Pasta Cup

Not one of my usually posts, but I saw these Batchelors Pasta pot shots yesterday.

Tesco where these one's were bought only seem to have Tomato & Herb or Chicken flavour; so I'm not sure if there are any other flavours in the range.

The cost is 68p but there is the chance the they are on offer of 2 for £1.  They taste fine for a snack or as an addition to a main meal.  The only problem is the packaging is quite a hard plastic pot but you could easily transport the contents into freezer bag and cook it in them, as they only need 150 ml of water.

Because the pot is made from a hard plastic, I thought that it would double up as a coffee cup, the pot will hold 200 ml of water when empty of the contents and weighs in at 30g.

Feed me, Feed me now!!!

A normal day's food

7.00 AM 1 bowl of fruitful
1.00PM 1 1/2 round of sandwiches with various filling; 1 apple
3.00PM A Banana
7-8 PM Evening Meal
10.30PM Maybe a couple of biscuits


I've always had a problem with converting this normal day's food into backpacking food; I can never find the right food to eat, especially when wild camping.

Breakfast and lunch seem to be the biggest problems, and in all the years of backpacking I've never been able to pin these down.

On the recent trip I was trying out a few new ideas; some worked, some didn't work so well.

For breakfast I usually just eat breakfast bars but always find these to be quite bland and not very filling. This time out I took along 'oats so simple'. The oats worked out O.K, were filling to a degree but after two days, became boring and I wasn't enjoying them.

I can't be bothered with the faffing about mixing in powder milk; I really only want something that is quick and simple to do first thing in the morning.

I've tried other foods like pop tarts but find these taste like sweeten cardboard.

Next up lunch; this time I took tortilla wraps and these worked well, they were small and light to pack and stayed fresh for the whole trip. The only problem was a filling for them; I took a big lumb of Brie with me and this was O.K. but did start to turn after 3 days. I also had Chorizo sausage but again found this to start turning after a few days.

As usual I had dehydrated food for this trip; some old favourites and some new ideas to try.

Fruits are always a good item to dehydrate as they can be eaten dehydrated or re-hydrated; I usually do 4 apples covered with cinnamon and these can last 3-4 days.

Strawberry are another favourite and work in the same way as the apples; either eaten during the day or re-hydrated as a pudding in the evening.

Talking of pudding I found a great cake to make and take on trips; It called an Angel food cake and is made from whipped eggs whites, with essence of vanilla.

When made it is a very light cake and once dehydrated can be broken into small nuggets which can be eaten as is or as I did hydrated with a little hot water and mixed with either the strawberries or apples to make a tasty pudding.

For evening meals were the usual mixture of home-made meals and shop bought meals dehydrated; two of these were the 'look what we found' meals. These rehydrated o.k and tasted fine but were small in portion size.

I also took some Eccles cake but these seem to be quite heavy for the size to weight ratio; also they didn't last to long as they were quite more-ish.

I think I need to spend the Winter working on a good set of backpacking menus.

Alpkit competition

Others had already posted about Alpkit's new shiny titanium cookware (actual titanium isn't shiny but you know what I mean :-) ).

But what they didn't say was that Alpkit have a competition to win, said shiny cookware. Up for grabs is a full set of the titanium cookware; all you need do is submit a one pot recipe.

The entry form is on the website; so if you're a Gordon or Nigella around the campsite get those recipes in.

Oh! and there's lego figs on the front page (wonder who thought of that!)

Food

4 Brunch Bars (2 Raisin 2 Cranberry & Orange)
2 Quaker Oats (1 Apple & Blueberry 1 Sultanas, raisins, cranberry & Apple)
5 Packs Mini Time-out wafers

1 pack noddles plus black pepper & lime tuna
1 Uncle Ben's egg fried rice plus chicken pieces
1 Beef pasta soup

1 Expedition food Rice pudding & cinnamon
1 Expedition food Custard & mixed berries

8 Nescafe 3 in 1 coffees
8 Tea bags
4 bags of mini hobnobs

2 bags of Mike & Ike

1 big bag of GORP

Total weight 2065g

I think that's pretty good for 4 days food; although I would like a bit less chocolate but I can never really find anything to replace it with.