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Healthy Dirtbag Diet

• October 2015
• Hi Steph Simple Living Climb Vegan

Hi Steph–
I can’t tell you how much I am inspired by your spirit, simple lifestyle and zest for life. Like you, I have adopted a plant based lifestyle and am amazed at how it has touched every corner of my existence. I enjoy camping and the outdoors and am wondering if you have any suggestions for portable, compact and easy to prepare plant-based food options for my trips? Thanks and I hope to bump into you some day during one of my outings in Canyonlands!
Ted

Hi! I’m about to move into my truck for the next few months to climb and BASE jump around Moab. I have trouble eating healthy when I’m living out of my car, do you have any tips regarding a healthy dirtbag diet?
Thanks! Matt

Hi Steph,
I’ve always admired you for climbing, but I just found out your vegan! I am too. I’ve just started climbing outside of a gym, and I’ve been having a hard time packing food for trips…I basically live off of peanut butter and bars. Do you have any advice on how to eat vegan away from stoves and Whole Foods?
Haley

Hi Matt,Ted and Haley,
The great thing about eating plant based when living out of a vehicle or a backpack is that most of your food items won’t spoil as fast or become bacteria-ridden.

I highly recommend having a stove, in general. If you’re fully car camping, you have a lot of options, from the big double-burner propane tank setup to a durable single-burner camp stove. If you’re in someone else’s car or potentially backpacking, invest in a small, light stove and a titanium pot. My favorite is the MSR pocketrocket: inexpensive and lightweight, and the Titan pot set (not as inexpensive, but you will love it for the rest of your life: put it on your Xmas list!)

I eat generally the same when camping as at home, with some exceptions. For example, at home I make my own soy milk and tofu, and I don’t do that when camping 🙂 And no baking or fermenting…, but that’s why it’s fun to come home! Basically you always have a staple food box with your dry things, oil, spices, nonperishables, and then you have your snack bag (I usually use a canvas grocery bag for the more crushable stuff and just keep it on top or in the front seat area) and/or cooler for some fruits, veggies and tofu.

One key item for the staple box is quinoa. Quinoa is high in protein and cooks relatively fast compared to rice. It has a great flavor that’s equally good for dinner (with stir fried vegetables or with beans or chili), lunch (make a quinoa salad by mixing in a matrix of finely chopped vegetables and garbanzos or black beans), or breakfast (stir in some soymilk, cinnamon, sliced apples or raisins). You can cook up a pot of it and keep it around the next day too. It’s really tasty plain with a little bit of Braggs liquid aminos and nutritional yeast sprinkled over it.

Lentils are also high in protein and cook relatively quickly, usually about 20 minutes. If you really need or prefer to conserve fuel, you can put quinoa (or rice) and lentils in a couple of new ziplock bags (double bagged to make sure you don’t have a leak) with some water. Keep the bag in your car or pack for a day or overnight, and you’ll cut down on the cooking time by at least half when it’s time to make dinner. Lentils with quinoa, vegetables, tomatoes, curry and a little can of coconut milk and some spinach or kale stirred in is a delicious belly filler!

I’m not a huge fan of canned food in general, but I do like to eat beans when traveling and camping, so I’ll occasionally bend on that while on a trip. Even better, I’ve been able to find small boxes of cooked beans recently at health food stores.

I keep a few boxes of black beans and garbanzos in my food box, along with a big bag of quinoa. You can’t beat simple bean and veggie burritos with salsa after a good day of hiking or climbing, and you don’t even have to wash a bowl when eating outside! I keep grapeseed oil, salt, pepper, cumin, curry, red pepper flakes and cinnamon and a bottle of Braggs liquid aminos and a bag of nutritional yeast in the staple box, and some garlic and ginger root for the stirfrys. I like Bob’s Red Mill muesli, but you can also keep some plain rolled oats in your box, and some powdered soy milk, raisins and walnuts–this is great hot or cold for breakfast with a little cinnamon.

These don’t get used all the time, but I also keep small bags of dry lentil soup mix and black bean soup mix (you can usually buy these in bulk at health food stores), for times when I need to pack food for an overnight bivy or it’s too late to really cook. With these, you just need to add hot water.

I also store a couple packs of lentil or chickpea Tasty Bites in the food box, which you can get at most grocery stores and definitely at health food stores. If you have time and other items, you can cook some quinoa first, and then sautee some vegetables and add the Tasty Bite to the vegetables and serve it over the quinoa. You can also add an extra box (or can) of plain lentils or garbanzo beans to it, which will give you a fast and easy one-pot dinner for two people with one packet of Tasty Bites. And, in a pinch, you can eat it straight out of the bag cold.

These are all the staples that stay in the food box, and every few days or so I buy fruit and vegetables that are fairly durable–apples, bananas, grapefruit, onions, broccoli, mushrooms, carrots, zucchini. Don’t forget that you can slice the skin off of broccoli stems and chop them up to add to stirfry or soup/chili/beans too! On days when I pass by a store, I always get some fresh tofu and spinach I can put into dinner that night–dark green leafy vegetables are the best, and can be hard to keep around on a trip if you don’t have a cooler.

For snacking, I like nuts and dried fruit, sometimes hummus and vegetables or crackers. If you feel you burn through a lot of energy, almond butter and crackers are easy and longlasting. And don’t forget chips and salsa to take the edge off while making dinner, and some good whole grain bread if you can find some!

Last but not least, always have canned seltzer water in the car so you can feel super uptown (and hydrated) sipping on your fizzy water as the sun goes down, while you cook up an awesome meal in the desert.
🙂 Steph