Backpacker cuisine

Food is trendy. Actually, food, fitness and losing weight. If you have the luxury of owning a TV, you'll soon notice that every second show is a cooking show and every second is biggest loser or some other show encouraging people to lose extra pounds. Every self respecting blogger is blogging about food, fitness and exercising (or traveling). I try my best not to be a part of the mainstream but as I already failed this attempt by starting a travel blog, I might as well go all the way and write a little something about food. Everybody has to eat, after all.

So this is a post about food. First of all, I'll need to warn you once again. The topic doesn't interest me in the slightest, I'm a terrible cook and the result of hours and hours in the kitchen is mediocre at the best. Despite all that, I still cook my own meals, at least I'll know what's in it. Traveling and living in hostels makes cooking even less tempting. You don't always have a clean kitchen and you can't carry 100 different kind of spices with you, and most of the kitchen equipment are broken. What's the secret of successfully making something more complicated than a sandwich is the world of scratched teflon pans, burnt pots and chipped tableware?

Surprisingly enough the week we have spent in Airlie has been full of extremely tasty meals. Once we stopped counting every cent and started investing an extra dollar or two in food supplies and googled some fool proof recipes, the result improved by 100% and we are eating something else than chopped this and that with cooked rice.

Here is a compilation of some of the meals in our cook book that cost less than 5 dollars per 2 servings. We also had some luck once again. an Australian family heading back to south left us crackers, peanut butter, quinoa etc. There's also a free self  in the kitchen, containing some spices like salt and pepper, and occasionally also pasta and rice. Quick sell deals at Woolworths are the new source of inspiration as we try to figure out how to prepare a selection of miscellaneous ingredients.

Anyway, finally, let me introduce some recipes have tried this far. Let's start with the Australian breakfast. We usually eat oatmeal. OK, might sound a bit boring but oatmeal is actually very versatile. Some salt, yogurt, peanut butter and banana on top. Absolutely delicious. What's even better is that oatmeal costs $ 1,19 and one package is enough to keep us fed for about 5 days. Plus it's healthy, it contains vital amino acids, vitamin b, it helps to control blood sugar and it's good for digestion ad well. Don't waste any more time, start eating oatmeal for breakfast already tomorrow!

Improved version of oatmeal

For lunch we usually have pasta with some sauce. Yes, you don't hve to have tomatoes and minced meat sauce every time, be brave, try new things. First we tried pasta with coconut milk, green beans, mushrooms and capsicum. That's pretty much everything they give almost for free at the supermarket. We added some Greek spices we bought earlier, so yummy. What a pity I never took a picture of the meal but maybe next time. Next pasta sauce was slightly different. We bought coconut milk, lentils, diced tomatoes in a can and mushrooms, of course. According to our calculation, one portion of this sauce costs around 1,5 dollars. Lentils are by the way one of the best things that are relatively cheap. They contains proteins and fibre, plus they are filling.

Gluten free pasta, lentils, tomatoes, coconut creams and mushrooms

The all time favorite is a soup mix we found. I call it the Australian buckwheat (buckwheat was such a typical thing to eat in Poland, this mix replaces it here in Australia) The mix contains barley, lentils and green peas, and it costs 1.7 dollars. One soup mix gives 6-8 portions. I admit the soups doesn't look delicious at all but looks can be deceptive. We usually add celery, carrot or whatever is cheap at Woolworths. (I even got celery for free at Woolworths because cashier couldn't find the price for celery and just threw it in my shopping back without scanning it with the machine).

Soup mix, carrots, cilantro

Lastly, tabouleh. We succeeded in exceeding all the expectations. Tabouleh contained quinoa, cucumber, tomatoes, red onion, garlic, salt, pepper and cilantro. The Australian family mentioned above also left me some feta cheese that I mixed in the salad. Fresh veggies are so expensive in Australia. Tomatoes are over 6 dollars a kilo and typically they are raw. We found some ripe and perfect tomatoes at the local farmer's market. They weren't that much cheaper but quality was so much better. BTW Woolworths also sells abnormal looking veggies and fruits at a lower price. We got a cucumber too thin to be a proper cucumber for 1.8 dollars!

The wnner in our masterchef- tabouleh

As I already mentioned, cooking's not really my thing so I'm not going to even try to write down the recipes for these things- It's pretty much just a tin of this a can of that If you wish to try them, just buy one unit of each ingredient and use your imagination, that's what we do all the time.