Breakfasts - bagels or english muffins with peanut butter and jam, instant oatmeal, cream of wheat or rice, cheese quasidillas, cereal or granola with milk, fruit leathers, scrambled eggs, couscous or rice cakes.
Lunches - stopping for lunch is not always feasible or opening the hatches and digging out stoves and pots takes too much time, so most folks rarely cook lunch. Rely on bagels, trail mix, apples and oranges, pita bread, cheese, gorp, dried fruit, nuts, beef jerkey, canned oysters, clams,sardines or tuna salad on crackers, beef stick (summer sausage/dry salami),granola bars and hard candies. If you want to take a break, especially on a cold day, get out your gear and put on a pot of soup to warm you up.
Suppers - here's where you can be a minimalist and open a can of soup or show your friends your gourmet talents. If you lack ambition or it's cold/rainy/buggy/etc., bring ready to eat one-pot meals like beef stew, soup or chili in a can. Also, packaged rice or noodle dishes such as red beans are handy and usually good tasting. If space and time are limited, use the freeze dried meals that you just add water to. I always carry one of these for emergencies. On the gourmet side, the possibilities are endless - bring a frozen, one pot meal for the first night, use fresh vegetables during the first week, dehydrate entire one-pot dishes at home or dehydrate parts of the meal and assemble dinner at camp.
If you have a recipe you'd like to submit, send it to: Dustin Beach or post it on the messge board. We'd love to hear from you.
Tips and Recipes
General Tips:
Avoid bringing too many canned foods as it creates a lot of trash.
Repackage foods that come in bulky packages. Write the directions on the baggie. Squeeze excess air out of the baggie when packing. Double bag if necessary.
Try all prepackaged foods at home first. If you like it at home, you'll like it on the trail.
Add dehydrated hamburger, turkeyburger, lambburger or chickenburger to packaged noodle and rice dishes.
Use ziplock bags for mixing ingredients.
Use sufficient water to boil pasta/noodles. Add salt first - oil is not needed, just sufficient water to boil. Pasta will continue cooking, so take it off the heat when it is al dente.
Bring several spices or spice mixes.
Watch out for MSG in packaged mixes. Also, the sodium content can be quite high, so don't add extra salt - taste before adding any salt.
Always test your meals at home! And, remember to pack out what you bring in.
There's a wonderful freeze-dried bacon product called Ready Crisp available at regular grocery stores. It is fully cooked and packed in vacuum sealed bags of 25 slices. You need no refrigeration, and because the bacon is already cooked, it heats in seconds with none of the greasy mess you normally get. The taste isn't quite as good as fresh cooked, but the simplicity of storage, preparation and clean up are really wonderful ...especially for large groups. The slices are small, so allow a couple more per person than with fresh cooked. If you like eggs with your bacon, take cartons of Eggbeaters to save worrying about breakage. Put the cartons in the freezer before the trip and then keep them on ice. They're good for several days that way.
