Here to help is our new cookbook, available now! It’s filled with more practical camping recipes for any type of trip. Here’s a favorite recipe that you can make right now while you’re waiting for your book to arrive!

Our trips may be transitioning from extended camping trips to shorter, more spontaneous day trips, but including healthy and satisfying meals is still an essential. Wes and I recently became certified foster parents, and we’re excited to include kids in our near-future adventures. We don’t have any kids in the house yet, so we are using this time to do any last minute preparations we can think of. This includes figuring out how to streamline our normal routines so we can spend more free time playing with kids. It also includes figuring out some easy kid-friendly outdoor recipes.

We’ve started leaning back into the idea of portable foods wrapped in baked bready things. Most of our recent trips have included standard pigs in a blanket (hot dogs and cheddar cheese rolled in crescent rolls from the can). I highly recommend these, but if you swap crescent rolls for frozen puff pastry and hot dogs for buffalo chicken, you up your fancy game significantly.

The toughest part of this recipe is remembering to thaw your puff pastry in time to bake it (I prefer to stick it in the fridge the night before if I think of it), and deciding on your favorite shape to form it into. As you can see, I’m not great at picking a favorite shape (they’re all so fun!).

Everyone will love this recipe and it tastes just fine out of a cooler or even at room temperature. Feel free to swap the chicken with veggie chicken strips or baked marinated tofu to make it vegetarian and less perishable.

Both grandparents lived a long and happy life, and left us with tons of happy memories to cherish for many more years. Memere was the grandmother that Aimee and I shared from our dad’s side, and she passed away this week last January. She and Pepere used to travel across the country from North Carolina to see us every year. They’d sleep in the camper shell on top of their pick up truck, even when that truck was parked in our driveway for the summer. The original #vanlife?

My grandfather on my mom’s side passed away last month. He was known for seeing the most pleasant side of all things, and his puns. Every time I visited my grandparents growing up, there would be a Costco-sized tub of sour cream waiting for me to turn it into as many pound cakes as it would make. I just used Nana’s recipe, but somehow Grandpa would convince me that I made it best.

My parents came to visit me for Christmas, and my mom brought with her a pound cake. We took it with us cross-country skiing last week. It’s really the perfect snack for a day in the snow. It is tough enough to pack well, and goes great with a warm drink. It is by no means a low-calorie food, so an active day outside is a good time to consider it truly justified.

Some people get cynical about new year’s resolutions, but I still love them. I love thinking about January as a clean slate, and I love looking back on last year. I didn’t finish all my goals last year, but I got a lot more done than if I had made no goals at all.

My goals this year:

• Re-season all my cast iron.
• Learn to use my new camera.
• Learn to be a better trad climber.
• Adopt kids!

Another big thing for me is making it easier to get outside whenever I can. My life got a lot busier last year, and it doesn’t appear to have plans to let up. I need to streamline as much as I can, so that prepping (and thinking about prepping) for trips doesn’t take so long. This recipe fits right into that goal. Puff pastry can live in your freezer, and tastes delicious no matter what you put on it. These little pinwheels were quick to bake, and tasted great at room temperature or reheated. I took them on a climbing trip to Joshua Tree, and then made them again to throw in my pack for a cross country skiing trip yesterday. We like them with mustard, either baked in or squeezed on. Pesto or tapenade would be excellent too.

It’s cold and gray outside in a lot of places right now, but get out there anyway. You’ll never regret it.

This Cherry Pecan Fruit Salad is my favorite version so far. Cherries have been everywhere around here lately, and any kind would do here. It’s worth cutting them in half to avoid having to worry about the pits later while scooping up big bites of this salad. I also added some berries and stone fruits, sticking with tartness over sweetness when possible. The chopped pecans add crunch and depth to the flavor, and even a little protein to make this feel like a nice cold trail mix. I bet chocolate would be good here, too.

I decided not to make a syrup for this salad. It holds together pretty well, and doesn’t need any extra sweetness in my opinion, though I’m not considering this to be a dessert salad. I added chia seeds, which get a little jelly when they mix with moisture. This adds some thickness to the whole thing. If you wanted, you could warm the lavender in a simple syrup ahead of time to give the whole thing more of all of that.

When we go skiing, we usually bring a couple cans of beer with us. Last time, Wes got the bright idea to bury them in the snow so they’d get super cold for when we were ready to take a break. He found the perfect spot in the woods near the top of the mountain, and started digging a hole. Well, guess what he found- somebody else’s beer! I guess it was the perfect spot after all.

