Stick-with-the-plan Soup: The Backstory

On our big Western road trip, we invested a fair amount of funds in food. Mostly we just wanted better lunches than PB&J every day. The end result of our varied lunch endeavor was that we had to cut back a bit on other meals. This cut was most felt at breakfast, where we ate 'gruel' for weeks on end. We called it gruel because after a week of liking it, it got hard to stomach and we had to mask it with copious amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha.

Gruel face.

So but anyway I am supposed to be writing about Stick-with-the-plan soup (which coincidentally also involves large amounts of salt, nutritional yeast, and sriracha). Before I talk ingredients, I have to talk Ed Abbey. Our trip was in the fall, which meant that the sun set earlier and earlier. So immediately after dinner, there was nothing more enticing than our sleeping bags... at 7 pm (8 pm if we really pushed it). Lying under the stars on the slickrock, we took turn reading out loud from Desert Solitaire and assorted stories by Terry Tempest Williams.

After about a week, we had grown to love Ed's cantankerous musings. We got a huge kick out of a line from his essay about The Moon-Eyed Horse in which Ed says to himself:
"But you're not clever, you're stupid, I reminded myself: stick to the plan."

This line especially hit home for us, because it was reflective of our lack of any planning whatsoever. We never found a campsite in advance, we never had a solid plan of future destinations, we never planned out our dinners. This lack of dinner planning combined with the random bits of food we had all brought from our previous trips and our aforementioned stinginess on breakfast and dinner led to some interesting meals. There were a few points on our trip (which for some wild coincidence happened directly before a trip to the grocery store) where we had to really scrounge for dinner in the depths of our food crate. What could we mix together to make an appetizing and filling meal?
The answer came to us in the form of Stick-with-the-plan soup. This soup/stew consisted of anything and everything that could potentially taste good together. Dehydrated peas, hominy, soy sauce, bouillon cubes, month-old cabbage, potatoes, rice, lentils, you name it! Bonus if cooked on a fire and some ingredients fall out into the fire because the pot is so full. We discovered that if you put enough salty ingredients in, it will taste delicious. Hominy not cooked, soup looks like sludge? No matter, it was still hot and filling. And it came about from having no plan.

Can you spot the soup?

Anyway, this is all to say that I named my Tumblr site 'Stick-with-the-plan Soup' because it is a smattering of trips and nature shots from my adventures over the last few years. Most pictures are from random wanderings, where there was no plan and yet it all worked out in the end. Just like soup. Ya know? 

So check it out!  I post pretty regularly with pictures of life at camp and of past adventures. As much as I want to update this blog with stories from camp all the time, it just ain't gonna happen. Until next time!