Van Life Tour Video | Tasty Veg Food Inspiration

VAN LIFE TOUR | Tasty Veg Food Inspiration

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Full Transcript

We’re on the road for eight weeks in a rental van driving around to see California’s beautiful national parks and wild nature. While we’re doing this we’re eating vegan food. I’ve been vegan for about four years now and it’s a really important part of my lifestyle. You’d expect us to be eating like black beans out of a can and nothing else. That’s not quite true. We’ve managed to find some great food and I’d like to share it with you.

Being vegan on the road is so hard. It is so hard to choose between these 15 different meals we could make for dinner today. Let me show you some of the wonderful groceries we found on the road. We have our basic pasta. We cook pasta quite a bit. It’s really good with olives. And a lot of times we just do a simple tomato sauce. We found on this trip a couple of really good pesto sauces. So these are both vegan. We have a black olive pesto sauce and a Sicilian pesto sauce. These are both really good on pasta.

Our other main type of dinner is a rice-based dinner. So we’ll use instant rice. These cook a lot faster than regular rice. So it allows us to use less propane while we’re on the road. We like these minute rices. We also have bran rice with shiitake mushrooms which is a really tasty option. This is also 90-second rice. On top of the rice, we’ll often do something like we have these nice ready-to-eat meal packets. This is an Indian coconut squash dal. We have a few other of these types. We have this one and this one. This is a fun product that we found on this trip. This is basically soy crumbles that is smoking chipotle flavor and basically, you just soak it in water and then cook it in oil for a couple of minutes and you can mix this with rice. Makes a really tasty sort of rice and meat dish. We also have some cans of soup. These make a quick and easy lunch. And we have a number of different sauces. We have garlic powder, we have
a hot chili glaze. For breakfast often we’ll do instant oatmeal. And we have some basic spices that we put in a lot of stuff. Tony’s Creole Seasoning makes almost anything taste good.

And we have a bottle of vinegar and of course our oil for being able to saute things on the road or as part of a salad dressing. For our fresh foods, we have this great cooler that fits under the bed actually. It’s made of styrofoam. We got it second-hand from someone who is giving them
away and it’s been a really great resource to keep our fresh food cool even though we’re driving around in a vehicle. So in here, we have it really well stocked right now because we just went to the grocery store. We’ve been actually eating a salad every day on the road. So we have these
nice fresh iceberg lettuces that have been lasting for four or five days kind of miraculously but it’s been great. We also have a cauliflower that I’m going to cook up with some chickpeas and curry. It’ll make a really nice dinner tonight. We have these mangoes. They’re not quite ripe yet
but I’m looking forward to them. And we also have creamers for our coffee. This one, the mint chip has been really nice. It’s like drinking ice cream but in a good way. And we also have, in here we have some pepper jack plant-based cheese that we’re going to eat with some tortillas, make a little sandwich, maybe with a little bit of lettuce. And we also have some hummus in here. So we’re pretty well stocked in terms of fresh foods.

Here’s our camping stove. So I have a lightweight pot. this is great for boiling water for coffee, making instant rice in, and making pasta in. To drain the pasta I push the lid in and drain like this. This goes on top of… This is a single burner Coleman camping stove that just screws into one of these green propane canisters. At the rate that we’re using it, we go through about one propane canister per week. And it’s been great, we cook our coffee and then dinner in the evening. It’s been really easy to eat vegan on the road actually. We’ve found lots of delicious groceries and it’s fun to put meals together. It’s not bland at all. We’ve eaten almost no canned beans which is great. I don’t really like canned beans. So the foods that we’ve been able to make from curries to pasta to pesto, it’s really delicious and it’s been a great part of the experience.