Today is National Beach Day and what better way to celebrate than to go to a local beach and having a keto picnic! If you are lucky and live next to an ocean like we do, you can head out to the beach and enjoy the amazing views and power of the water. Or, you can find a lake and enjoy the beach there. There are lots of options.
Snacks for your Keto Picnic
A good picnic starts with snacks and continues with food throughout the day! You will need a cooler, as keto tends to have real food that needs to stay cool. We have a couple of smaller coolers that fit in the saddle bags of our motorcycles. Is there anything better than riding out to a beach, spending the day, and then hopping back on the bikes to go home? Sounds like a good day to me!
Some of our favourite snacks include cheese. You can buy little packages of cheese and then mix and match. We love Babybel – I mean, who doesn’t. You can also get a bit more sophisticated and find small packages of Havardi, Gouda, and Old Cheddar cheese snacks. We find those at Costco. And then there is pepperoni. We have a local company in Nova Scotia called Chris Brothers which is world famous. Their mild pepperoni only has a couple of carbs in 30 grams. It’s delicious.
The Main Course
What is a typical picnic lunch? Fried chicken. Well, we don’t eat it fried anymore, but we sure do like chicken breast with the skin, and some sugar-free BBQ sauce to dip in. If you want to add the fat intake a bit, have turkey instead of chicken. The darker meat has more fat than the white chicken meat.
We absolutely love a cucumber feta salad. Lettuce as a base of a salad is so…normal. Try cucumber instead! We shared this recipe on our blog recently and it is really popular and different. Just a tip – if taking this on a road trip to a beach, pack the ingredients separately and then put it all together once you are ready to eat. If you put it together and then travel, everything will go soggy. No one likes a soggy salad.
Desserts on Your Keto Picnic
Last, but definitely not least, is dessert. After a hot day on the beach, you need something to end your day on a sweet note. Our chocolate chip cookies are amazing anywhere, anytime. They are sweet and chewy and delicious. And, cookies will hold up in a cooler until the end of the beach day. Since it’s a special day, you can even have more than one without any guilt or worry that you are falling off the keto track.
Benefits of a Picnic on the Beach
The water has always been my happy place. As a kid, I lived by a river, and I would spend hours swimming in it or sitting on the bank. Today, I love sitting on either a sandy beach or rocks above the water and looking out over the ocean. At times of stress, I find myself watching the powerful waves of the ocean. There is nothing like water to calm my nerves.
What is even better than water to help my stress? Food! When you combine the two, you have a summer get-away that can make a one day vacation. It’s shown that when people are outside, it reduces their stress. They get vitamin D from the sun and just being in nature helps us to take a moment to breathe.
The end of August signals the end of summer for us. What better way to celebrate the end of my favourite season than to have a keto picnic on a beach!
Wendy
