Emergency Gluten Free Rations - No Refrigeration Required!
I’m in the marketing biz for a high tech company and this week the whole team was on the road to put on our annual client conference.
Location? A large hotel conference and banquet facility in the middle of downtown Salt Lake City. There are a number of restaurants nearby where I could get a safe, gluten free meal, but with the requirement to be there and working from 6am until sometime in the evening, dining out was not an option. I had to rely on hotel food.
Yummy.
I’ve written a lot about the challenges of eating while on the road, but the gluten free dining nightmare equivalent of Saw 3D has to be dining in a large banquet facility. I have about as much faith in the safety of gluten free meals from a banquet facility as I do in Chloe Kardashian winning the Presidency in 2012. (For those of you not really into reality TV and politics, that means I’m not really all that confident.)
Given the number of times I have either gone on hunger strike out of fear, or gotten sick from restaurants, I’ve started to bring my own food when I travel. This usually puts me frighteningly close to the 50 pound luggage weight limit imposed by most airlines. Usually I bring snack foods like Glutino Pretzels and Riceworks Chips. You know, TV snacks appropriate for football games – not meal replacements. This time, with some creative inspiration from Aunt Rissy, I took one step closer to “gourmet in a suitcase” with the following:
- Hot-Kid Sesame Rice Crisps
- Hormel Pepperoni (Turkey and Beef because I felt guilty about all that fat in the beef ones. Yeah, like the turkey ones are healthy…)
- Laughing Cow Original Creamy Swiss Cheese Wedges
Besides the fact that 2 out of 3 of these items have really silly names, they were actually chosen for another reason: None require refrigeration prior to opening and one could argue that refrigeration may never be required. I think I saw some of these things in the trunk of Mad Max’s car.
World Famous Pepperoni Cheese Cracker Sandwich!
The real genius in this selection is that you have everything you need for mini-sandwiches. A lot of them. The recipe is pretty simple and can be prepared in a hotel room without utensils, if you’re willing to spread the cheese with your hotel room key card.
- Two rice crisp crackers
- A boatload of pepperoni slices
- A sizable gob of creamy swiss cheese
- Eat in one bite. I found out the hard way that trying to take small bites out of the mini-cracker-sandwich generates lots of crumbs and the housekeeping staff gets cranky.
An added benefit is that these mini sandwich gems contain all four basic food groups essential to joyous living:
- Bready stuff
- Greasy meat product
- Cheese! (Did I mention I really like cheese?)
- The stuff you get to lick off your fingers when you’re done
In all seriousness, this turned out to be an awesome plan. I had them for lunch three days this week and was quite satisfied. They are tasty! And I really like that Laughing Cow Creamy Swiss Cheese. I figure 4 or 5 of these are equivalent to a real sandwich, more or less. Add some rice chips on the side and I felt like a real human.
Definitely a do over!
I’d love to hear about your creative solutions for dining on the road. What ideas do you have?
After an 18 month adventure through the catacombs of the medical system, I was formally diagnosed with Celiac Disease. The bright side of that journey is that I know 3,712 nasty and horrible conditions that I do NOT have. 
My easiest go-to pocket ration is a Tanka Bar and a Larabar. They both keep for a reasonable time, are pocket-sized, and are easy to eat. They are also minimalist on ingredients. (I have other food allergies so have to be careful what I eat.)
Other options, mixed and matched:
Aged gouda. If it’s deeply aged it will keep for a very long time at room temperature. This is my favorite travel cheese because it won’t spoil easily even though it doesn’t have preservatives. I also like Babybel but I prefer it if I have access to a fridge.
Beef or buffalo jerky. (I like it to be minimal in ingredients and grass-fed; this needs to be watched cautiously for gluten but I have a local rancher who makes jerky without soy sauce or anything like that and I love it.)
Almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, etc. Since I can eat tree nuts I like to stock up on these. Protein and fat are satiating, and it’s often a lot easier to get a gluten-free piece of fruit or plain white rice or a potato on the road than something safe with protein.
