Re: Backpacking Dinner Ideas?
Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2016 11:00 am
Most of my life I cooked the way Wandering Daisy does. We both learned the NOLS group system. When I quit leading groups, I still followed the system sans the divvying stuff up between a cook group. If you backpack a lot, you can buy numerous freeze dried meats, fish, vegetables, etc. by themselves. Then reconstitute, cook the noodles, rice, pasta, etc, add typical spices and cook from scratch this way. This gives you almost infinite variations on meal choices. Curried chicken and rice and shrimp creole were two of my favorites.
I do have a new dehydrator in box that I never got around to opening. It is sitting in our pile of things for the yard sale before we sell the house and move. If you live near or will be passing through Sacto, you're welcome to come buy it on the cheap.
BTW, Kool Aid powder stirred into a cup of snow (ice) is great on a warm spring day. Best snow cones I've ever had.
I personally enjoy baking on the trail. I started out baking in a covered frying pan buried in coals. When we quit building fires we went to the Optimus oven. This post shows the oven I use now (the name is slightly changed):
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7941
I bake gingerbread, pineapple upside down cake, pizza, fish casserole, bread, cinnamon buns, brownies, you name it. You can flatten cookie dough very thin in the U shaped bottom for cookies. You can also make cheesecake, bury it in a snow bank and have a nice desert after dinner.
They have become a bit pricey as of late, but you can bake so many things in them.
This thing does weigh 1 lb., but in the old days when our packs averaged almost 90 lb. on the first day out, this wasn't much extra weight. In a group of 16 with 4 cook groups, a different group could use it every night, sometimes 2 groups in one night, so it wasn't that much extra weight per person with maximized use between many people.
I do have a new dehydrator in box that I never got around to opening. It is sitting in our pile of things for the yard sale before we sell the house and move. If you live near or will be passing through Sacto, you're welcome to come buy it on the cheap.
BTW, Kool Aid powder stirred into a cup of snow (ice) is great on a warm spring day. Best snow cones I've ever had.
I personally enjoy baking on the trail. I started out baking in a covered frying pan buried in coals. When we quit building fires we went to the Optimus oven. This post shows the oven I use now (the name is slightly changed):
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=7941
I bake gingerbread, pineapple upside down cake, pizza, fish casserole, bread, cinnamon buns, brownies, you name it. You can flatten cookie dough very thin in the U shaped bottom for cookies. You can also make cheesecake, bury it in a snow bank and have a nice desert after dinner.
They have become a bit pricey as of late, but you can bake so many things in them.
This thing does weigh 1 lb., but in the old days when our packs averaged almost 90 lb. on the first day out, this wasn't much extra weight. In a group of 16 with 4 cook groups, a different group could use it every night, sometimes 2 groups in one night, so it wasn't that much extra weight per person with maximized use between many people.