Picnic food recipe roundup

Thursday, July 28, 2011

I realize that it has been a little while since I posted a recipe. It isn't that I'm holding out on you guys! It is simply that I'm in somewhat of an uninspired patch with food at the moment. I'm spending my mental cycles on clearing out my chattery brain by means of nature hikes and yoga instead of daydreaming about cookie dough and sun-dried tomatoes (separately, of course). I've been eating simply, getting take-out, and still working on using up what I have in the pantry when I can.

That being said, though, some thoughts of take-along foods have been swirling around in my head because I have been day-tripping and picnic-ing as often as possible lately. We brought a picnic lunch along for our Big Tree hike and, just today, I packed yet another for a day trip to Donner Lake in Truckee, CA.


Usually a picnic for us includes a rather uninspired combo of PB&J sandwiches, sliced apples, cookies, and snack bars. I am totally crushing on the idea of picnic foods in jars, though, and that has me thinking about some more exciting portable foods. Here are some of my favorite ideas (not all of these are vegan, however they can be vegan-ized):

  • Sliced apples or pears with nut butter dips (using variations of this recipe from OSG)
  • Apple chips (here or here)
  • Nut or seed butter protein balls (here or here)
  • Homemade fruit rolls, here
  • A "vegan-ized" sandwich, here
  • Dreena Burton's Super-Charge Me! cookies, here or my breakfast cookies (a breakfast picnic, by the way, sounds like fun!), here
  • Homemade soft pretzels (this recipe looks like a good start- I would make a few tweaks) with vegan cheese sauce (something like this or this or this)
  • Homemade potato chips with avocado ranch dip, here
  • Homemade crackers (here or here) with my roasted red pepper dip, here
  • Anything baked in a jar: pie, cobbler, oatmeal...
  • Gilled sweet potato salad (minus the feta), here
  • Any kind of grain salad would be good too- like this or this or this or this
  • Any of these high protein salads from OSG

*Book recommendation: Speaking of the great outdoors and packing food along for a hike, I just finished reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. I loved this book. LOVED it! Bill Bryson is absolutely laugh-out-loud hilarious and this book is now one of my all-time favorites!

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