Later, when Wes decided it was time, he went to dig our beers back up. He chose his ski pole as the perfect digging tool, and ended up stabbing one of the cans. So of course, he had to shotgun it immediately (he’s a zero waste kinda guy).

In conclusion, beer is good, but having a hot cocktail like this Mexican Hot Cocoa is even better. If you are among the millions who received a Hydro Flask for Christmas, this is the perfect thing to use it on. These bottles do the best job I’ve seen of holding the heat in.

Mexican Hot Cocoa is warm and spicy, which is perfect for a cold day in the snow. You’ll get some necessary calories to keep you playing longer, and a jolt from the cocoa cafe flavored tequila. Take advantage of the winter if you’ve got it!

Have you ever tried Kombucha? It is supposed to be extremely healthy, (claiming to cure all sorts of illnesses and even reverse gray hair, according to it’s Wikipedia page), but it’s a rough one flavor-wise. It pretty much tastes like flavored vinegar to me.

So when Aimee suggested making a cocktail out of it over the holidays, I was skeptical. She left the job in the hands of our resident bartender, Wes, though, who made up this truly fabulous drink.

If you’ve ever had a shrub, this is very similar. It’s only slightly sweet, and a little sparkly. It’s a refreshing daytime type of drink. Perfect for an afternoon picnic or an afternoon relaxing in your hammock at camp. It’s a great drink to include in your January activities. You know- because January is when we’re all out there getting healthier.

Cheers! We’ll see you in 2016!

More surprisingly for me, given that I love to cook, is the burden of figuring out what food to bring. This is especially true when we’re meeting up with other people. It can be difficult to coordinate the menu so that all the components work together. Usually the food turns out fine, but it’s not often impressive.

As difficult as picnicking can seem, I think it’s such a good family activity. Earlier this year I decided I really needed to treat my picnicking supplies as I do my camping supplies so that we’re motivated to get out of the house for more picnics.

The most helpful thing I did was to simply declare a home for our picnic supplies. We used to have all our stuff in different locations and things would inevitably get put away in the wrong place. Now I always know where our picnic blanket is, along with a cooler bag, some outdoor plates, and utensils. I also know exactly where it goes when we’re done with it. That simple and seemingly obvious change has helped tremendously.

The other helpful idea I had was to come up with an easy picnic food theme. I can see this changing over time, but for now I’m really crazy about bruschetta. The beauty of it is you can have one person bring some nice bread and everyone else bring some toppings. Toppings can be all sorts of things, but here are some ideas:

• lemony marinated beans
• cherry tomatoes and basil drizzled with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper
• smashed avocado with lemon, chile flakes and salt
• brie with thinly sliced figs or apples and a drizzle of honey
• ricotta with dates and pistachios
• Muhammara Dip
• Garlicky Lima Bean Spread
• Eggplant Caponata
• Smoky Cheese and Pepper Spread

Now that it’s Fall, the cooler weather is another factor that might make picnicking seem less enticing, but I say just bundle everyone up and pack a warming drink in a thermos to accompany your bruschetta spread.

While trying to decide which overwhelmingly sweet flavored alcohol I was going to buy a whole bottle of, I realized they make airplane bottles of most of the flavors! I narrowed my experimentation down to five, and landed on vanilla vodka as the best choice for this cocktail. I expected to like the honey flavored whisky or orange vodka better, but vanilla warmed the whole thing up just one more level. It also made sense when I dolloped a scoop of freshly made mason-jar whipped cream on top.

This dip is inspired by a recipe on one of my favorite blogs, 101 Cookbooks. It is actually very similar to our Chunky Roasted Red Pepper Dip, but it’s smoother and a little tangier thanks to tomato paste and the pepper varieties. I tried a version with the heirloom bell peppers shown here, and another one with shishito peppers. Both were fabulous.

I recently got this Hydro Flask Food Flask, which is an awesome container for picnics and day trips. It kept the dip cool in 100 degree weather until we were ready to eat it, and is durable and leak proof, compared to the plastic storage containers I usually try to awkwardly jam into backpacks. Stanley and Klean Kanteen both make these in different sizes as well.

The original recipe calls for Pomegranate Molasses, which I didn’t have on hand, so I used a combination of balsamic vinegar and honey instead. Pita chips are my dippable of choice, but crackers or fresh campfire-warmed pitas drizzled with olive oil would also be lovely.