Before My Pantry Box Had a Name

This photo looks like I staged it.
I didn’t.

What you’re looking at is my living room in the middle of packing for a camping trip around Lake Michigan. Totes everywhere. Gear stacked. Lists on the table. Coffee in hand.

It looks like preparation.

What you don’t see is the anxiety sitting right there with me.

There was a time when I could be on a plane in three hours.

I’m not exaggerating. I remember one morning, I picked up orders around 0800, had a flight at 11:25, and in that window I had to go back, pack everything I owned into a couple of sea bags, get to the airport, and go. No overthinking. No stress. Just… go.

That was normal life for me in the Marine Corps.

And then, somewhere along the way after I got out, that changed.

I don’t need to go deep into it, but I will say this: I was dealing with PTSD after my time in the military. Over time, that turned into anxiety that made even simple things feel heavy. Then came fibromyalgia. Then food sensitivities.

None of it happened overnight. But piece by piece, things that used to feel automatic started to feel overwhelming.

And travel? Travel became one of those things.

There was also a stretch of a few years where we didn’t travel at all.

Life was different then. My husband was building a business from scratch. There wasn’t time. There wasn’t money. We stayed home.

And when you stop doing something for long enough—even something you used to do easily—it stops feeling familiar.

So when we finally decided to take this trip, it wasn’t just a trip.

It was me trying to figure out how to travel again.

And not just travel.

We were tent camping our way around Lake Michigan.

No kitchen.
No oven.
No backup plan.

At that point in my life, my food was extremely simple.

I ate meat, vegetables, and occasionally fruit. That was it.

Dinner, every night, was some version of a sheet pan meal—meat and vegetables, oil, seasoning, into the oven. Done.

Lunch was leftovers on a salad.
Breakfast was coffee with cream.

It worked. It was predictable. It was safe.

But standing there in that living room, looking at all that gear, I realized something:

I knew exactly what I could eat.
I had no idea how I was going to cook it.

That was the real problem.

It wasn’t the packing.
It wasn’t even the travel.

It was the fact that I didn’t have an oven.

So I did what I could.

I packed a Dutch oven.
I packed a cast iron skillet.
I packed what I thought I might need to recreate something close to what I was used to.

And then I figured it out as I went.

What used to be a sheet pan dinner became a skillet meal.

Steak with zucchini, asparagus, onions—cooked right there over camp heat instead of in an oven.

It wasn’t what I was used to.

But it worked.

Another night, it was sausage, potatoes, onions, and bell peppers.

Same idea. Different execution.

No oven. No sheet pan. Just adapting.

Looking back now, that feels normal.

At the time, it didn’t.

At the time, every one of those meals was me solving a problem in real time.

And if you go back to that first photo—the one with all the totes—you’ll see something else.

That shallow bin in the middle of the floor?

That was my “kitchen box.”

I didn’t call it that because it was a system. I called it that because I didn’t know what else to call it.

It held things like foil, baggies, a knife, a cutting surface—basic tools to make food possible outside of a kitchen.

There were other bins too. One for food. One for gear. A small cooler for the cab, and a larger one that went in the back.

It wasn’t streamlined.
It wasn’t pretty.
It definitely wasn’t optimized.

But it was a start.

At the time, I thought I was over-preparing.

I thought the lists, the bins, the planning—it was all just me trying to manage anxiety.

And part of that is true.

But it’s not the whole story.

What I was actually doing was building a system.

I was learning how to separate food from gear, how to bring what I needed to feel okay, how to adapt meals to whatever setup I had, and how to create some level of consistency even when everything else felt uncertain.

I didn’t have language for it yet.

I didn’t have a name for it.

But that was the beginning of what I now call My Pantry Box.

This photo doesn’t show a system.

It shows the moment one started.

If travel feels overwhelming…
If food makes it harder…
If you feel like you’re doing more than everyone else just to make it work—

You might not be overdoing it.

You might be building your version of freedom.

And sometimes, it starts exactly like this.

In a living room full of gear…
with a cup of coffee…
and a list that feels like it’s holding everything together.