Date: 2013-02-07
To: Food considerations
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: overcast clouds

The last few days have been a blur of all kinds of activity. One activity has been somewhat neglected - sleep - and I was definitely feeling its effects while dancing yesterday night. The Princeton dance is on a Wednesday night, and for the past couple weeks I have begun working at 5am on Thursdays. I have not removed Wednesday night dances from my schedule. If I have to choose between adequate sleep and dancing, I will usually choose dancing. Beside, it's easier to fall asleep satisfied and with physical and mental energies spent for the day. I probably would have been awake until late at night if I had stayed home anyways, my mind wandering around but refusing to settle down.To carry or forgo a stoveOn Wednesday between work and the dance, I went to Shop Rite to investigate some different foods. In Appalachian Trials I read how Badger (Zach Davis) did not use a camp stove, and lived off cold food and town food. I liked the ideas he presented and practiced there, and specifically I had not considered tortillas as a thru-hiking staple. On novice weekend trips a few years ago I had brought bread and peanut butter, but replacing the bread with tortillas and carrying a variety of things to put in the tortillas seems like a wonderful idea. The idea of foregoing a stove was reinforced in Becoming Odyssa, and Portrait's success with tortillas and a variety of fillings helped make that path look more desirable. Portrait also added a filling I would not have considered to the mix - marshmallow fluff. While I did not buy this on Wednesday, I will have to get some to see if it is as good as he makes it sound!I must weigh the benefits against the disadvantages of going cold food vs carrying a stove. Going with a stove...+Can enjoy hot beverages and meals+More culinary options are available-Extra weight and bulk of stove and pots-One more thing that can break-Need to filter, carry extra water for cooking and cleaning-More prep time required for hot food, and cleanup time required for cookware-If hot food or fuel run out or if stove breaks, the rest becomes dead weight...there isn't a way to offset any of the negatives presented there, as they are all present solely because the stove is there. The breakage problem can be remediated by carrying the most reliable stove available, but that won't help you if you drop it in cheese goop like Odyssa. The proper balance between food and fuel carried can be carefully calculated, but that will only be the proper balance in an ideal environment. You can add a safety factor to the fuel to make sure you don't run out, but elevation and your own cooking efficiency will determine how much fuel you actually burn versus how much fuel your stove claims to use and how much time your food needs.Now let's consider the advantages and disadvantages of foregoing a stove...+Remove stove, cookware, and fuel from pack weight and volume+Reduced preparation and cleanup time when eating-Do not have the option of hot food or drink-Less variety available with the removal of heated options...There is less I can think of here, as it is a simpler system. Instead of food, fuel, cookware, and stove the system is merely food. The disadvantage of not having hot food on the Trail cannot be easily compensated for. It could happen, but mostly as a surprise or possibly as a result of spending way too much effort building a fire. Portrait describes an impromptu grilled cheese made by holding tortillas and cheese over the embers of a fire someone else had built. Maybe if I camp for the night with anyone that is carrying a stove, I can trade some of my food for some of their cooked food and mix things up that way. The lack of variety isn't a terrible disadvantage, either. There is limited space in my pack - the space that would be occpied by the stove and related items can easily be filled with different cold foods and I know I can keep my options open, instead of just filling it with more of the same things. I can mix things up with some comfort / "luxury" foods that I would not have brought along if my food bag was dedicated to stove, fuel, cookware, tortillas and their fillings, granola bars, and pasta sides!Tortilla filling considerationsAs I was mostly considering my options for tortilla fillings, I largely skimmed over the other options. I know I scanned the instant pasta, rice, and quinoa options extensively the last time I was at Shop Rite. There is nothing more for me to see there. I already had a small jar of almond butter in my pack, as I felt that would be a nice alternative to peanut butter. I planned to augment that with a jar of Nutella, but that came in a large, awkwardly-shaped jar. There was a store brand hazelnut spread available, but that came in a glass jar and I wasn't sure if I wanted to risk bringing glass with me, for weight and safety reasons. Instead of any hazelnut spread, I wound up picking up a jar of peanut