Since 2009, 80-90% of my everyday dinner is a vegetable salad. I didn't copy anybody, neither I am a vegetarian.

However, there was a cause for this.

It was my first tramp with WTMC. I chose a medium level of tramp. It was the 3 nights Northern crossing at Tararua Ranges.

The first day was the hardest, it was about 8 hours elevation hike with a heavy backpack. I was around 10 minutes behind the fast group.  Mika was with me to help, so I wouldn't get lost. When we arrived at the first hut everybody was unpacked and chilling out on the sun.
Exhausted, I started thinking about how would I do for the next 2 days! It supposed to be even harder. I had some kinda hunch that something wasn't right!

I asked guys who had the heaviest backpack. The heaviest was about 13 kg. Mine was much heavier! Everybody was a bit shocked and they asked to unpack it. As appeared, my hunch was correct! Something was very wrong!

The group leader, Paul, assigned everybody to take some tramping gear or food. I was asked to take some vegetables. I had no idea that it should be about 300 grams of asparagus at most. Instead, I took almost 6 kg of vegetables for everybody as I thought! It was totally wrong! At this kind of tramps, you calculate every gram of your backpack!

The first best part was dinner! It contained mostly vegetable cos we had to eat them all to unload my backpack! The second part was the next day when my backpack was so much lighter. Also, there was something else that everybody noticed. Nobody was as tired as usual after the first day of quite a hike. It was obvious, the vegetables made a great muscle or whatever recovery overnight giving us a lot of energy and not draining any to digest.

We had a great 2 more days tramping!

Since then, my dinner consisted of 85% of vegetables! Every time I have the same recovery effect of lightweight food, my energy reloaded, no heaviness or tiredness!

But what about protein? I do need it ... where do I get healthy plant-based protein? 
I add to salad some cheese or sometimes an omelet a side. Guess where I get my protein now? That's right! My everyday lunch is roasted buckwheat kasha! 100 gram is a nice portion which contains 13 grams of healthy protein.

Here is the article from Paul about that trip.