On the hoof

What to eat when out and about is a perennial problem. You may not always know how long you will be out, how much or what kind of food will be available and whether you will have access to any kind of cool food storage. I have a few solutions. If it is just a matter of being out for a few hours, most food will keep cool if well wrapped, so I take my finger salad – stuff like celery cucumber etc cut in strips that I can eat with my fingers out of the box, plus cherry tomatoes and small salad leaves. I add some cubes of low fat cheese or a few almonds. Almonds are a great portable emergency snack and I have sometimes lunched off a small handful of almonds and an apple. I am also experimenting with a healthy flapjack recipe. Best kept in fridge or freezer they can be taken out just before you travel. On a longer trip your hotel may not be the health food emporium you would like it to be and will look askance if you bring your own food and ask to use their fridge, so last time I was on a weekend trip I took apples, plus a tin of butter beans, (a large white cooked bean - nothing to do with butter!) two tinlets of tuna in water, a small plastic box and a tin opener. Day one, I opened the beans, put half of them in the box for the next day (they will be fine for 24 hours unrefrigerated) and used the rest plus one tinlet of tuna for a salad. The next day I used the rest of the beans and the other tin of tuna. That was two lunches. Dinner and breakfast being buffet style in the restaurant I was able to choose something suitable.

Sometimes these situations will lead to serendipitous discoveries. Not long ago I was staying at a location where mass catering was the order of the day and breakfast was going to be bacon, sausage, fried eggs etc. I rooted around the kitchen and found a pack of rolled oats but there were no facilities for cooking a single portion. So I improvised by pouring some oats into a serving bowl and adding boiling water. In five minutes I had porridge. And it was the best porridge I had ever eaten! The grains had a little bite to them and the nutty taste of the oats was more evident than if I had simply boiled them. I made another discovery on a similar occasion. Again, staying away from home, I was in a cold house and wanted a hot breakfast. There was a big bowl of delicious fresh fruit salad in the fridge which was just what I fancied eating except that it was cold. So I filled a bowl with it and put it in the microwave just long enough to warm it through but not long enough to actually cook it. Yummy. Even if I was lowering the vitamin content by warming it I was still getting more vitamins than if I hadn’t eaten it at all. So warm fruit salad is now a winter staple.