When we first realized our joint connection to the dish, we determined that it would be fun to make it in the backcountry. You may remember stories from that trip, but we’d taken fresh corn with us for it, and the weather was much warmer and muggier than anticipated, spoiling the corn before the first night. The recipe turned into a pretty sad mashed potatoes and gravy instead.

Since then, we’ve made it more successfully in other contexts, and are happiest with it as a car camping recipe. It is so quick to put together that you won’t have a problem maximizing playtime during the day and still having a hearty, special dinner to share.

Last year we cooked at a campout for almost 200 people and had made a bunch of curry paste in advance. On the long drive to the campsite, I realized I forgot to pack the curry paste! Initially I panicked, but Mai-Yan calmed me down and reminded me we could just buy some. We used store-bought curry paste, and it turned out great.

I still prefer making curry paste myself (using this recipe), but for a really easy version, the store-bought stuff is fantastic. It can be difficult to find, but a good Asian market usually will stock it. If all else fails, you can find it online. The brand we like is Mae Ploy. It doesn’t have any funny ingredients, and is seafood-free.

My kids love this, especially with toppings. They like it topped with peanuts and fried shallots. I like to add cilantro and hot sauce as well. You can find fried shallots at your Asian market, online, or get real fancy and fry them yourself.

When you’re cooking this, start with just two tablespoons of curry paste, and add more later, to taste. You can always add more, but you can’t take it out!

I’ve been using dehydrated bean flakes for a long time, but I only recently discovered whole dehydrated beans. I had ordered a sampler pack of dehydrated veggies to stock my backpacking pantry, and these dehydrated whole red beans were in the pack. I didn’t have high hopes for them, thinking they’d take forever to rehydrate, but they work so well! I love them because they have more texture than the bean flakes, something I’m always looking for in my backpacking meals.

This is a one pot meal, and it’s got lots of protein and fiber, both of which can be difficult to come by in the backcountry. Definitely bring a little bit of vinegary hot sauce (like Crystal or Tabasco) or even better, some pickled peppers (such as pepperoncinis) along with you.

Specialty Ingredient Sourcing:
Dehydrated whole red beans
Dehydrated bell peppers
Tomato powder

I’ve passed on my love of this dish to Daniel who has been asking me to make this on camping and backpacking trips for years. I kinda ignored him- too many perishables, specialty ingredients, too heavy… When a Sprouts Farmers Market grocery store opened in our neighborhood recently, we noticed they stocked shelf-stable tofu in Tetrapaks. Daniel made a new case for trying this dish and, after some experimentation, here it is!

Full disclosure, there still are some specialty ingredients required for this dish, and the tofu box weighs 12 ounces which will make some of you gasp. On the plus side, it’s ready in 10 minutes and one of the most satisfying and warming dishes I know of for a cold night out. We made this on our overnight trek to Mount Whitney and it was worth every ounce of weight.

Specialty Ingredient Sourcing:
Shelf-Stable Silken Tofu
Korean Chili Flakes
Dehydrated Cabbage

If you’re curious about hiking up Mount Whitney, the tallest peak in the contiguous United States, I highly recommend it. The main thing I had gathered from my research and feedback from other hikers is that it was going to be HARD. I can confirm that it was not easy, but no one told me how overwhelmingly beautiful and diverse the hike would be. For that alone, I think it was worth navigating a frustrating lottery system, camping in the backcountry with an unusually large amount of people, and dealing with poop bags. Train adequately and get out there – you won’t regret it!

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.

So he is actually my neighbor now, and we are friends again- after 10 years and lots of life changes. He came to California ready to explore, and had never been to the Sierra, so we jumped at the opportunity to be there for his first experience. I was lucky enough to get us permits to Little Lakes Valley, which is beautiful and (usually) a very accessible hike that too many people are on for me to be interested. There was SOO much snow this time, though, that it kept a lot of the crowds away. Hiking across miles of sun cups (little cups in the snow everywhere that you either have to balance on the rim of or fall into, twisting an ankle) was tiring, but it was gorgeous. We explored the whole basin and camped next to one of the only unfrozen lakes.

We spent the night before the backcountry portion of the trip car camping as usual, and cooked up this quick and easy Italian Orzo Soup. It was a nice warming dish that was very easy to execute after a day of traveling and planning backpacking logistics. I highly recommend it by the campfire.

One little note: the logistics of both car camping and backpacking in the same trip are tricky, especially in bear country. We always think about being minimalist and lightweight with our backpacking food, but are luxurious with car camping food, thinking it doesn’t matter. Our cooler didn’t fit in the bear locker at the trail head this time, so we had to scramble to figure out how to store it all in a bin and bags to fit inside the lockers instead. It is very important not to leave food in the car, so plan accordingly.

This attitude is very common among outdoorspeople. Most of us have been going out there to find seclusion and ourselves for a long time. We all want others to experience this, in theory, but not in the same place we’re doing it. Wes and I had this discussion as we slowly trolled through the first-come, first-serve campgrounds looking for a place to sleep. It is often hard to find a site, but it was ridiculous this time. And the worst part of it was that some of the people we spoke to were actually quite rude. We witnessed arguments, park rangers regulating improper parking, wildflower crushing, and frowny faces. Camping is supposed to bring out good vibes and connection! What was this all about? Don’t these people know the rules??

