard time resisting the sales and great food we come across. We'll probably be coming home with a lot of those left over dry goods ... plus of course, a couple of pounds on our bodies to keep us warm over the winter.

Heather