If your eating on the run, then this might not be a good option?
However, if you stop and not opposed to boiling a cup or two of water quickly on your camp stove, this might help with the meal boredom factor.

I'm a big fan of Cous-Cous. Quick cooking, tasty and being a complex carb, it provides the fuel you need for paddling.

Take a zip lock bag and add say a 1/2 cup of Cous-Cous to it.
I put in a flavored bullion cube of your choice (keep wrapped).
Boil water, equal water to Cous-Cous. Remove bullion cube, add water and cube, stir and seal bag. Wait 5 minutes and you have an excellent lunch/dinner.
I bring Venison snack sticks/ Single Albacore/Chicken pouches. You can add to Cous-Cous for Protein to make a complete meal.
 If you have some fresh fillets, dice one up into small chunks and add to it as well.
  You can do the same with quick cook brown rice ( double water to rice) and there are other notables as well.  Quinoa is one that's getting popular. Unique in that's it also has protein in it, making it a complete nutrition source, Been around for centuries.

Nice part is that these dried quick fix whole grains are light in your food pack, pack plenty of caloric punch, and can me added to soups/stews or adapt well too almost any spice or liquid choice.

Do a little Googling. I'm sure you'll find many helpful tips/recipes.

If you don't mind cooking, I like to pack dried soup: lightweight, nutritious, and after a half-day of canoeing, you probably need the water and salt too.

Both Maggi and Knorr-Swiss make a wide selection of good ones, much better than domestic dried soups like Lipton Cup-o-Soup.  Oxtail and minestrone are personal favourites, but they're all good.

If you're tired at the end of the day (or if you eat your big meal at lunch and want more than a couple of granola bars for dinner), they're substantial enough for a quick meal, especially if supplemented with "nature's bounty" - fresh fish, wild mushrooms etc. Or if you want more calories, you can add extra rice or pasta. (on that note, orzo is the most compact, fastest-cooking pasta that I know of.)


 

PBJ every day
keeps the doctor away
puts a smile on my face


I don't know why, but I love it on a canoe trip....never eat it at all the rest of the year.

I don't like lunch "stops", just prefer a lunch break, and mostly not even that - more like just a pause.  I bring a variety of snacks that I can eat a bit at a time - I like a steady fuel supply, not a stop and refill approach - I may start on my "lunch" at the first portage of the morning.  So I'll take a bite at the start of a portage, maybe a couple more on the return trip, and finish at the end.   I do the same type of lunch for hunting trips or climbing tirps or whatever, so I always have a good supply of stuff to build lunches from.  

Problem with stopping to cook lunch, aside from the extra fuel you need to carry, is a full stop breaks my momentum - takes a while to get back into cruising speed for me.  For my brother, anything longer than 15 min and I have to hit the button on the shock collar to wake him up.  Anybody who can stop and cook up a lunch in half an hour is either really fast or exagerating a bit I'd think (and I'd suppose if you planned ahead and had everything ready in one easy to get at stuff sack, maybe a half hour would work).  For me, it would be closer to an hour start to finish, and I don't want to use up that much time - an hour, or even half an hour at midday is likely to translate into an hour or more of late afternoon paddling into strong headwinds - the afternoon winds are almost always going to be a lot stronger than at noontime, and I don't like that tradeoff at all.

I travel every day but one layover day, and that's "fast and light" as a backpacker would call it.  A half hour break every day for 14 days amounts ot almost a full travel day ( I average about a 10 hour day) - if you are doing a 10 day trip in 14 days, well, you've got that time to use - me, I'm doing a 12 day trip in 13, and I' don't have that extra time built in.  Obviously, if you are base camping, you have a lot more time to use for a lunch stop.

So I do the snacks for lunch - usually 2 or 3 "snack bar" type of thing - Nutragrain bars, Sunbelt fruit and grain bars, granola bars, diet supplement bars - with a "fruit" item, and 3 or 4 hershey's mini candy bars - for a solo trip, a day's lunch all fits in a sandwich size ziplock.  

