Tina and I are going vegan for September, and we have a backpacking outing planned for the last weekend of the month. Teresa Marrone’s The Back-Country Kitchen is, once again, looking like the best resource.
Breakfast and lunch are not a challenge. I often have a Lärabar for breakfast at home. Oatmeal, bars, dried apricots (only Blenheims), figs, cashews, whatever, will get us through until dinner. But dinner is a challenge.
If you want to get started on trail cooking, turn to page 318 of The Boy Scout Handbook (14th edition, page 336 in the 13th edition). Choose one ingredient from each column, scale the amounts, and you are on your way.
Since the 11th edition Scout handbook in 1998, the cooking chapter has included a great “choose your own stew” recipe. It might have been in the 10th edition, but I don’t have one of those handy.
The 11th and 12th edition have slightly different lists, so I’ve combined both to make one table. I’ve also split vegetables out into their own column, since they are not really the same thing as cheese or nuts.
I was excited when I heard about this cookbook. We need a Scout-friendly backpacking cookbook and I like the idea of contributed and trail-tested recipes. Unfortunately, I have some reservations recommending this book to Scouts. Good information is buried in boring text and only some of the recipes are Scout-ready.
I had high hopes for the backpacking recipes in the 2014 Cooking merit badge pamphlet, but I’m deeply dissapointed. The previous edition listed a single entree with no vegetables and two dutch oven desserts. The new edition has two entrees, but neither can work as trail meals. The first recipe uses raw meat, forbidden in the requirements. The second is mostly heavy canned ingredients. Both have excess that you either toss (violating LNT) or pack out.
This pamphlet is an obstacle to a Scout working on Cooking merit badge. These recipes fail the requirements and direct the Scout towards a style of cooking which doesn’t work for backpacking. These recipes are not “quick, light, and easily stored” (page 47).
Prepackaged backpacking food is often blah and expensive. If you’ve thought “I could do better than this”, start with this book, Trail Cooking: Trail Food Made Gourmet. This is the brand-new cookbook from Sarah Kirkconnell, who writes at trailcooking.com.
The meals I’ve made from this book and it’s predecessor, Freezer Bag Cooking, are easy to make, cost half as much as pre-made backpacking meals, and are bigger portions, that is, enough food.
I made “Cheese Steak Mashers” (page 171) for a weekend backpack that was forecast to be wet and cold (it was). Here is the ready-to-pack meal (the bag in the center) along with the ingredients.
This is a surprisingly tasty meal. I always use this in my cooking demos and people are always a bit suspicious until they taste it. Then they want seconds. For a purely vegetarian (even vegan) dish, use vegetable bouillon instead of chicken bouillon.
On a whim, I threw in dried apricots and I was really happy with that addition. If you can get them, use local Blenheim apricots rather than the cheap stuff. Once you’ve had Blenheims, the Turkish apricots taste like cardboard. Trust me.
Backcountry cookbooks tend to stick to a single cooking approach, ranging from “just add boiling water” to cooking from scratch. You may need to sample a few cookbooks until you find one that matches your style.
Here are some of my favorites, covering several different styles.
Need that extra zing for your backpacking meal? Shelf-stable bacon bits! It is a three ounce package, so you’ll need to use it fairly quickly after you open it. But that might not be a problem. And it is at Safeway, so you can get it for this weekend. I might do that, since I’m teaching BSA Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills this weekend.
See Sarah Kirkconnell’s blog for the details.
For the Henry Coe campout with our troop this past weekend, I brought some bread mix so the Old Goat Patrol (the adults) could bake bread on sticks over the campfire. Specifically, this was the “Italian Stick Bread” recipe from The Back-Country Kitchen, essentially, from-scratch biscuit mix with Italian seasonings added.
I last made this when I was Grubmaster for the Raccoon Patrol in the early 1970’s. Back then I used biscuit dough that came in a can, the kind you whack on something to split open. That was more fun but this version tasted better.
Given the current explosion of water treatment options (UV, chemical, filters), I’m really happy to see the comprehensive test of products by the US Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine. They don’t test the UV purifiers, but the they have great coverage of filters and chemical treatment with a clear presentation — green, yellow, red for coverage of pathogens and one, two, or three checks for degree of purification for each class of pathogen.
In chemical purification, the Katadyn Micropur MP 1 Tablets (link to REI) are the clear winner. Reading the detailed writeup, the MSR MIOX gets three checks across the chart when used with an “overkill” dosage — the 8X option in the MIOX instructions. That’s good, because I already own that one.
No water purifier is a substitute for washing hands. We had clean, pure water at Scout camp this summer but still had a few kids get the barfs and runs. Use soap and water, and scrub for the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice. Not at The Chimpmunks tempo. No cheating. If your patrol gets sick, the fingers point at the cook.
Side note: REI has really improved the linkability of their URL, stripping lots of paramjunk off the end. Let’s all give them some linklove.
Most Casual Observer 