Vegan Mofo Begins! ...a camping post!

It's the first day of VeganMofo, the Vegan Month of Food! In honor of Vegan Mofo, I'll be posting every day this week with some pictures of, links to, and/or recipes for delicious vegan food.

Check out VeganMofo.com for more information, or to look at blog rolls and check out events and giveaways throughout the month of September.

Just an hour ago, I got home from a weekend camping trip on Lovells Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands. Kevin and I have been to a few of the islands on day trips, but not to Lovells, one of the more secluded islands. So we chose that one for camping!

Lovells Island was used as an outpost in the Civil War,  WWI, and WWII, then was just abandoned until the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation acquired it in the 1950s (it would otherwise have become either a landfill, a fuel outpost, or a nuclear waste depository). The ruins of Fort Standish and various gun batteries are still here, though mostly overgrown.

 ...And you're totally allowed to explore them!

 (Bear with me, pictures of food are coming soon, I just wanted to post some of the cooler things from the island!)

 

 All this hiking and exploring worked up quite an appetite!

 This was our campsite. We did have a fire in the grill at one point, but we didn't do any cooking this time around.

These St. Dalfour "Gourmet on the Go" meals were awesome camp food! There are 4 different types, but only 3 are vegan, and only 2 are nightshade free: Couscous with Veggies, and Three Bean with Sweet Corn (the 3-bean one is also gluten free). We packed two of each, and alternated the ones we ate for dinner one day and lunch the next. This was the first time we'd tried them, and they're really good for canned meals! They come with a packet of "gourmet culinary sauce," which is basically oil, vinegar, and pineapple juice (kind of weird, but not bad).

Our second dinner was the spinach dal Tasty Bite (for Kevin, obviously) and New Harvest Kitchen's teriyaki mix (for both of us) over kelp noodles; no heating or prep required! This was the first time I had the New Harvest Kitchen stuff; it's a little pricy ~$8 a pack, but I ate less than half and was REALLY FULL. It's soy based (I think the little soy nuggets are supposed to resemble beef chunks?) and gluten free.  Pretty salty on its own, but it would be good with a bunch of veggies added.

Breakfasts were apples and Clif Bars, but I was too sleepy to remember to take pictures in the mornings.

We hung our garbage from a tree branch and jokingly called it our "bunny bag" instead of bear bag. (Lovells was, for a while, a rabbit run, and when later abandoned, was covered in rabbits. The hawk population increased in the last few years... so bunnies are fewer and farther between now.) There are no bears on the island, but there are some rats, so we figured our garbage shouldn't just be lying around.

That concludes my first entry of VeganMofo!  I'll see you all tomorrow with more posts about vegan food... and I'll leave you now with a few shots of the view from our campsite--the Boston skyline!