There are probably a hundred varieties of snack item you can find in the grocery store - I just keep my eyes open and buy stuff on sale - Nutragrain bars go on sale at two boxes for $5, so I stock up then, and buy whatever else I see that looks good.  There are all kinds of energy bar types - Larabar, Luna Bar, Cliff Bar, whatever - I lke to add peanut butter cracker sandwich packages too.  When I package my food, I lay it all out on the floor, and work at getting as much variety into each day's lunch as I can, so I don't eat the same thing everyday.  I don't really care for Power Bars - most of the other things I buy taste better, and won't tear the teeth out of my head when I take a bite.  If its cold, you have to chop the Power Bar up ahead of time into bite size pieces.

I'll often mix up some raisin/mm/peanut gorp, and put a quarter cup or third of a cup of that in as one of the lunch items - maybe alternate that every second or third day.

The daily "fruit" item isn't a heavy apple, but may be a small handful of raisins, a few apricots, or a small package of fruit jellies. maybe some dried apples or banana chips - I alternate these too.

But everythng I bring is stuff I can just take a bit of from time to time, and all packaged so that if I don't eat it that day, I can add it to the next day's lunch, or just keep the leftovers in the food bag without it spoiling or getting too messy

The real "keystone" of my lunches though is two pints of cytomax drink mix per day.

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I mix up a pint in the morning, and drink that instead of water.  Water is good, gatorade better, but cytomax is much better yet.  Every time I take a swig, its fuel and water both.  Useing it, I have definitely been able to cut down on the size of my lunches, can go for longer and harder, and just't don't feel really hungy during the day.  Mid-day, I mix up a second pint.

I pre-package a scoopful in a baggies sandwich bag, and bring a piece of folded paper with it to use as a funnel, to make it easier to pour into my water bottle.  I use a pint water bottle, and bring two packages per day.

I know how much I need to eat, and that is a lot less than I think I want, or that I start out packing..
I normally pack a month or so ahead of time, and will repack my food, and then re-repack it, whittleing it down to the weight I want to carry.  I know pretty well what I need, and I don't bring a lot of extra food.  Its easy to bring way more than you need - but I don't want to carry more than I need.  I keep in mind that lunch is only a part of the day's food, and bring only enough to keep me going thru the day - I don't need or want to eat too much.  I figure that if I ever do get hungry, I can always catch a fish or two to supplement what I bring, but I don't count on fish for any meal other than once on my layover day when I have time to cook it.

You will be surprised at how much bulk and weight it will take for a 14 day trip - so it is a good idea to pare your food down as much as you can.  The tendency is to bring a little extra for dinner, and for lunch and some extra snacks, and ....  and that get really heavy really fast.

I look at the total day's food,and package it that way - i.e. day 1, day 2, etc -  I'll lay it all out on the living room floor, and arrange it all so that I have as much variety as I can get, and don't eat the same stuff two days in a row.  That normally means having a freeze dried dinner on day 1, and the same variety on day 6 or 7 - usually only have chili mac twice on a 12 day trip in other words.

  Alternate oatmeal and carnation instant breakfast every other day (with Milkman, or whatever powdered milk you like).  Maybe every 4th or 5th day, I'll go with a two-serving size of freeze dreid meal, rather than the pro-pack size - both to add just a wee bit more food, and to have a meal that isn't available in the pro-pack size.  I always finish off the days' supper with some kind of desert - instant pudding (I split a package into two servings, and bring the powdered milk pre-measured - mix by shaking in a ziplock bag) is a nice treat every third or fourth day, but mostly I just bring some prepackaged snack dessert - Dolly Madison, or something like that - a brownie, a strawberry roll, a coffee cake - something that even squashed, still tastes good.

For sure, I avoid cooking anything other than boiling water - the more you cook, the more you need to clean, the more fuel you need to carry.

Mat, if you use baggies for your cytomax, you can just cut off the bottom corner of the baggie to add it to your water bottle.  The bag thus becomes the funnel as well.  Not sure what that paper weighs, but as a guy who counts ounces, you might appreciate the weight savings.