We're not dead...

... it's just not all that hard to live package free. Well apart from me with my various bad habit cravings. Although there are lots of snacks you can buy in bulk. I've probably said that before and I'll probably say it again.

So what have we been up to? Well there are lots of things in jars on top of our kitchen cupboards. Here is some sweet and sour vegetable pickling evidence, recipe courtesy of Meaghan's mum, I was given the job of sterilising the jars, but it was too scary so I retreated to the safety of the washing up and left Meg to it:



Before... and.... After...







There's a regular routine of butter, yoghurt, bread and granola making. All going fairly well except most of the yoghurt has been either slimy or lumpy or somewhere in between but the last batch seemed spot on. Hoorah. I think the temperature is key. Well there's not much else to get wrong.

What else could you possibly need? Well maybe some soup.



Mmmmm. Brown.
It tasted good though.

And some hard won, self-packaged cheese. It was an extremely exciting moment when Kala came home with this golden nugget...


Another discovery way up there on the excitement scale was that you can take your own pot to the gelato store and they will fill it for you. No photos of that, we ate it too quickly.

And last but not least there is a new member of the PLUMPY household. And he's pretty plump.



And hard to photograph because he's always asleep. But meet our new hamster, somehow he's got the name Bobbin. It just seems right. When I adopted him off a craigslist ad the girl said, 'You're not going to feed him to a reptile are you?'. No, we're going to eat him ourselves because it's difficult to get unpackaged meat. Unlikely actually. He's mostly fluff and his chewy noises keep me company working from home.

I'll leave you with an update on our new and old boxes. You'll notice quite a few beer bottles, maybe that's why we're not finding it very difficult.

Plumpy hikers

Just to mix it up a bit I decided to go on a 3 day hike and was thoroughly looking forward to it before I remembered I wasn't allowed any packaged food. My heart and my back starting sagging simultaneously. Sweaty heavy bread and watery granola it would be then. And what about protein? My meat eating body constantly worries about this. Way to much actually. It's become a bit of a thing.

Luckily we found a proteinous friend out on the trail. I stabbed him with my plastic fork and ate him whole.

Not really.

The first successful packageless camping food was some homemade granola, recipe courtesy of Kala's dad.


Due to the honey and other yumminess it's actually way to tasty and I find my hand inside the jar quite often. Luckily I abstained enough that there were sufficient amounts to take hiking. But what about milk powder? Crucial for granola and tea I find. You can get it in bulk but we didn't have any and obviously it was 11pm the night before I was planning to go. So instead I took milk in a thermal mug, perfect. And heavy. The theme of the packageless camping food.

Thanks (again) to Kala who went and found some basil late at night (it's possible), I made some cashew and basil pesto. Pesto is so quick and easy to make, who knew? Well, lots of people I guess. But not me. So along with some bulk pasta there's a meal. And with some cous cous and a slightly cheating foil packet of veggie curry there's another one - well we're allowed to eat up what's in the house and it was in the house. So there. And some bread, which was heavy and did go slightly sweaty but not too bad. And the never ending supply of peanut butter. Which I have made 3 times and has turned out completely (and progressively) disappointingly different each time. And of course jam, lashings of jam. Yoghurt covered raisins and pretzels are dangerously easily available in bulk. Mmmmm. And I happened to trip across a hip flask full of rum. Shame.

So off we went to Lake Ann, near Mount Baker in Washington State. I kept my mouth shut about my banana and pesto whilst crossing the border and all was good. Apart from a slightly horrifying moment when I thought we had about half as much food as we needed it all went well. And it was quite pretty too...


and Krista was so happy about joining in with the packageless adventure she was jumping for joy.


or perhaps it was all the yoghurt covered raisins. Actually I think I ate most of those.