butter that had dark chocolate mixed into it. There's an open jar of Nutella I spotted at home recently, so I will compare the two and see if it is a substitute or something else entirely. I figure if I decide to go with a cold food plan of action that relies heavily on tortillas and their fillings (and maybe crackers to put those fillings on, too) I will go for a few different jarred products.I also wonder if it would be wise to remove the jarred products from their jars, and maybe put them in freezer bags. Here I am not concerned with weight savings - unless I encounter something that only comes in a glass jar - but with volume savings. I could fit granola bars, powder drinks, and other items in between the jars but it is still not an efficient packing system. I can't effectively use that space between the jars, and when I remove any of them I have to remove everything else as well, or else it just gets squished to the bottom and I wind up with more wasted space. Additionally, with a bag I would gradually shrink the size of each otherwise jarred item as I consume it. A near-empty jar of peanut butter is plenty of wasted space! At home, or if people are sending mail drops, I can also extract all of the delicious filling out of the jar and bag it with much less difficulty than trying to scrape the dregs while on the Trail and hungry. If the jarred items become bagged items, they take on a much more ideal form factor for packing and saving space in my food bag. Even if I double-bag with freezer bags and carry a few extras at the bottom of my food bag, I think I will wind up reducing the volume and weight of my food bag.The actual food shopping resultsThose thoughts aside, I walked out of the grocery store with some of the expected items - a jar of dark chocolate peanut butter, a stack of 30 tortillas, a couple blocks of cheese, and a few different packets of tuna and salmon. One of the tuna packets is advertised to be a pre-cooked and marinated tuna steak... this cost slightly more than the shredded tuna and salmon, but it also featured 160 calories in 4 ounces as opposed to 150 calories in 5 ounces. That isn't a big enough difference to sway my decision on its own, but I will see if the marinade flavours do enough to push it over the edge. I did not get any shredded chicken, but I will have to remember to look for that in the future. The cheese I selected this time was smoked cheddar and gouda. I could have purchased cheaper processed cheeses - and may do that in the future for presumably lower cost and longer pack life - but for now, I will purchase cheese that I will inevitably enjoy before I leave for the Trail. In cooler months I will certainly supplement the cheese with pepperoni, summer sausage, and the like.I also walked out of the store with a couple things I had not anticipated. One of those was Tortilla Stuffers. If I saw these before, I glossed over them as I enjoy good Mexican-styled food and would not have considered prepared burrito fillings over preparing it all myself or eating out. However, these are beef, rice, and beans pre-cooked and packaged in their juices (and probably lots of preservatives), with the idea that you microwave them and dump them onto a tortilla. I guess it is like those microwave burritos you see at convenience stores, except it doesn't seem as terrifying to me since it is not yet a burrito in its final state. It is staring at me and letting me know it has existed for far longer than a burrito should exist. The calories per unit weight of these Tortilla Stuffers is less than desirable, but if they are halfway decent I may throw a few in my pack for the novelty. In addition to this item, I purchased a couple bagged, prepared soups. In hindsight I probably will not get these, as they are not bulky but very heavy. The chorizo-chicken-gouda one sounds really tasty, but it is still 14oz and has just 420 calories. Still, it is an improvement over canned soup by virtue of the more helpful geometry. I wonder if I can get bagged chocolate milk south of Canada.Eating trail food before leaving, the least exciting partNow that I have all these different foods, I should really get around to eating more of them and sorting out what is the best and worst of my selections. Even before I had considered removing a stove from my pack, I was finding the Pasta Sides less than desirable. It seems like they all require 1/2 cup of milk for cooking. I tried making them with the powdered skim milk I had bought, which itself was even less appealing than skim milk. A friend told me about powdered goats milk, which they said contained fat, but I was unable to find any. I saw powdered buttermilk, but opted against trying that out. Unless I find a way to improve them considerably, the Pasta Sides and other generic pasta and rice things are an arguement against packing a stove in my mind. Either way, I should start eating more of my potential food candidates and getting a better idea of what is my desirable course of action.Peace,