Quick & Easy Road Trip Dinners

On the road, often the menu looks somewhat like this: fast food for breakfast, fast food for lunch, and fast food for dinner.

Uh…definitely not a sustainable meal plan.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to whip up some quick road trip dinners on the go! Just pull over at a rest area, unpack a few ingredients, and take a break from the fast food binge. As an added bonus, you can stretch your legs and break up the monotony of a long drive.

Ready to dive in?

Road trip dinners with no cooking involved

If you want to avoid cooking altogether, I don’t blame you. Let’s start simple with a few road trip dinners you can make without unpacking the whole kitchen.

Although these meals don’t take much prep work, you will still need a cooler or cooler bag. Road-tripping without a cooler is no fun anyway, because you’re stuck with hot drinks and dry snacks. So make sure you bring a cooler and keep it packed with ice, both for your groceries and to use for drinks.

1. Tuna salad

Number one on this list is an old-time favorite. But I’m not talking about the ultra fancy tuna salad with a bazillion ingredients. For a quick & easy road trip dinner, you have to keep it simple. All you need are four ingredients:

• canned tuna

• boiled eggs

• mayo

• mustard

Yep, four ingredients is about a simple as it gets. Use one boiled egg per can of tuna, mix in the mayo until it’s creamy, and add some mustard to taste. I recommend packing some boiled eggs with you so you don’t have to stop and boil eggs somewhere along your road trip. Once the tuna salad is mixed up, you can serve it on crackers, bread, chips, celery, or whatever else you like to eat with tuna salad.

2. No-meat taco salad

Taco salads are great easy road trip dinners! Just cut out the meat so you don’t have to worry about cooking the ground beef or warming up already-cooked taco meat from your cooler. That still leaves six ingredients…which is still a bit much for a road trip dinner, but hey, eating healthy is important.

• lettuce or salad mix

• cheese

• salsa

• sour cream or ranch dressing

• nacho chips

• black beans (whole or refried)

Just throw everything together and enjoy your salad!

3. Lunchmeat sandwiches

Sandwiches are pretty common road food, and lunchmeat is a bit more filling than PB&Js, making lunchmeat sandwiches a top choice.

• bread

• lunchmeat

• cheese

• condiment of choice

If you want more toppings, just pack your cooler with whatever toppings you prefer.

Cooked quick & easy road trip dinners

Sometimes it’s nice to end a long day of driving with a hot meal. If you are a die-hard roadtripper, I know you have a stove. It might be an RV stove or a little propane burner, but you can’t be an experienced roadtripper without a stove on hand!

I like to use the Coleman double-burner propane stove. To cook a meal on the go, I can find a level picnic table at a rest area and set up the stove in just a couple minutes. I mostly stick to a few favorite road trip dinners that have a short prep time and short ingredient list.

1. Bean & Cheese Tortillas

Just stick a frying pan on your stove, oil the pan, and you are ready to fry up some tortillas! You may notice that I don’t list the oil in the ingredients list below, because it’s on my list of camping kitchen box essentials. If vegetable oil is not currently in your kitchen box, it should be.

So, minus the oil, here’s your ingredients:

• tortillas (I prefer whole wheat tortillas)

• shredded cheese

• black or pinto beans (either whole or refried)

• sour cream

It only takes a few minutes to fry a tortilla until the cheese is melted, then you can slide it onto your plate and have a hot dinner.

2. Fried rice

Fried rice may not be a typical road trip dinner, but it is simple to make, as long as you are willing to wait until the rice cooks. Do yourself a favor and use white rice, because it’ll cook faster than brown rice.

• rice

• eggs

• shredded carrots

• soy sauce

This dish will take both your pot and your pan. (I know what you’re thinking…another dish to clean.) While your rice is cooking in the pot, butter your frying pan and fry up the shredded carrots, then the eggs. Once the rice is done you can toss everything together with some soy sauce, and dinner is done.

3. Sphaghetti

This quick & easy road trip dinner is a family favorite. Like fried rice, making spaghetti on the road will take both your pot and your pan…but it’s got a super simple ingredient list.

• spaghetti pasta

• tomato sauce

• ground beef

While you have your pasta cooking in your pot, brown the ground beef in your frying pan. Once the meat is cooked, just drain some of the grease, then dump the tomato sauce into the pan with the ground beef. Yeah, heating up the sauce in a frying pan might be a little unconventional…but you don’t want to dirty up another pot, do you?

Once the pasta is done cooking and the sauce is nice and hot, you can dish up the spaghetti.

I hope you enjoy cooking outside more than I do. (I think it’s way more fun than cooking indoors.) If you’re new to road-tripping, click here for advice on planning your adventure.