One of the greatest experiences you can have in your RV is boondocking. Boondocking, dispersed camping, wild camping, off the grid or dry camping are all terms to describe camping in your RV without hooking up to any utilities or connections. Boondocking is a form of camping by which you carry all your own water, capturing your own wastewater and generating your own power. Often times dry camping can be free on public lands (where permitted) or could be on state park campgrounds where you can access for a small fee. As amazing as dispersed camping could be, the challenge of cooking creative, healthy, delicious meals is one of the hardest aspects of “off the grid” life; and for us to keep things allergy free adds an extra level of challenges.
Almost everything we create when boondocking is geared towards minimizing water usage, cleanup, and cooking time. Some essential items to make cooking easier and faster are having a large supply of paper plates, zip top bags, a supply of plastic silverware, propane grill, pressure cooker if you have a generator or even an older one that doesn’t need power, and some well thought out pre-planning.
Smart planning for an overnight (or two) boondocking trip is not only necessary but quite simple. The night before we know we will be unplugged, we do as much prepping as we can. For example, our one pot Chicken Fajita Pasta dish requires sliced veggies, chicken and pasta. One day before, we prep all the sliced items and put them into Zip top bags with seasoning. We slice the peppers/ onions and put them in a bag with half of the seasoning, then dice the tomatoes and place in another bag, followed by cubed raw chicken in yet another bag with the other half of seasoning. Then on a cooking day, we use the propane oven to assemble and cook in one pot. This could also be a pressure cooker recipe running off a generator for a half hour or an old school pressure cooker not requiring power.
For our Chipotle Butternut Squash and Ground Beef recipe, we peel and cube the squash and place into a zip top storage bag for later use. From there the recipe is all ready for quick and easy assembly in one pot over propane or pressure cooker running off a generator.
An easy breakfast boondocking solution for us, (obviously excluding our youngest because she is allergic to eggs) is to hard boil some eggs ahead of time. We hard boil a half dozen or so, peel them and place them in a zip top bag for a quick grab and eat breakfast paired with some muffins that we make ahead of time. Some other easy morning solutions we typically bring with us are pre-made pancakes which we heat up in the microwave (off the generator), and the old standby is cereal in a bowl (paper) with some dairy-free soy milk. (Note: a lot of the soy, almond, and hemp milks come in an unrefrigerated box carton which is great for storage and travel, although we prefer to have it cold when we eat it.)
Lunch seems the easiest to make and bring with us because it usually revolves around things we can eat with our hands. (Less utensils!) Of course, making sandwiches is SUPER easy and an obvious first choice. We don’t eat a ton of wheat as a family so we often only have one sandwich day during the week. A couple of the healthiest options we enjoy while “unplugged” are our Cilantro Chicken Avocado Dip and Our Famous Hummus Party. (Just a fun name to make hummus seem more exciting lol). We do have a hummus recipe we can share with you if you reach out to us at Our1Chance.com, but honestly it is so much easier to buy premade and is normally dairy free.
The homemade bread on this sandwich is free of wheat.
For our Cilantro Chicken Avocado Dip, we precook the chicken on the grill before boondocking and refrigerate until we need it.
On meal day, we chop up the cilantro, squeeze the lime and avocado and make it from scratch. The dippers could be corn chips, potato chips, celery or carrot sticks, pepper strips etc.
Link to recipe and more photos on our blog. http://our1chance.com/cilantro-chicken-avocado-dip-allergen-free-recipe/
I think we can all benefit from some great easy recipes. Tell us your favorites in the comments below. We would LOVE to hear them and share with other RVers.
