Picnic food recipes and ideas

If you go down to the woods today
you'd better take supplies!

You could easily have enough ingredients in the house to make some kind of wrap or a good old fashioned sandwich such as the very English cucumber sandwich or the best chicken salad sandwich recipe.

Rolls or filled bagels are another easy picnic food idea.

As supplies go, salads are great for the keep-it-simple philosophy too. A salad or two, some good bread and you have the basis of a lovely outdoor meal.

The best salads for traveling are those which can be mixed or tossed before you leave home. This Italian salad is one of those and so is, what in my opinion is the ultimate picnic salad.

There are plenty of other tasty salad recipes for picnics in the Picnic Site, some of which can be used to make a meal, others as part of an outdoor feast.

You'll also find salad recipes here with beetroot as the main ingredient. Or there again, if you want red, perhaps you prefer to stick to the tomato.

Apart from salads, you can include such things as cold sausage rolls or hot sausage turnover, some slices of picnic ham (USA or UK version), chicken, gorgeous hand-made scotch eggs, big wedges of tortilla, or savoury pasties or pies.

Small vegetables such as baby carrots, baby courgettes, strips of red, yellow and green pepper, asparagus tips, celery sticks, radishes, cherry tomatoes etc. all add a bit of crunch and you can display them around a healthy dip or two.

As far as possible you want picnic food that you don’t need cutlery for – at least no more than a fork. And if you have to have meat that requires a proper knife and fork (for barbecue recipes for example) then make sure you have proper plates and not flimsy paper ones which buckle up in your lap!

Then also in the picnic hamper should be something sweet, such as coffee cake with walnuts, some variety of picnic cake, fruitcake or oaty flapjacks to satisfy healthy outdoor appetites.

And don’t forget the drinks and not just the alcoholic ones! Have lots of soft drinks and water available too, especially for children, who dehydrate quickly when they're playing in the sunshine. For ideas go to picnic drinks.