Food for the Trail

If I'm being honest, the real reason I started a blog is so I can show off my perfectly organized and packaged backpacking meals. Call me weird but preparing meals for the trail is one of my favorite things to do! Sure we could drop a lot of money on premade dehydrated meals but that would be no fun, too expensive, and I'm sure they aren't nearly as yummy as what I can make!

Here is how I plan and make our meals:
I make 3 documents on my computer (or handwrite it if you rather)

• Menu
• Recipes
• Shopping List

For the menu, I figure out how many days we are on the trail and pick recipes for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. Here is the menu for our upcoming trip to Isle Royale:

I found the recipes online and I copy and paste them into my recipes document as I'm filling out the menu so they are all easy to access from that one spot.  Here are some links to where I got them from:
http://www.trailcooking.com/recipe-home/
http://www.backpackingchef.com/
http://www.wildbackpacker.com/backpacking-food/recipes/backpacking-dinner-recipes/

I use those recipes to make my shopping list based on what I already have at home and what I need to get at the store and what I need to get from the internet.  So far my FAVORITE place to buy dehydrated veggies is Harmony House and I highly recommend buying their backpacking kit because its an awesome value! For around $50 you get all this and I didn't even use all of it prepping for our 6 day hike to Isle Royale which means I have supplies at the ready for a weekend trip in the fall.

                                                     Harmony House Backpacking Kit

Once I've got all my ingredients, I label my quart freezer bags with the name of the meal and any instructions about cooking it and then fill it with the ingredients (I color code my writing for meal type too, i.e orange for dinners and blue for lunches).  When we hiked the porkies, we did most of our cooking over a fire with a cookset but this time around I'm going to use the Freezer Bag method and make my own cozy (going to be doing that soon and will let you know how it goes!) Here is a great article that explains FBC: What is freezer bag cooking?

One last thing, when I hiked the porkies I was very ambitious and used the straw method (learn more about that here) of packing our cooking spices and oils but it was really time consuming and most of them opened up on the trail and made a mess so this time I made my life easier by buying a bunch of little packets online from http://www.minimus.biz/.  Cost me $20 but it was worth saving myself the headache and mess but if don't want to spend that then start hoarding slurpee straws and fill them up!  I also make a point of picking up freebies whenever I'm out eating or shopping (yes I am that girl who grabs extra packets of salt and stuffs them in her purse!).