Food Preparation for long trips

Have a look at Cryovac machine. It allows you to pre prepare a variety of wet dishes that you only need to reheat when on the road, we even get take away Thai food and cryovac it before we leave.It is great for meat as well
Also with bread, if you use the lebanese style wrap bread it keeps a lot better than normal bread. Woolies also has a sealed pack of garlic/herb style bread that you can toast. We also use cruskits or Vita weats instead of bread for sandwiches

Depends a bit on your fridge set up. We now have two, one in our camper and one in the fourby. The camper fridge we use as a fridge/freezer so when we do a cook up on the road, say stew or Bolognese we can pack it for separate meals and cook as required. We then buy as we go and stock up just before a long stretch. With meat we get the butcher to cryovac it as this not only makes it last longer but it is easier to pack. We try to carry tin food a bit but watch the weight. We have baked our own bread when in areas where good bread is hard to get. Just carry those bread mixes and cook it in the camp oven. We found the camp oven is good to cook large amounts of good food just on the cook top rather than a fire. (We carry one of the portable canister tyre stoves and it is brilliant for the camp oven.) Kevin

Hi Leanne, I agree with Kevin, we travelled to Cape York last year and found the I.G.A at Cook Town will do up vacume pack of meat free, Woolies at Weipa has a very good range of meat and veg, from memory the food supply from the ship from Cairns arrives on Tuesday, so you have to be quick to get the fresh veg, Bamaga has a meat and seafood outlet opened everyday except Sunday, supermarket at Bamaga & Seisa also reasonable supplies and prices. I take rice, pasta and vacume pk noodle, you can also vacume pack nuts and dried fruit, you can make a dozen bread rolls with one pk of bread mix, they freeze well. My one thing I would not be without is my Dream Pot, I have had it for years and have used it for yoghurt, boiled eggs ,sweet dishes and prepared meals before we leave in the morning. Hope this is of some help to you, also don't forget to pre book camps sites on line. Maisie K

Another vote for cryoing meat and precooked meals. I portion and trim meat the way we like it before cryoing. We also have dual fridge freezer, but if I had only one would run it as freezer and transfer food to an esky daily. We run the freezer about -16 so the meat takes ages to thaw.

Other thing is to plan out all meals, taking into account anticipated activities including likely eating out opportunities. Assume you will have some bad days and have some very easy meals - bolognese can be reheated from frozen for example. I am a fan of drained canned potatoes halved and fried with a steak as a quick meal.Bamaga will have fresh fruit and veg and meat, but it may not be what you were counting on (or the price or quality may vary), so be prepared to be flexible.

You can eat out at Archer River, Musgrove etc, and they generally do good basic stuff like burgers, but watch for early closing hours. We typically end up eating out a little more than we plan on, especially for lunch.

We use one of these systemsAirlock
It works pretty well, very portable and is reusable.
We bought it at a camping show and use it at home as well as for camping.

It's interesting for me to see how many people set their fridge to freeze as I never do! I also don't prepare any meals in advance - and I cook for a family of 4. I just cook pretty much as I do at home. Spur of the moment and opportune to suit the mood and circumstance. Food should be a pleasurable experience - both in the preparation - and the eating. I just couldn't bear to know what was for dinner the day before I ate it! It would also take out some of the fun of camp cooking. Our family feels the ideal dinner is one cooked over the open fire and what we would cook in those circumstances would be a totally different choice to one we'd cook on gas. What I do is plan a list of meals that I can cook based on my available ingredients (I keep a running inventory) and I write up the "menu" of possible meals in groups according to how the meal needs to be cooked. That way, the first decision when arriving at camp is how can we cook here? And the next decision is to refer to the list of menu options and pick one off the list.

Just to clarify - I rely on cryovac (not frozen) for meat, also cold cuts. I do this myself at home but I will also try to purchase meats from supermarkets along the way that come ready cryovaced (quite common). There are lots of small packets in cryovac of cold meats, smoked salmon, chicken etc. Our meals are pretty basic - raw muesli with plain yoghurt for breakfast, tin tuna on a wrap for lunch maybe some hard boiled eggs and salads made from fresh grated carrots, grated beetroots, that kind of thing, cold meats or fish with some spreads like philly cream cheese spread, some gerkins from the fridge etc, snacks of raw nuts and fruit during the day, maybe cruskits, vegemite, cheese, lots of fresh black coffee in the Jetboil plunger, sometimes instant miso soup, 2 minute noodles for the kids snacks etc, but always a fresh cooked meat/veg meal at night and a bit of chocolate for dessert. I do make casseroles, rissottos and soups etc too. I do pack a lot of tin things and pantry stables like tin chick peas, dry lentils, tin corn kernels, coconut milk, curry pastes, tin tomatoes etc and lots of hard, raw vegies that I keep in a dark, cool place individually wrapped in newspaper. Lots of sweet potatoes, oranges, zucchinis, avocados etc. At some point I usually transfer these to the fridge as the meat and dairy supply starts to deplete and more room becomes available.

I don't know how people cope with only a freezer - where do you put all the items that you need at 2-6 degrees like yoghurt, cheese, milk, relish spreads, and other things you've made that you'd like to chill like hard boiled eggs, left over meat from last nights meal etc? I don't have much space - we have a family of 4 and we don't take a trailer but I can fit everything I need in the one 40L Engel not set to freeze. We all have swags and our vehicle is packed to the eyeballs both inside and on the roof. We've coped up to now and my kids are 10 and 14.

Good luck with your trip planning. As you can see, we are all very different people and it stands to reason we will do things differently at camp to one another as we probably do at home. There is no one-size-fits-all solution but you've got lots of good responses and ideas here so I hope that helps you but you're welcome to ask any more questions if you need more info.

Leanne
Don't forget you can also prepare meals with minimal meat in them which extends your fridge supplies.
Bacon in cryovac lasts a long time refrigerated (so Carbonara or fried rice/nasi goreng with hard boiled eggs sounds good), Salamis do last at least a week under 30C without refrigeration, best if you go to a real deli and see which ones they have hanging without refrigeration. Cheddar cheese doesn't require refrigeration, it's sold off the shelf in supermarkets. In addition tinned tuna and salmon, (tuna mornay), and you can get UHT cream in 150mL packs.
Have to leave some room in the fridge for the daily ration of beer or wine!!

It does not need to be complicated, you have a fridge and a freezer, so do what you do at home, frozen foods in the freezer and the other foods in the fridge. You will really only be a maximum of a week or less between shops.
Be careful not to put your potatoes in with your onions, not a good mix. Carry your potatoes and onoins in net bags, out of direct sunlight and they will keep for quiet sometime.