Appetizer (3): How to Cook in a Teardrop

If you don’t know who I am, my name is Sam and I’m the other brain behind these adventures. I’m the one who made the teardrop and comes up with most of the destinations Kes and I travel to. As you probably already know, I love to hike, camp, build, and, as you’ll soon find out, cook! I hope you enjoy this little appetizer and, if you do, there will surely be more to come!

Let’s talk about food. Do you like food? Cause I sure do. And after a long day of traveling, hiking, and exploring, there’s really nothing better than having a nice hot meal to enjoy.

The first time I remember camping was when me and my dad went backpacking in the Jemez for a night. Our idea of a nice camping meal back then was one of those freeze-dried, prepackaged meals that you add a couple of cups of hot water to, seal for a few minutes, and call good. There’s really nothing wrong with these packaged meals, and in fact this was my idea of what camping food was for a long time. But anybody who’s had one of these dinners knows that there’s just something missing. Yes, they’re bland and watery, but what I really think they’re missing is love.

Slowly, Dad and I made alterations to these freeze dried meals to make them a bit more enjoyable. How about bringing a bag of mixed spices to kick it up a notch? Maybe a side of tortillas or bread to break up the mush? These little addons did wonders, but that key ingredient was still missing - love.

One trip, while Dad and I were eating our usual grub, a group of other campers came over to talk to us. Somehow we got on the topic of food, and we explained how we usually just ate the premade meals. They went on to describe their meals, which consisted of fresh cheeses, fruits, crackers, pastas, and everything else we had never thought about bringing. A lightbulb went off in our heads - maybe it wasn’t so far fetched to prepare ‘normal’ meals while on the trail. And suffice to say, we went to bed very envious that night.

From then on, Dad put more effort into the meal side of the trip than any other aspect of planning. It was like a whole world had been opened to us - one full of three part meals, sweets, and flavor. We started replacing bottom tier freeze dried kung pao chicken and mushy lasagna with full on Thanksgiving meals and red beans and rice. Instead of paying $10 or more for a prepared lunch, we bought tortillas, tuna, and hot sauce for less than half that and enjoyed them twice as much.

I guess I’m talking about my backpacking food journey because it mirrors my and Kes’s mindset when it comes to road tripping food. We’ve been traveling together pretty much since we started dating six years ago, and I’m happy to say that our meals have only improved with each place we go.

One of our first major road trips together was when we went to Black Rock Desert and Lake Tahoe. This was the trip that I would say really created that spark that made us want to keep traveling. The places we went to and memories we made were amazing, but unfortunately I can’t think back so fondly on our meals. Luckily our past errors only make me laugh now.

So what did we eat on that trip that was so bad? The item that still sticks with me today is the oatmeal. When we were shopping, the only oatmeal that was available was steel cut oats. Please, please, never buy steel cut oats. We did do good by flavoring the oats with some chocolate and spices, but our mistake was in planning oats for breakfast every morning, for nine days straight. I get that people can eat the same breakfast for their entire life - me and Kes quickly learned we are not those people. Having crunchy oats floating around in a chocolatey broth for breakfast every. Single. Day. Was terrible. Say what you will about our cooking technique or flavoring, me and Kes have agreed we will never eat oats again.

The second meal we planned on that trip that still makes me laugh was pizza. You can make pizza a million and one ways - on flatbread, with a premade dough, or even on a tortilla. Were any of those ways good enough for us? Of course not. For some reason I insisted on making dough from scratch. In the middle of the desert. Dusty wind and unpredictable weather were only the start of some of the issues with this idea. Well, after about three days of putting off the meal in lieu of others, we decided it wasn’t going to happen and just went hungry for a night.

Not all of our food problems were created by our own narrow mindedness. A great example of this is when we went to Death Valley. During this trip we were using a Yeti cooler, as usual, when we learned that a certain phenomenon occurs with this cooler after driving many, many miles of washboard roads. Turns out the Yeti likes to eat food given enough… shall I say, external stimuli? All I can tell you about this is that one morning there was a couple of pounds of sliced turkey sitting nicely in its package on top of the ice in the cooler. That night, after arriving at our campsite, we opened the Yeti to find the package sans turkey. There was, in fact, no trace of the turkey slices at all. All that was left of our lunch was a fine pinkish pulp that was almost indiscernible against the ice. Unfortunately, this was not the first nor the last time this phenomenon occurred.

If the name of this blog wasn’t enough to prove how big a role food plays in our adventures, those stories should be. Coming into the gap year, Kes and I both knew this fact and knew that we would need to prepare consistently delicious and nutritious meals if we were going to finish the year successfully. Luckily, we weren’t alone. Using our past experiences I was able to design the teardrop and fit it with the latest in culinary technology (not really). Some of our new partners in cooking crime would be a permanently mounted stove, refillable propane tank, and, most importantly, an electric fridge! These gadgets wouldn’t do the cooking for us, but they would make the job a lot easier.

No more were the days of crushed turkey and rotten egg ice. No longer would we have to dig through a bin of camping supplies to find the stove and associated propane bottle and then set it up on a counter barely wide enough for the legs. And, I think this was Kes’s favorite, no more disposable propane bottles!

