8 Lunch Ideas for Your Next Canoe or Kayak Trip

On kayak and canoe trips, I like to carry simple meals that require little prep and take up little room in the portage pack or hatches. Usually that means that I pack one or two types of lunches for a 10-day trip. By day 10 that can get a little old. Recently, I asked online friends for lunch ideas. The responses were varied, some elaborate and some simple. But all were less complicated than those found in a commercial paddling cookbook such as The Back-Country Kitchen: Camp Cooking for Canoeists, Hikers, and Anglers. The ideas were so good that I thought I’d share with the rest of PaddlingLight’s readers.

Main Dishes for Paddling Lunches

1. Wraps, summer sausage (or pepperoni) and cheese. To prepare: Pull a burrito wrap out of the package, slice summer sausage and cheese. Wrap it up and eat. To pack: To preserve the wraps in your food bag, wrap them around the outside of bag so that the wraps follow the contours. Options: On a cold, wind day consider cooking the wrap in the fire.
2. Wasa crackers, cheese, sausage and horseradish mustard. To prepare: Take a Wasa cracker, slice sausage and cheese onto the cracker and cover with a big helping of mustard. To pack: Wasa crackers are hardy, but take care when packing them. Keep them in that paper package they come in and pack at the top of your food bag. Many grocery stores carry horseradish mustard in plastic squeeze bottles. Learn how to prevent your Wasa crackers from crumbling.
3. Peanut butter, summer sausage and some maple syrup…all wrapped up in a tortilla. This idea comes from Sven Hoaglund. I’m not so sure about the peanut butter, but maple syrup on sausage tastes great. If Andrew Zimmern can eat bizarre foods, so can paddlers. It’s probably tasty.
4. Hot soup. To prepare: Kurt Penner suggests heating up soup at breakfast, storing it in a lightweight thermos and eating it a lunch. This is especially good on cold, rainy days. I like carrying along instant soup mixes, which makes the process as easy as heating water and opening a package of soup.
5. Fruit, pepperjack cheese and a walnut, dried cranberries and sunflower seed mix. Combined with a lovely crusty loaf of Italian or other good bread covered with olive oil that had herbs and pepper and garlic steeping all day. This suggestion from Tracy Prior Seffers would work best on shorter trips where you can protect the bread or on trips that you’re motivated to make bread the night before.
6. Four-oz bag of chicken salad with multigrain sandwich thins, a couple sticks of Polly-O cheese, some Spanish olives. To pack: Kayak Gus tells us that this combo fits inside a Ziplock bag with a single-serve Gatorade drink mix and a Clif Bar.
7. Hummus with mini pitas. This idea comes from Agnes Jung. To prepare: Mix powdered hummus with water until the hummus forms a paste-like consistency. I find that mixing the hummus at breakfast and storing it in a plastic bag makes lunch prep faster.
8. Pitas! You can put lots of stuff in them such as PB&J, Honey, sausage slices, smoked salmon or tuna from a pouch, cheese, dried beef, etc. To pack: Pitas are fragile so store them on the top of the food bag. You could substitute burrito wraps for pitas and use all the same ideas.
   

Bonus Dish

One of my favorite lunches when kayaking are cucumber sandwiches. You’ll need snack rye bread, cream cheese, a cucumber, and dill. To assemble, spread the cream cheese on a piece of rye bread, top with sliced cucumber and sprinkle dill on the top. If you want to get fancy, you can mix a package of dry Italian dressing into the cream cheese before spreading.

Side Dishes for Canoe and Kayak Lunches

1. Fruits: Apples hold up extremely well in a pack and taste fantastic at lunch. They supply a crunch often missing from camping food.
2. Veggies: Carrots and celery both hold up well in a back, and you can dip the celery into a plastic tub of peanut butter with little mess.
3. Trail mix. My recipe for the best trail mix is one bag Peanut M&Ms, one bag mixed nuts without peanuts, one box of Goldfish crackers.
4. Cliff bars.
5. Homemade energy bars: If anyone has a good recipe, please, Agnes Jung suggests this recipe for Healthy Carrot Cake Power Scuffins
6. Fruit cups but they get eaten early to lighten the weight.
7. Granola bars.
8. Gummy worms. Tim Gallaway says, “Nothing makes a day better like a gummy worm on a rainy-day boating. Gummy worms aren’t just for boating though. We always get them for skiing. They’re great for a quick boost going up the lift.”

Any other ideas?