How and what will we eat??

As we talk with people about our upcoming adventure, some of the questions we often hear are, "What do you eat? Do you carry all your food? Do you stop at restaurants along the way?" As the "cook" in our home and the hiking partner most responsible for food on trail, it's most appropriate for me to share this story.

Well, let me begin to explain the process of eating on the trail....We obviously don't go hungry.

We have always eaten well on trail, sometime even baking. We purchased a 'backpacking oven' some years ago and I was able to refine the technique to bake fresh bread, coffee cakes, cinnamon rolls and even cookies. Lightweight, it was still weight we carried and the concoctions I mixed up to bake, were even heavier than the oven, so over the past couple years, in our quest to become "ultra-lightweight" backpackers, the oven has taken up residence in a storage box. Neither one of us has ever been a fan of the backpacking meals available at camping retailers... Expensive, full of sodium, poor selection and mostly heavy!

I've spent the past month researching and reading blogs and websites shopping for a new dehydrator... we dehydrate almost all of our own food and use a technique called "Freezer Bag Cooking".  Which basically means, all of our food is dried beforehand and I mix recipes with the dried ingredients and put it in a freezer bag, which, on trail, we only need to add maybe a couple small packets of additional seasonings or oils and boiling water, let it sit in a 'cozy' (or in our case, our fleece) while it re-hydrates and then we chow down! Gourmet stuff by most backpacking standards and is most cases we are the envy of other hikers.

After much research and study, I decided to purchase an Excaliber 3900 dehydrator. It's the Cadillac of machines and hopefully will serve us a great many years. It's quiet, efficient, has a 10 year warranty and the capacity to prepare dehydrated food for the Apocalypse. We've been using 2 'Ronco' circular machines for years, both purchased at yard sales for about $5/each. Marginal efficiency, inconsistent results and small capacity caused me to rethink the amount of food I'd need to prep for a 5 month hike. The most I've ever prepped before was for a month hike, so the volume I'll need this time required the new machine. Besides, with the garden we still grow, it will be nice to preserve the additional food for any emergency.

I have been experimenting with the Freezer Bag Cooking techniques for several years and have come up with some very tasty and easy meals that we love while hiking. Some of our favorites are beef stroganoff, chili mac and tuna noodle casserole. If you're interested in learning more about freezer bag cooking, please visit this woman's website.  FreezerBagCooking  She is the guru of this type of cooking and has taught me a lot of the basics. I've just taken it to a new level, modifying other recipes I use, making them trail meals. Fresh fruits and vegetables are the biggest missing ingredient on trail, so dried fruits, etc. make an adequate substitution. Not perfect, but better than endless pasta.

Our new machine arrived this week. Mind you, we're only 9 months away from lift-off and I need to prepare and dry approximately 130 meals before leaving. When we leave, all of our prepped meals will be listed on a spread sheet, packed into boxes labeled with each meal name and a number. Boxes will be prepacked to ship to us along the trail to start the trip, but as we hike along, we'll be able to call our "Logistics Manager" and have other meals substituted as we desire. For instance, if we get tired of something, we can ask her to send more Chili Mac or take out the Cheesy Macaroni for a while. "Send us 5-#8's and 4-#12's" and logistics will then go to those boxes and pack them in our next "drop-box" that will be shipped to the next trail town in our path northbound to Maine.

Our first experiment in the new Excaliber machine was Beef Stroganoff. Mixed with a new recipe from: Hungry Hammock Hiker, it made enough to sample a dish and dry 5 additional meals. I had also found some very large stuffing mushrooms on 'clearance' at the grocery store, so I thought I'd dry those too...

The vote from my hiking partner on the stroganoff was, "Fabulous", so in the machine it went, along with the mushrooms for 10 hours at 150 degrees. When I got up in the morning, I raced downstairs to check on our new purchase.... viola, shriveled and shrunken, leathery mushrooms, just waiting to be put into another delightful recipe and stroganoff, ready to re-hydrate on trail with just 1 1/2 cups of boiling water; weighing a mere fraction of its former self and for the same price as ONE manufactured backpacking meal.... and much more tasty!!

As you can see, eating on trail for us is the reward at the end of a long day of hiking......a gourmet dining experience in a trail 'hut' and a TON of work ahead of time.... but SO worth it!! So, for the next 9 months, I'll be drying most anything I can think of... vegetables from the garden, LOTS of pastas, meats, fish and fruits. Next up, fruit leathers with fresh Michigan strawberries! Bon Appetit!