DoE food recommendations, pot noodle not allowed

[Batceanera]

Does anyone please have any ideas for reasonably priced food which can be heated up for Duke of Edinburgh' trips. I'd rather it be vacuum packed than dried because it will be easier to cook. Meals will need to heated in boiling water (I think).

DC can be fussy and I am not worried about eating really healthily, they do that at home. They can take apples, they don't really eat crisps and will drink water.

Amazon sell chicken and rice food packs, they are very expensive. Maybe a tin of curry and a pack of rice would do for a meal?

How old are these children? Do they not have cooking facilities? I am not from the UK, so am not familiar with the DofE trips.

www.dofe.org/shopping/eating-on-your-expedition/

In similar situations we did pouches of instant rice, added pouches of tuna for protein and some vegetables. Or pasta with jar/pouch of sauce. Or for the first day curry etc from home with pouch of instant rice. This was for Trangia style camping stoves - depends what their cooking facilities are.

Jar of curry sauce, tin of garbanzos, pouch of rice or a baggie of instant rice you add boiling water to and wait five minutes, Bob's yer uncle.

Not as a dinner idea but for lunches/snacks, wraps are fantastic for hiking/camping. Do half the pack with cheese and the other half with chocolate spread, roll them up and pop then back in the packet for storage.

I've just had another thought, bacon is cured so doesn't need refrigerating, it might 'sweat' in the packet but that's OK.

How old are these children? Do they not have cooking facilities? I am not from the UK, so am not familiar with the DofE trips
All cooking equipment and food is carried by the participants and cooked outside. They typically use a Trangia.

Ignore the person who said cans aren’t too heavy - the kids take so much. Those plastic snap pots of beans are lighter

It's not the weight of the tin that's the problem, it's because it's hydrated food which is obviously much heavier than dried. Although I don't know if they carry all the water they need so it doesn't make any difference, or extracting and purifying water from a stream is part of the exercise, so that makes dried best.

Dried doesn't seem any harder to cook than dealing with vacuum packed food boiling it and extracting it from the pack (messy).

But I'd just leave them to it rather than giving them ideas. A big point of DofE is the participants working things out independently, rather than Mum doing all the thinking for them. There's lots of information about food on the website, so along with their likes and dislikes and whether they favour weight reduction over taste etc, they should be able to work it out. They're 15 not 5.

But the camping food might be cheaper from an outdoors shop not Amazon, which can often be quite expensive for things that aren't books or electronic tech.

A) they should be working this out themselves, it's part of the group tasks.

B) pot noodles are not allowed because they have very little nutritional value and take up a lot of space

C) part of the assessor's requirements is that they COOK a meal. That is not simply reheating a ration pack or adding hot water to dehydrated noodles. They should be combining ingredients - even if it's just cook pasta, add sauce, add chopped up hot dog sausages. This is actually part of the conditions of assessment, as much as route planning and navigation.

Ex-dofe assessor.

I also sent my son with those instant porridge pots.
I am sorry I think you might have misunderstood the school though - I doubt they said you could not speak to other parents or teachers for ideas. Literally thousands of kids do the dofe each year. The dofe website has ideas too.

The school probably don't want to deal with dozens of 'is X or Y food OK' or 'my poor strapping six foot 15 YO ickle boy doesn't like any of the food suggestions and I'm worried he will starve' type questions.

I reckon one could cook either pasta + jarred sauce + pre-cooked then frozen meat e.g. meatballs or something.

I've heard very good things about Idahoan mash and also about the Waitrose bacon and potato thing.

When I did d of e expeditions I took filled pittas for lunch (everything gets squashed in the bag any way!). Mug shots are good to have a something warm with pittas as light and don't take up much space. I think we did pasta for evening meal n took hot chocolate sachets too. Breakfast was porridge sachets you just add water too.
My bag was HEAVY was much better at packing the more I did so canned foods were a no go for me, too heavy! We tried powdered milk n eggs too... can't remember how successful that was though!

I have 2 that did DofE gold, no one in their group had tinned food. Everything was as light and as compact as possible.
They had some pepperami sausages. Easy boil rice. Pack of sauce.

Pot noodles give you very little energy for what they are but they are marketed as a meal.

I agree you need to let him figure it out!

The glitch with tinned/ pot food is that the waste remains bulky in the bag to carry out, as well as the weight from the start.

There are lots more options of pre-cooked food in sachets avaliable from supermarkets than when I did my award 25+ years ago.

Dried foods like beef jerky are easily avaliable too.

Last week ds was OK with taking fine egg noodles (cook much faster than pasta), a pot of stir in pasta sauce to share, and a packet of beef jerky to cut into small pieces and add in. They had instant custard and banana malt loaf for pudding.
The Idohoan instant mash packets, esp the cheese one, is amazingly nice and only needs something adding to make it seem like cooking for a good meal

Pot noodles are not recommended because the plastic pot can break and it takes up a lot of space for a small amount of energy. I would think that the packet style noodles should be ok as the carb part of a meal, just not on their own?

Packets of pre-cooked microwave rice are good. They have instructions for reheating on the hob on the label.

Quick cook pasta/spaghetti and some stir in pasta sauce?

Naan bread, pitta bread, wraps

Pouches of tuna or some sort of dried meat? Chorizo? Hotdogs?

[quote Faircastle]www.dofe.org/shopping/eating-on-your-expedition/[/quote]
they reccommend a 60 quid cooking stove? W the actual F?

They give their reasons why the Trangia is the suggested one. If people camp regularly it will get used over and over and last for years.

If the DofE is a one off, they'll be able to sell it, so anyone not sure about how much use they'll get out of it will be able to buy a second hand one, knowing they'll always be able to sell it on and get a decent chunk of their money back afterwards.

Plus there's loads of kit floating around that can be borrowed to make the scheme more accessible to people on low incomes.

How about filled pasta they takes 3 mins in boiling water and you can add frankfurters in with the pasta and a stir in Sauce, or pesto.

No one takes tins on DofE unless they’re ridiculously poorly prepared - their rucksacks will weigh a ton without adding that to the mix. Nearly every student ends up taking pasta plus those pouches of sauce that you can buy. Lunch - pittas or wraps. Breakfast - porridge which you make with water. Lots take hot chocolate sachets; everyone takes loads of snacks.

They should be in the supermarket sorting this out for themselves, btw, and should already have been trained how to cook a basic meal on a trangia. It’s part of the assessment criteria to have at least one hot meal that they’ve cooked themselves a day.

In (larger) Asdas in the world food aisle they have curry in vacpac shelf stable and rice is widely available fully cooked, just heat through.

On their training day, one of the tasks that the group should do is plan their food. When my children did it, they worked together to come up with a meal plan and a shopping list for the group, which they then split out between the group so everyone buys/carries some each. They went to the shops after school and bought what they needed. My role was limited to giving them money to pay for it!

They tended to do stuff like mushroom and pepper stir fry with egg noodles and sachet of sauce. Pasta, pesto with chopped up frankfurters. Pasta, sachets of tomato sauce, tins of tuna. Instant mash, hot dogs and baked beans etc. Nothing fancy, but nothing fully pre-prepared either. It's part of the learning experience to plan and put together the foods, as well as basic outdoor cooking.