Ever since I have been…
…eating baby carrots, baby spinach and baby tomatoes I keep wondering where the hell they get the big ones now?
Cheers,
JackL
this will blow your mind…
Baby carrots are simply full sized carrots extruded into the baby carrot form! I was naive about the baby carrot conspiracy for most of my life and it really depressed me. …at least there’s still baby corn and veal. (j/k about the veal) 
indian and middle eastern foods…
work great for camping as well! On my last trip up to the Apostle Islands, we had pita, hummous, tabouli, daal, saag, and several other delicious vegetarian indian and middle eastern dishes. I’m definitely not a vegetarian but I found the food delicious, filling, and perfect for camping (we brought along pre-cooked packaged meals).
Though I’m not vegetarian
I find meat a pain to take along on trips. Having to have a cooler full of it and enough ice to keep it cold enough, no thanks, I like to travel light.
One thing I really love to take with me is risotto. You can get it in the 4-serving boxes with the seasoning packet, and it’s really good. Add extra parmesan cheese (assuming you’re ovo-lacto), and you’ve supplemented the protein.
Another thing I like to make is couscous. Again you can get the boxed version with the seasonings. I get one with minimal seasoning, and bring with me a little bottle of olive oil, some shallots, some golden raisins, some cut fresh french green beans, maybe some julienned sundried tomatoes, and either cashews or canned garbanzo beans for protein.
Holy crap!
I didn’t know that!
What about the other baby goodies, or are they just midget forms of the big guys?
Cheers,
JackL
spam rocks!
That sounds good.
I love to make my own hummus - it’s great with carrots for dipping instead of pita if you want to cut out carbs.
I love tabouleh, it’s one of the things I like to make with the mint, tomatoes, and parsley I grow in my backyard.
Another thing I like to make, that you can bring all the ingredients for and make on your trip is panzanella. There are a lot of recipes out there for it, but it’s basically a tomato bread salad, and great with a pinot grigio or even a lighter italian red like Sangiovese. It pretty much is a meal in itself. I make mine with my own tomatoes, chopped onions, stale italian or french bread, minced garlic, olive oil and red wine vinegar, salt and pepper, and fresh oregano, basil, and flatleaf parsley from my herb garden.
What’s cold process powdered milk? Is it different than Carnation? I’d love to find a powdered milk that tastes better.
You can also get B-12 from Brewers Yeast
Sprinkle it on foods. Mix it with cocoa powder, turbinado sugar, milk (you could use soy, but omit sugar if you do), some ice, and put it in the blender. Lots of vitamins including B-12, plus lots of protein.
But keep it real
If you are going to give up meat, give it up. The whole mock-meat thing seems kinda disingenuous. There is plenty of appetizing stuff that you can eat instead of meat that you don’t have to reconstitute a bunch of protein, add flavors to make it taste like meat, and caramel coloring and mold it to look like meat.
I ate termites in Africa
Kinda nutty tasting.
I can’t eat canned meat
There is something about the taste of them - and I have tried it all, canned ham, spam, tuna, salmon, chicken, corned beef hash, it all tastes gross to me.
We weren’t meant to be anything
Just for interest’s sake. I’m a total omnivoire, I’ll try any food twice.
Go back far enough and we were vegetarians. We evolved to include meat in our diet. It’s the reason for our big brains, that’s for sure. It also caused tummy aches until and sometimes after we learned to cook it.
Look at cultures with a long tradition of vegetarianism. Hindu diet has been around since long before we knew about vitamins and minerals and amino acids. It’s very possible to live a long and healthy life without eating meat and needing no supplement pills or anything.
Try this exercise. Eat no meat for three months. Give it long enough for your body to get used to the new diet. Then have a nice juicy porterhouse, medium rare. Don’t go far from the toilet. Years ago I worked in a really nice steakhouse. When I was leaving, my vegetarian (not a real one, fish&chickenetarian) friend came for dinner and had a filet. The tenderest softest peice of meat on the cow. He didn’t shit straight for a week. One steak.
Our tummies become accustomed to the diets we choose.
If meat is murder lock me up, baby! I’m a repeat offender with no chance for rehabilitation!
Seriously…
The biggest problem with meat is how we make it. What we do to the cows/pigs/chickens/whatever in order to feed the market.
There are also some shocking numbers on the efficiency of cattle farming. Something like for every cow there are acres of good farmland that could grow 1000 times the food in both quantity and nutrition. I made these numbers up, the real ones are similarly astounding.
BSE, anthrax, avian flu, who knows what else is out there just waiting for an opportunity to decmate the market. Our mega-ranch practices are more efficient, but they are also riskier.
Effluent runoff bringing E-coli to the groundwater. You screw the groundwater and you’re in big trouble.
Go tell it on the mountain!
I’ll bring a kielbassa and some tuna for a couple of lunches. Every other meal is total veggie. Just last weekend we brough bacon for breakfast, it was amazing.
The longer the trip and the hotter the weather, the less meat I bring. It goes bad, and when meat goes bad it goes really bad.
Also, many of the places I camp don’t allow bottles or cans. Tinned meat is an abomination anyway.
Pasta, including couscous is good stuff! A packet of soup bulked up with a handfull of couscous rocks.
Vegetarian chili, beans and tomatoes and broccoli tips. Chock full of what’s good for you.
Supplement things with shredded tofu, you don’t even see it for the tofu squeemish.
Textured Vegetable Protein (TVP) is good stuff too. No flavour, and you need protein in you diet when you’re tripping. So-Soya brand sucks, like chewing a dish sponge.
Nuts are full of all sorts of goodness. Cook with them!
fake meat
people give up meat mainly for three different reasons, their health, the environment or for the sake of animals. mock meats whether they look like baby lambs or lumps of brown sludge aren’t “cheating” they’re just another way of keeping your diet varied and flavorful and often are great ways to introduce the vast majority of people who aren’t experienced in vegetarian cooking to all the options that are out there.
I’ll buy that.
Especially for those who do it for health reasons, environmental reasons. But the PETA types who talk about eating meat being a barbaric practice, then eating Tofurkey or Notdogs, that just doesn’t seem right. It seems to me similar to saying “cannibalism is terrible” but then reforming pork to look like a piece of a human being, and then digging in. Plus, it seems if you are going to really give up meat, stop eating stuff that looks and tastes like it, and you won’t miss it anymore. I like dairy foods, but I’m lactose intolerant. I can eat a little with no effects (especially some of the drier cheeses, and especially if melted, must break down the lactose a little), but a bowl of icecream sends me to the bathroom really quickly. I tried some of the soy-based stuff, and it was pretty good, but actually left me missing the real stuff. I gave it up, and after a few months lost interest in dairy. It helped me lose weight, too.
Not intending to offend…
but, just an observation. There seems to be a lot of shell games going on in your post with, tastes like this, can be sub’d for that. Honestly, why stay tide to the tracks waiting for your hero to come along and cut the ropes? All of the scheming and processing in your suggested food alternatives seems to me to be as reliant on manufacturing and resources as any free range chicken. I’m not sympathetic to animal cruelty either, and I do go a long way out of my way to minimize it, but maybe good ol’ animal protein makes a bit of sense. Your call, not trying to proselytize. I just see some inconsistencies in the vegan thing.
Augustus Dogmatycus
MMV
baclkpacking pressure cooker
expeditioning mountaineers used to use them to raise cooking temps and pressures.
sangiovese is harder to find
these days. We served it at our wedding.
if we need to eat meat
why can we synthezise b 12.
Next argument please.
Sorry…
…we can’t synthesize B-12. There is a complex absorption involving the stomach and the small bowel.
Tom