My wife any love to go camping. Not the kind of camping where you load up backpacks and hike miles into the wilderness. But the kind of camping where you back your car into a spots, and set up a tent. Kind of a lazy man’s roughing it.
This Spring, we are planning on doing a week long driving trip. When we have done this in the past, we have stayed exclusively at campgrounds, and set up our tent. This time, we will probably do a combination of the staying in a tent, and maybe a motel room. We will see.
But I was thinking about low-fat healthy camping type food. Let start with breakfast. Scrambled eggs are common, and easy to make while cmaping. But for low-fat versions use a liquid egg substitute like Egg Beaters. And don’t melt butter in the pan, use a cooking spray (butter flavored if you like). Then how about some 97% fat-free ham? If you have the little racks to hold the bread over the fire (or over a propane stove), you can make toast. Don’t use butter though. Use maybe a little jelly, or how about a few spritzes of buttery spray?
For lunch and dinner, how about fat free hot dogs? Ball Park makes three different kinds. You can cook these on sticks over a fire, or boil them over a stove. Be sure to bring ketchup, mustard, or reslish or whatever your favorite condiment is. And buns! Don’t forget the buns. You could always cook some more of the 97% fat-free ham. And you could maybe boil up some small salt potatoes. They are easy enough. Then cut them open, or mash them, and use some buttery spray, or some Molly McButter or Butter Buds. Also things like canned vegetables like corn or peas. Just don’t forget the can opener, or you might find yourself out in the woods bashing cans with rocks in a desperate attempt to open them.
Sorry to say that there is not much you can do to make Smores low fat and healthy. But go ahead and have one. Just one!!!! Remember moderation!! You don’t have to torture yourself by not allowing yourself a small luxury once in a while. If you cut yourself off completely, you are more likely to snap, and binge on bad stuff.
We are back from our trip. With all the good food at the various restaurants we went to, we didn’t eat particularly low fat. We didn’t go completely overboard. We never ordered dessert. And we did buy some fruit (bananas and grapes) to keep in our hotel room for snakcs. I did gain a couple pounds over our trip.
But now we are home. Last night I made Linguine With Clam Sauce. That is very low fat. I work today. So I will be taking several Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine meals to work with me.
I continued to workout on our trip, running most of my scheduled miles, and doing some swimming too.
I had a meal at one restaurant that they called Linguine Chicken Tettrazini. I was going to try to make a low fat version of it, but the recipes I have found sound different than what I had in the restaurant. I think what I had in the restaurant was closer to a pasta alfredo. But the alfredo sauce was a little more liquid. I don’t know. I will dig through my cook books for something interesting to make.
Looking for a low-fat snack? Think pretzels. They are relatively inexpensive. The bag I have in front of me is made by Rold Gold. They are small pretzels about an inch and half across. A serving consists 16 pretzels. A serving has 110 calories and only 10 of those come from fat. The source of the other 100 calories is the 2 grams of protein and the 23 grams of carbohydrates. And if you think those carbs look scary, sugars make up less than 1 gram of them. That means most of those carbs are the good complex starchy kind!
The downside of pretzels is the 450 mg of sodium. That’s a lot of salt! An average Healthy Choice meal seems to have around 600mg. That’s for a whole meal. And 16 pretzels can be wolfed down in no time.
But pretzels are a convenient snack food. They don’t need to be heated or cooled. They really don’t go bad quickly.
My wife and I are celebrating our 13th wedding anniversary. We are currently staying in a hotel overlooking Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. We actually came to the hotel yesterday. We had brought some pretzels with us, and but no other snacks. Our room has a small fridge with overpriced drinks (liquor, beer, wine). We were not interested in there alcoholic beverages at all, but we did load it up with Diet Pepsi, and Diet A&W Root Beer that we had brought with us. We went out for an overpriced dinner last night at TGI Fridays, but we wanted some snack foods. We headed off in search of a grocery store. But they were closed as it was now 7:30 on a Sunday night. We took note of where it was, and head back to the hotel. We just snacked on the pretzels.
Today after a quick trip back to the US side to mail off our taxes, we headed to the grocery store. I wanted some bananas. I thought about bringing some with it, but was leery of trying to cross the border with produce. In the grocery store, we bought 3 bunches of bananas (a little green), and 2 bags of red grapes. I found some tapioca pudding made with skim milk. Each pudding has 120 calories and 3 grams of fat. The Canadian packaging doesn’t list calories from fat, but at 9.5 calories per gram of fat, that works out to 28.5 calories or about 24% calories from fat. The chocolate and vanilla flavors each had 4 grams of fat. I would have preferred fat-free pudding but didn’t see any. Too bad our hotel didn’t have a microwave. We could have maybe found some fat-free hotdogs, gotten some buns, and ketchup. Yum! We do have a coffee maker. I wonder if I could cook the hotdogs by letting them sit in the carafe of heated water? That could be interesting to try. We will be here for a couple more days.
LOL! I just realized that I don’t have spoons for the pudding.
At home, it is easy to stock the fridge with low-fat food. But while traveling, you are usually limited to eating in restaurants. And most restaurants have a limited choice of low-fat food. And when looking through the menus, there are so many delicious looking choices. The handful of low-fat healthy choices are usually buried. Some restaurants will mark the low-fat, or healthy choices with some sort of symbol like a heart. So you can look for these. But even if they have the healthy foods well marked, it is hard to pick the good-for-you stuff over the not-so-good-for-you stuff. If you are on vacation, it makes it that much easier to eat the not-so-healthy stuff. Well, try to use some restraint. You are on vacation you can relax a little. You don’t need to kill yourself eating healthy ALL THE TIME. But try to use some restraint. Don’t order an appetizer, AND a full meal, AND a dessert. Skip the appetizer, and skip the dessert. And when you order the meal, if you aren’t going to order one the healthy things, then at least don’t order the least healthy things. Skip choices that are full of fat. Skip the Fettuccini Alfredo which is full of heavy cream and cheese. Skip the deep fried foods. And just because you get a plate full of food, doesn’t mean you have to eat it all. Think moderation. Just because you aren’t going to eat as healthy as you normally eat, doesn’t mean you need to go overboard the other direction.