Food for the Expotition

I love to read books about people who undertake great expeditions. Everest: The West Ridge and Endurance are some of my very favorite books. I don't necessarily have any grand mountain-climbing asperations; I just love reading about people who push themselves to the limit.

With all my reading about arduous undertakings, you'd think I'd have thought about what it takes to get ready for an expedition like that. But not really--they went; they either had great success or demonstrated extraordinary courage in the face of defeat. Not much is really said about what they ate for breakfast.

On the other hand, I have been consumed with what we're going to eat on our trip. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that we are across the country, so everything needs to be planned and packed a week in advance while we drive and get Jed settled. Reason two? We want things to be good tasting, good for us and as light as possible. It's taken a lot of thought to find things that fit all three categories.

Another reason is that I have been on a very strict diet basically since March. Doing so has enabled me to lose 35 pounds, which is so amazing to me. I feel so free! This hasn't come without sacrifices--I can't think of the last time I ate a piece of bread or a cracker. Backpacking food is notoriously carb-heavy, and while I know I'll be walking all day, I am so afraid of undoing all the good work I've done by eating noodles. I've come to crave celery, cucumbers, grilled chicken breasts, sauteed shrimp, apples and strawberries, and not having access to those things while on the trail is making me fearful.

a really crappy picture of our meal plan

So, we wanted food that would have a lot of protein and vegetables, as well as enough carbs to keep us going, AND not break the bank. We decided the best way to do this was dehydrate our own food that we cooked here at home. The meals we laid out for ourselves all have at least one vegetable, a protein, and a carb.

Our friends Alisha and Ed have a huge dehydrator that allows you to set the length of time and temperature, which is really nice. I had never dehydrated anything before, so it was just a guessing game of how hot and how long, but it was actually pretty easy. In the above picture, we have salsa (top row), spaghetti sauce, taco meat (middle row) and lots of taco soup (bottom row) getting ready to dehydrate. Dave fashioned the little trays out of waxed paper because we didn't want our sauce dripping through the mesh screens.

And here it's done! The taco meat is gone because it got done faster than the sauces.

A close-up of the taco soup (top) and spaghetti sauce (bottom). Appetizing, right?!

This is the ground beef and cream of mushroom soup for our stroganoff. Turns out creamy sauces are pretty hard to remove once they've dried to waxed paper. We ended up just rolling the sauce up in the waxed paper. I'm not sure what we'll do with it on the trail--pour boiling water over the whole mess, hope the sauce rehydrates well, and pull out the waxed paper, I guess.

Once we have all the components of the meal dehydrated, we just put them in small baggies and then in a quart-sized bag to contain the whole thing. Above, our spaghetti meal--cooked, dehydrated noodles (boiling water long enough to cook noodles or rice takes up a lot of fuel, so we cooked the noodles and rice here at home, then dehydrated them. They'll only take about 3 minutes to cook on the trail--minute pasta!), dehydrated spaghetti sauce, and dehydrated broccoli. I was so amazed when I dehydrated the vegetables. This tiny bag of broccoli was an entire 16 oz bag of frozen broccoli!

Some of our dinners all packaged up and ready to go--spaghetti with broccoli, white sauce, chicken, mixed veggies and pasta, tacos (that we'll be eating in pitas) and hamburger stroganoff with rice.

When it comes time to make dinner, all we'll need to do is pour the contents of the bags in the containers of collapsable Tupperware we're bringing along (it appears Tupperware has discontinued this line. Boo! It's such great stuff!), pour boiling water over the top and wait for things to rehydrate. At least, that's the plan. Since we're pressed for time, we haven't had a chance to experiment with this at all. Keep your fingers crossed for us that it works!

For breakfast and lunch, we've decided to go with a lot of pre-packaged stuff, because it's easier not to have to rehydrate things in the middle of the day. We have made two batches of pitas and we'll eat those for breakfast and lunch as well.

Dave and I will each carry a bag of breakfast and a bag of lunch stuff and split the dinners between the two packs.

A smattering of breakfasty goodness--home-dried figs, granola bars, instant oatmeal and dried cherries.

Lunchy staples--tuna and mayo; peanut butter and jelly; crackers and cookies; jerky; nacho cheese and more granola bars.

And because we can't live without treats, we have brought along some powdered milk and instant pudding. I am especially looking forward to those nights!

Even though it has been such a crazy thing to prepare for, I am so excited for this trip. I can't wait to get back in the mountains, to have a break from this crazy heat, to see our families and friends again. And I'm excited to push myself in different ways. I think that might be the thing I'm looking forward to most.