Trail Food

Follow this link to amazon and use the "Look Inside" feature to view the table of contents and sample chapters. Read the kindle edition free on Amazon Prime

This is about selecting food, cooking tools and cooking methods for backpacking and camping. It is applicable to all outdoor venues from general camping to ultralight backpacking. The recipes and preparation methods make preparing a meal as easy as boiling water. The ease and convenience is comparable to hydrating freeze dried meals except that this approach uses low cost bulk dry ingredients rather than expensive freeze dried and pre-packaged foods. You can use the same approach in your kitchen to create nutritious meals really fast and really easy.

For a backpacker more focused on walking the trail than preparing gourmet meals, trail food has to meet these requirements:

• It must keep the weight to a minimum.
• It must provide optimum nutrition for the hiking environment.
• It must provide enough variety and flexibility to avoid food boredom.
• It must build in enough flexibility to adapt to variable re-supply options.
• It must make it convenient to match an individual’s energy needs with the energy content in trail food.
• It must include ready to eat or no-cook options.
• It must be as easy to prepare as hydrating a freeze dried entree.
• It has to taste good.
• It must be as inexpensive as possible without compromising light weight and good nutrition.

This is more than a collection of recipes. Rather, this book presents a set of principles on how to design meals, improvise recipes and utilize less expensive sources of bulk ingredients and still provide excellent to superior nutrition at lower cost.

From the neolithic until now, man has traveled, on foot, over long distances. We have been moving, migrating, exploring, scouting, hunting, invading, escaping, and just looking to see what is on the other side of the mountain. Traveling takes energy, energy that is supplied by food, food that has to come from the immediate environment, from non-perishable supplies carried on our backs, or from an established supply chain.

This is about making the most and best of the food that we can carry on our backs.

This book discusses the sourcing of commercial bulk dry, energy dense, food ingredients that can easily be turned into meals. It also discusses the use of a food dehydrator to augment the commercially available dry foods. Drying bulk frozen vegetables, canned fish and meat, and surplus fresh fruits and vegetables is a fast and economical way to augment the available commercial dry foods.

A cooking method is discussed that is as fast and efficient as adding hot water to a freeze dried entree, but but uses economical bulk ingredients and offers significantly more variety and flexibility.

Ultra-light alcohol and wood burning stoves along with their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. The properties of alcohol fuel and the different kinds of alcohol is discussed.

Examples of ultra-light and low cost trail kitchen components are presented.

Multiple recipes are presented. Most recipes are recipe templates with suggestions of how to modify and vary them to adjust for taste preference, variable calorie needs and ingredient availability.

Examples are presented for meal plans as well as recipes. Examples are also presented on how to make your own meal bars and how to plan no-cook meals and menus.

If you are interested on the historical perspective on how trail food and trail cooking was handled in the past by early explorers and pioneers and the marching armies from the Roman Legions to the present, read the last chapter first.