Kes and I have gotten comfortable preparing meals that really aren’t that different from meals you prepare at home. The only difference is that we really have to be conscious of what food we have in the pantry and the fridge. We don’t have the space to let a jar of something slink to the back of the pantry and never see the light of day again. Likewise if something goes old in the fridge, I’ll tell you firsthand, it becomes obvious very quickly.

That’s not to say we don’t have a preference for certain meals or cooking techniques. Of course, one pot meals are the easiest and most preferable. Anything that reduces the amount of dishes that has to be done is great. But most of the time this simply means we have to be a bit more innovative and think ahead to what dishes are going to be created and what dishes don’t need to be created.

After four months on the road, we have a pretty solid list of our favorite dishes. Here’s some of them:

1. Army Stew. We probably make this more than any meal. It’s basically hearty ramen with onions, mushrooms, and topped with American cheese. We usually eat it with a side of Spam or sausage.

2. Tortellini Bake. A really easy one pot meal that only has about five ingredients. Tortellini, pepperoni, mozzarella, onion, and marinara.

3. Salad. Salad is great because all you need to get is a mix of greens at the grocery store, and then top it with anything you have lying around in the pantry.

4. Pasta Dishes. This can be anything from normal old spaghetti, to a vegetarian lasagna, to pasta carbonara. The great thing about these meals is that pasta is CHEAP!

I would say these four meals make up a good quarter of all the meals we make. Just because we like one pot meals does not mean we are not willing to get more complex with our dishes either. Some of the more difficult meals we’ve made are chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes, fried rice, and Buddha bowls. These meals were intimidating on paper, but once the flames were lit and the knives brought out, they proved to be no more difficult than our typical one pot dishes, just with a bit more clean up afterwards.

This was from the first time we made the Tortellini Bake, just outside of the Great Sand Dunes.

Breakfast and lunch have pointedly been left out of this conversation for a reason. That reason is . . . spontaneity! We really don’t plan for breakfast that thoroughly, we just make sure we have a steady supply of bagels, granola, potatoes, and eggs. With these you can make your normal old bagel with cream cheese, or you can kick it up to an egg green chile cheese breakfast sandwich. It’s really up to us to decide what we want each morning, and the same goes for lunch as well. I like this way of doing things because it not only reduces our overall food waste, but also proves that I am making progress in one of my gap year goals - to be more spontaneous.

Any time we meet somebody on the road, the topic that almost always finds its way into the conversation is how much time Kes and I spend together. And this is a totally fair thing to joke about - aside from bathroom breaks and gassing up the car, there’s rarely a moment when we are apart. I think how we make it work is by playing on our strengths and weaknesses. We each have abilities we’re great at and those that could use some improvement. A major daily chore where this comes into play is, you guessed it, cooking!

An easy example of these strengths and weaknesses is Kes’s sauce making capabilities. She is great at tasting a sauce and adding exactly what it needs, be it salt or hot sauce or anything in between. This makes her way more adept at cooking certain dishes like army stew and soups. For these meals she takes lead.

My strength is reading a recipe, understanding what needs to be done, and finding the most efficient way to get the meal ready (AKA least dishes). Kes’s strength is not necessarily focusing on all the moving parts of a recipe, but instead focusing on one single task at a time, like dicing an onion or searing meat. Over the course of the four months we’ve been on the road these major strengths we each possess have balanced each other out and helped us form a sort of dance we move to every evening.

I’ll typically take the lead on the meal, getting out the ingredients that I know we’re going to use and setting up pots and pans, that sort of thing. Meanwhile Kes will get a jump on dicing all the veggies and set them aside. I’ll heat up the oil and start cooking the veggies as they come. Kes will finish cutting, then start preparing other ingredients as needed. I’ll keep an eye on the pot while organizing the galley and keeping it tidy. Kes will move on to cleaning some dishes before dinner is ready. So the dance goes until another amazing meal is on our plate.

There are a lot of different aspects to these meals we cook, some that you probably relate to a lot and some not at all. But I’m willing to bet there’s one particular advantage to cooking in a teardrop, probably my favorite, that you don’t get from cooking at home. That advantage is being able to cook outside with a different view everyday!

Camping on the beach? Uh oh, I smell a spoiler for next week's post.

The teardrop is an amazing camper to travel with for many reasons, but at the top of that list is the fact that it allows me to combine two of my favorite hobbies: being outside and cooking. Be it sun or rain, hot or cold, mountains or beach, whatever it’s like, you can bet that me and Kes are out cooking. I absolutely LOVE cooking outside because there’s always something different to look at and experience. It doesn’t matter if it’s a comfortable 70 degrees outside or if it’s below freezing, I can say with confidence that there has never been a time where I would trade out my setup for something more traditional. It doesn’t hurt that I also have the best cooking partner I could ask for.

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Hello there,

I really hope you enjoyed this window into Kes and I’s life.

Like Kes’s normal blog posts, I also want to know which part was your favorite!

I really liked sharing the cooler story. How about you?

Best,

Sam