Cooking on the Trail /Camping

This is a great topic! I've been putting some time researching and experimenting with backpacking meals. One thing I have recently discovered is that mountain house meals, though are expensive, are not a bad choice as long as you don't have a sodium restriction... And you can add stuff to them. For example, as my husband and I were hiking into our elk bivy camp, there were some dumb grouse... and one of them ended up with one of my arrows in him...and ended up in pieces in our beef stroganoff. I pieced him up into the water we were boiling for the mountain house meal and just added him in to the meal, and it was not too bad!

I just got a dehydrator so I'm trying to learn about dehydrated meals so I can limit mountain house meals. You can dehydrate all kinds of stuff! And because I am not one to waste my appetite on mediocre food as I like to "enjoy" and not "survive" when hunting, im finding all kinds of good at the local store.. A company called Bear Creak has a great line of just-add-water soups/stews/chilli that you can use as a base and add other misc. dried favorites to, and the dirty rice mixtures are great too! I like the home made granola bar idea.. I want to try that one. My favorite breakfast is the oatmeal with powdered milk with misc fruit additives. You can even do regular cereal with powdered milk and just add water and have a bag-o-cereal for breakfast...

 

"You can even do regular cereal with powdered milk and just add water and have a bag-o-cereal for breakfast..."

Instant breakfast mixes with milk, but if you have powdered milk you just need water.

But heck, we have goats. Throw in a couple small cans of condensed milk.

I have a small Styrofoam shipping container, the kind they refrigerate medicine and body parts in, which I wrapped in tape to make it a bit more abrasion proof.

Freeze stuff with dry ice before you go and it will be much colder than normally frozen stuff. It will keep for several days in the Styrofoam. On one trip while others were eating space food, I BBQ'd nice steaks for Hannah and I. After seeing the looks on their faces, I broke out enough steaks for everyone.

 

We're getting ready to do a 10 day backcountry hunt and the dehydrator has been running round the clock at our house. I buy a lot of frozen veggies, they're already blanched and you just add them to the dehydrator trays frozen. Also, any type of soup or casserole leftovers from dinner just go straight on the trays and dehydrate up really good. Pasta, cook it and then dehydrate it. It looks the same but will rehydrate in warm water within minutes rather than having to boil in water at camp. We use the freezer bag meal method and just add hot water to individual serving freezer bag meals.

 

trail cooking

what great ideas from everyone! from my horse packing days I can add one more thing. the small boxes of Jiffy muffin mixes make great pancakes in a bunch of flavors. also the small boxes of biscuit mixes can be mixed up and "baked" wrapped around a stick, kinda' like a marshmallow over the fire.

 

"I have a small Styrofoam shipping container, the kind they refrigerate medicine and body parts in, which I wrapped in tape to make it a bit more abrasion proof. "

Body parts, eh? So your steak is riding in the same container that used to carry someone's kidney?

I suppose if it is good enough to keep an organ cold, it's good enough for a ribeye!

Reduce, re-use, recycle!!!