We ended up backcountry camping, which is an option most people don’t know about (or maybe aren’t comfortable with), and it was one of the most relaxing nights we’ve had in the park. Sunset fading to a full moon, quiet, and our own personal field of untrampled wildflowers. We cooked these hearty mushroom french dip sandwiches, adapted from this recipe, on the grill at a day use area before heading out so we didn’t have to carry much with us (since we didn’t even bring real packs).

When more people want to spend time outdoors, the need to protect more places for all of us to fit in will increase. This is a good thing! But let’s all do our best to communicate the important outdoor ethics that we know, and learn the ones that we don’t so we can keep these places wild. They belong to us all.

I’ve talked before about how one of my favorite camping tips is to prep a meal at home and freeze it. That frozen meal acts as a big ice block in your cooler, and you have a meal all prepped and ready to heat at camp. Whenever I make a pot of beans or soup, I’ll freeze it for this reason (if I have enough leftover). These Peanut Butter Beans are in our regular rotation at home and I took a frozen container of them on a trip to our local mountains this summer. Along with some flatbread and a quick salad, they were a satisfying and delicious dinner. The small amount of peanut butter makes these beans surprisingly creamy and savory.

I strongly suggest making these from dried beans, but the recipe includes instructions for making them with canned beans if you’re short on time. If you wanted to make these at camp, I’d suggest cooking them in a dutch oven on your campfire.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in the fabulous Madhur Jaffrey’s book, World Vegetarian.

That’s pretty much a typical end of a backpacking day for me. It seems no matter how much or little ground has to be covered in a day, I’m always racing to set up camp and get dinner going before the moon comes up. Luckily, on our trip to Mineral King, we had this Salsa Soup with Corn Dumplings planned for dinner.

In a nutshell, this is a spicy tomato based broth that gets covered in cornmeal batter dumplings. Let it simmer for 10 minutes until the batter is cooked. When you peek into the pot, your dumplings will probably have converged into one delicious cornbread-like pillow over the soup. In each bite you get a subtly sweet starch layer followed by hot and spicy broth. Soup naysayers stand down because this meal is comforting and will satisfy any ravenous hiker.

In preparation for the trip, I used a dehydrator for the first time. I didn’t follow any recipes but rather put random stuff on the trays and let it go for a long time until it appeared to be completely dry. There are better ways to do things, but I’m impatient, and I was really excited to use this machine.

Fortunately, the homemade salsa and red bell pepper I added to the recipe rehydrated really well in the soup and added texture to the broth. My salsa was pretty basic (lazy), just fresh tomatoes, cilantro, salt and lime that I pureed in a food processor. If you don’t have access to a dehydrator, you can purchase dehydrated bell peppers and dehydrated salsa. Substitute the amounts called for in the recipe with 3 tablespoons dehydrated bell pepper and 3 tablespoons dehydrated salsa.

As for the dumplings, I’m not talking about Asian-style dumplings but the other kind which consists of steamed or boiled dough or batter. Read more about the origin of dumplings here.

This recipe is modified from my standby Backpacking recipe book Simple Foods for the Pack – also mentioned in this Grits Cakes post.

I’ve played around with adding cashew butter to my backpacking meals and it often works great. You can buy little packets of cashew butter at natural food stores or online, and if you mix the cashew butter with some warm liquid at camp, you can add that creaminess to lots of different dishes. This Creamy Grits With Kale and Sunflower recipe is one of my favorites.

But as much as I love the simplicity of adding a little cashew butter to my meals at camp, sometimes it doesn’t work as well as I want it to. I tried using cashew butter and powdered tomatoes to replicate my favorite sauce on a backpacking trip last summer, but I just couldn’t get the same creaminess that I was looking for.

When I got my dehydrator, a whole new world opened up to me! I’ve had fun blending up my favorite creamy sauces and seeing how they dehydrate. The results have been impressive.

For this recipe, make the sauce, blend it and pour it on dehydrator sheets. When it is dehydrated, it’ll end up looking like fruit leather, but more brittle (if it’s not brittle, it needs a little longer in the dehydrator). In a completely dry blender, blend up the tomato sauce leather to create a powder. This step is important- without blending it the sauce doesn’t rehydrate as nicely.

The pasta comes together easily at camp. You could definitely rehydrate the sauce in a separate pot from your pasta pot, but to minimize dishes I’ve found that you can just sprinkle the tomato sauce powder directly into the pasta cooking pot. You’ll want to set aside some of your pasta cooking water so that the dish doesn’t turn into soup. I take some of the water out and then slowly add it back in once the pasta finishes cooking and the sauce is rehydrated (see instructions for more details).

The recipe is written for two large servings, but you might want to double or even triple it in order to make it worth the effort of dehydrating and blending the sauce into a powder. You can store the powder in the freezer to ensure a longer shelf life.