Nissan Patrol 4x4 (Africa)

So for all the overland gurus, what food do you pack? Seeing the we usually camp on a spot for a couple of days, we always plan for such and with enough space to pack one actually splurges and take a lot of food that come back as is. So if you overland with a single night at a spot, what do you take? Or rather how do you portion for a night at a spot? No trail mix ?

I am a bit of a weird one. I do not do breakfast. Happy with a cup of coffee. Happy for a light snack at lunch, but eat properly in the evening.

As such, we generally pack breakfast for the kids and snack stuff. And then we take vacuum packed meat. One vacuum pack a little overly stockes for each day. What remains becomes lunch tue next dat. I love sosaties for various reasons - I will explain later. However, if you are crossing borders, meat may be a no go due to the FnM outbreak here recently.

Other than that, fresh salad stuff for salad, braaibroodjies and so on. We tend to refill the salad stuff where we can, as we go along. As well as the bread.

Longer trips, I make sure we have several boxes of long life salad in the drawers, as well as a few L of longlife milk.

Coming back to the sosatis.... we normally take fajitas (wraps) along. Very nice to eat with cold leftover sosatis and salad stuff next to the road.

Finally, pack tinfoil. Sounds stupid, but probably tye most awesome thing ever for wrapping up your braai leftovers before putting them in the fridge.

Over-catering is a problem to which I am also searching for a solution, but as Ian mentioned, left-overs are handy for the next day. I tend to do brunch rather than breakfast & lunch.

We have quite a lot of food issues, and unfortunately one of them is bread. We can eat very little of it, which is a pity as it is easier than most of the alternatives.

Salad stuff is very difficult to travel with. It squashes/flashes in the fridge, doesn't survive out of the fridge and tends to be difficult to find along the way. I tend to spend quite a lot of effort packing it carefully to allow us fresh salad for as long as possible.

The other thing I do quite often is to cook the harder vegetables in the fire. Sweet potato, butternut, gem-squash etc work very well wrapped in tin foil and placed on the edge of the fire. Needs to be turned regularly though.

We tend to braai almost every night, with possibly a potjie somewhere along the way.

One trick is to cook the first night's dinner at home before we leave. Something that can just be warmed up. I tend to plan my trips to get as far as possible the first day, so I tend to be tired and sometimes late into camp.

I tend to take some tinned meat (bully beef, tuna and so on), primarily as emergency rations, but I may dip into this on days when the planning doesn't work and one runs out of time or so forth.

I plan my Outreach trips around travel TIME, not distances. Every 4 hrs eat something, even if just ProVita with cheese or handfulle of nuts or tubie.
Day one calls for "tradition": Toebroodjie; kook eier; boere worsie en Oros .. daarna is dit Koffie & beskuit by opstaan; "Brunch" 10 / 11 vm se kant; Snacks & broodjies 3 nm.. vanaand so 7 0f 8 uur: Braaivleis + / Mince & Rys [by die huis al gaargemaak en verpak] [volgende dag program bepaal ook of daar gebraai of "opwarm kos" geeet word
Ek pak nie meer as 4 dae, maks 5 dae se kos in nie, daar is genoeg plekkies in Afrika waar mens kan aankoop en dit ondersteun die plaaslike mense.
Ek koopo my vleis in Botswana aan [Noor Uitreike] OF in Upington / Springbok vir Richtersveldt Uitreike.
Kenia, Zambie, Moz, Malawi eet ons saam met die sendelinge OF koop by die Kukas

So, Izak .. daar is nie 'n gegewe nie. As jy wil grend eet kan jy. As jy wil "avontuur" eet, kan jy dit ook [Gesonde balanseerde eet tydens so 'n trip is vir my nie van toepasing nie .. solank jy nie omkap van honger nie is jy gesort .. WATER is 'n ander saak ek is vol geite oor my water

Thanks all, food for thought (mwhahahahahaha). I am also not much of a breakfast person, and will eat what is left over. The kids of course hate left overs (spoiled brats), so it’ll probably be pronutro for them. Maybe an energy bar or so lunch time and lots of water. Then in the evening a braai that’s also breakfast. Thanks guys

Totally agree with the brunch kinda thing. Overlanding / camping with three meals a day is not convenient. One thing we have gotten stuck on (not everybody's taste) and which is super easy to pack is the Safari salads and they have many different ones:

Nooooo!!!! I hate salads, I’ll go as far as lettuce and tomato. I’ll rather chew on a leather belt. One thing that will definitely have to come with is biltong, and of course lots of water. But luckily I’ll be able to stock up along the way on both

My 2c

Due to having small children that need to have nap once a day we are "forced" to overland, as they sleep best in the car with aircon on.

As with everything overlanding, planning is everything, and as Oom Mac said, duration,duration, duration.

Duration of travel (arrival at camp) determines dinner ( cooking duration), duration before stock-up determines cooking method used (cant carry a weeks worth of firewood). Otherwise, if we have a lot of time to cook - wood, less - charcoal (travel with it in ammo box thus stackable), even less - gas.
We are 4 persons and overland for 7 days before a need to restock with a 50L fridge. We don't pull a trailer or have anything on the roof ( d/c bakkie).
(We take enough wine and beer).

Our children like their sandwiches, thus I bake a small bread every 2nd night ( ingredients are easy to travel with), the adults tend to use wraps.

A quick meal for example is mince in pan (gas), then make Smash and cover mince - viola, cottage pie.

These small packets of tuna (already spiced) are perfect for a snack with provita. Pre-prepare cous cous with spices and such - easy packable.

So my advice is nothing new, get freezer bags that are the width/length/hight of your 12v fridge, and the freeze all you want into that shape as flat as possible. Take things you only need to add boiling water with (it doesn't need to be unhealthy- we often do dehydrated mince). Take things that are packaged in such a way so it lasts (tuna package for instance, long life milk). Take ziplock bags for left overs, they deform to fit into spaces and use no space when not in use, unlike containers.

The most of our ideas are morphed from our hiking days, so check out hiking websites - for compact and healthy dishes.

You will truly get your own rhythm and see what works for you. Overland with friends and learn from one another

Breakfast = tee/cofee and rusks.
Brunch annything from Bacon and egs to provitas with tomato and cheece or tuna.
Dinner = braai, nothing else I like to braai!!, box salad, fresh salad if sourced along the road, bake bread.

And because I do most overlanding with my father there must be desert every night...........

So we just came back from a week of camping. And as the OP mentioned we always seem to make too much food for dinner (1st world problems ). This happens even though we try and purposefully not make so much food that everyone can get a second helping.

Two great ways to solve the problem I realised the last couple of months is to purposefully not plan for lunch every 2nd/3rd day. And we always take extra wraps along - they use up basically no space in the fridge and don't get stale.

So on our "no lunch planned days" - if there is a lot of leftovers it goes into a wrap. And if there isn't a lot, I make jaffels from it - made from the leftover bread baked in square potjie of previous day.

It's not a silver bullet - but thus far it's proving to be atleast a wooden stake