Dried fruit. In case I can’t find fresh fruit on the road.
Canned garbanzo beans. More cumbersome than most but so filling. I can eat these with just salt, pepper, and olive oil or tahini or something and be satisfied; it is a little more like “real food” than the snack foods that are my emergency rations. These are better for car trips than plane trips, though it’s easy to find gluten-free garbanzo beans at most endpoint locations, if you have access to a market.
Tasty Bite Indian entrees are doable anywhere you have access to a microwave, and probably doable with one of those coil heaters you can drop in a coffee cup, as long as you bring a heat-safe bowl too. I haven’t tried a coil heater yet but it’s tempting because sometimes hot water is hard to get. Since they’re stored in shelf-stable soft packs they’re a lot easier to travel with than heavy cans.
Tea bags: because it’s nice to have SOMETHING hot, and most restaurants have a pretty grim tea selection. (I can’t do much caffeine so coffee is usually out, and I don’t really like decaf.) If I’m drinking my own tea in a restaurant I just order their tea so they’ll bring me hot water, and use their tea if it looks good and my own if it doesn’t. I’ve had a Starbucks in an airport give me hot water for my tea for free, though, even though I offered to pay (I tipped.)
Instant black bean flaked soup is also nice for the ‘I just want something hot to eat’ feeling, and are easier to make than a tasty-bite entree.
I like to scout for markets near my destination. Though sometimes that can be kind of limited! On one trip where we didn’t have a car, the only market in walking distance was a Russian import store about a mile away. I can’t read Russian so most of the foods were not something I would attempt to try with my list of dietary restrictions, but I did score a nice soft cheese that was a bit like quark crossed with labneh that was made in the US so labelled in English and using US laws (so I knew they had to label wheat if it was included, plus traditional cheesemaking is unlikely to include gluten.)
On plane travel days we like to take fried rice or biryani or a frittata in a see-through plastic container, in case they decide to confiscate it. I haven’t had any food get confiscated yet, but I have had some get tested for being a bomb because it came out wetter than usual! So not wet on the food is a plus, that was just a miscalculation when we cooked it and we didn’t have time to come up with something dryer. Anyhow this really helps for peace of mind because I have only ever gotten ONE gluten-free meal on a plane despite requesting it on every flight I’ve ever been on, and that meal was… pretty darn grim. Even my gluten-capable of husband prefers the plane meals we pack to the ones the plane gives him.
Gretchen – Thanks for sharing all the great tips with our readers!
I’ve taken the beef jerky route too and that’s an excellent way to get something reasonably filling. And of course it travels really well – by design.
I love the Tasty Bite meals as well. One thing I’ve done in the past, with moderate success is to heat up the bags in the hotel room coffee maker. Not quite like using a stove, but I thought it was a pretty creative improvisation
Grocery stores are always a bonus if they are nearby. Packaged hard-boiled eggs are a great option. Of course these need refrigeration. I may have been known to empty the cold part of hotel room mini-bars to hijack the space for my stuff!
I’m impressed that you managed to make a Tasty Bite entree in a coffee maker! That fixes the normal problem of getting hot water out of one, that it tastes like coffee. (Not so good if you’re making green tea….) because the bag seals off the coffee taste. I’ve always managed to wangle access to a microwave, but it’s nice to know that the boil-in-bag option really works.
Well admittedly its less than perfect… But I guess ‘warm’ is better than ‘not warm’
Rudi’s loves this blog post! What about bringing along a loaf of Rudi’s multigrain bread and some nut butter, you could even still use your extra hotel room card to spread the nut butter! Rudi’s has been talking about traveling alot on our Walking in your shoes blog and definitely enjoyed reading about this Gluten-free adventure! Thanks for sharing!
-Tighe, Rudi’s Gluten-free Bakery
http://www.rudisglutenfree.com/2011/08/12/gluten-free-adventures-part-ii/
Wow! You win the ‘Traveling Gluten Free Innovation Award’ for the idea on using the room key as a butter knife! I LOVE that!