Saturday 31 October 2009

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.

2 comments:

  1. Breakfast (and supper) - eccles cakes

    Always munchable, but beware side effects of flatulence if sharing a tent
    ;-)

    Tortilla's a move forwards - I tend to take baby bel cheese & slice salami, filling the tortilla and rolling it into a tuve to eat. I tried pitta bread - works equally as well, but will go off after 3-4 days if its damp

    ReplyDelete
  2. Breakfast - muesli. If you get bored with the Oats then try packing a mix of things - Oats one morning, muesli another Granola the day after.

    Lunch - Baby Bel's are bombproof and cured meats are Ok for the first couple of days. Tubes of cheese and pate can be hand from shops. I tend to use Oatcakes but occasional make a home made flat bread with cheese, herbs, toms and garlic baked into it (that way you dont need a filling!) pasties or pies - Penny makes a fantastic sausage meat pastie :)

    Oh now you're making me hungry.

    ReplyDelete