Date: 2010-01-22
To: Food Prep and Maildrops and Gear- Oh My!
Miles today: 0.0

Oh my goodness! What sad neglect of a journal... There has certainly been a lot going on in my world, but I just happen to be really bad at sharing it sometimes. I have lots to share, so I'll start off with an entry on food preparations.A few weeks ago I FINALLY got my butt in gear on my food plans, which I intended to start in the fall. I came up with a plan that is far more ambitious than I originally intended, but I am SUPER excited about it! While I planned to make maybe half of my lunches and dinners at home, purchasing the rest along the way, as I started my crazy planning spreadsheet, I decided to modify this a good deal. In my opinion, resupply choices for hot dinners are pretty limited (way too much Lipton noodles), where as lunches and breakfasts are much easier.   My plan is now this: I am in the process of making almost all of my dinners, about half of my lunches (mostly cold trail salads to which I add water in the morning, producing a delicious, fresh salad by lunchtime- YUM!), and a handful of breakfasts. I do not like complexity or washing dishes on the trail, so my meals are almost exclusively made for the "freezer bag cooking" (FBC) method. All I ever have to do is boil water, pour it in with my dehydrated meal, and slip the whole thing into my insulated, super lightweight food cozy (Thanks, Sarah!). The most complicated it ever gets is maybe adding water to two bags and eventually mixing them together. I've taken a lot of recipes from Freezer Bag Cooking (Sarah Svien Kirkconnell), as well as adapted lots of recipes I've used before and cooked in the pot. Another book I pull a lot from is Lipsmackin' Backpackin' (Tim & Christine Conners). I'm pretty new to the FBC thing, so I've been testing things at home. All in all, I'm very happy with the results. I tend to not get perfect rehydration on veggies and chicken that are home dried instead of freeze dried, but with all the energy and fuel this method saves me on the trail, I'm happy with the trade-off! If anyone is interested in this concept, check out www.trailcooking.com.Now, here is the real kicker that makes this plan so ambitious, as well as so exciting: I am going for an insane amount of variety! I am happy with a little more monotony in lunches (and I really love a lot of my trail salad recipes!), but when it comes to dinners, I don't want to get stuck with 20 servings of a meal that I end up hating. To this end, my magical spreadsheet has 59 different dinners on it, with no more than 4 servings of any one recipe. I have made 14 so far, and have 45 to go. I may not have time to make the entire list before my start date, but I knew that when I came up with the plan, and that's just a-ok.So, this is why I am constantly up to my eyeballs in backpacking food these days. I have continued to be the ultimate procrastinator by starting this at least a couple months later than I should have, but it's all seeming to work out very well at the moment! Luckily, I really enjoy doing this, so even all the work is fun. Postscript, March 10, 2011: My food plan worked out great! The prep was an insane amount of work, but completely worth it. There were a couple of things that I ended up not liking much, but this generally worked out fine. I had a few times that I was up a dinner or two due to hiking faster than planned or hitching into town for an unplanned meal. In those cases, I'd just add my least favorite dinner from my pack to the hiker box. My food was repeatedly the envy of other hikers all the way up the trail!