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.

Even around the holidays, Brussels sprouts can be hard to sell, but this recipe will do it, and it will be wonderful to have something fresh and crunchy to add to your menu.

No cooking is required for this recipe, making it an easy side or appetizer. We like it best on crackers, hearty bread, or Melba toasts.

The celebration of the actual holiday in the outdoors adds to the revival of what truly matters about it- bonding with the people you love.We have heard many stories of Thanksgiving camping trips, and love spending it in our local wild areas ourselves. Even more exciting are the trips venturing deeper into the backcountry. In these cases, it is important to keep the logistics of food simple to allow you plenty of time to reach your destination and enjoy a relaxing time with your loved ones. Keep the meal confined to the essential dishes, and spread out the work among all the guests.

We thought through a few of our must-have dishes and adjusted to make them possible in the backcountry. Cranberry Bourbon Compote is simple and perfect to accompany any other Thanksgiving dishes. It is not as saucy as a standard cranberry sauce, but has the same flavor profile and is lightweight and non-perishable. It is delicious spooned over your other Thanksgiving dishes and would also be a great addition to a breakfast made out of leftovers.

The hardest part of planning a backpacking trip is planning your meals. There are specialty retailers out there that provide some wonderful options for backpacking food, but those aren’t always convenient when you’re planning a last minute escape. Whether you’re trying to accommodate specific dietary needs or you’re leaving early tomorrow morning, it would be nice to be able to get what you need at your local market. Regular markets can provide an array of options to get you what you need for a trip full of personalized good eatin’. Food should never be the limiting factor for whether you can take off into the wild and nurture your soul.

The Base

We generally like one pot meals backpacking, which are quick to cook and usually limit the amount of dishes to wash at the end of the day. Start with something that will take on whatever flavor you have in mind, and provides you with a lot of energy. Best options for this part of your meal that can be easily found at your local market are:

• Instant mashed potato flakes
• Parboiled rice
• Instant grits or oatmeal
• Quick cooking pastas like ramen, angel hair, couscous, and soba noodles
• Pancake or biscuit mix

The Bulk

All kinds of delicious things can be added into your one pot masterpiece. Build depth and interest with dehydrated or freeze-dried veggies and meats. As these absorb water and sauce, they’ll come right back to normal and melt into your meal:

• Dried mushrooms
• Freeze-dried mixed vegetables
• Sundried tomatoes
• Cured meats and jerky
• Canned tuna and chicken
• Smoked salmon
• Silken tofu

The Flavor

You can go any direction with what you’ve built so far, and the spice department is going to help you get where you want to go. The downside of buying pre-constructed backpacking meals is your inability to customize spice and salt levels in your food. Start slow, and build up to perfection. You can also create a sauce at this point with creamy thickening additions.
Our favorite choices are:

• Bouillon cubes
• Curry pastes
• Soup mixes
• Spice mixes that you buy pre-mixed or make yourself, like our Secret Weapon Spice Rub
• Powdered milk
• Peanut butter powder
• Instant bean flakes

The Toppings

To ensure that you’ll get variation in texture, add some crunchy toppings as a garnish. These can be daytime snacks that serve a dual purpose, or you could keep special toppings aside for a special element to each meal.

• Nuts (crushed smoked almonds)
• Seeds (chia, sunflower, hemp, millet)
• Crushed chips or crackers
• Bacon bits
• Shelf-stable cheese
• Freeze dried fruit
• Chocolate

Here are some of our favorite recipes that rely mainly on finds from our market.

Cheesy Mountain Ramen

Loaded Mashed Potatoes

Oatmeal Pancakes with Dried Fruit Compote

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.

I never imagined that it would be something that I use so much, but we’ve got this thing running at least three days a week! We’ve been trying to eliminate junk food from our diets and my dehydrator has become my secret weapon. My kids LOVE dehydrated fruit and kale chips. The stuff we make in the dehydrator is so much better than what we can buy at the grocery store and much more affordable (especially in the quantities we eat!).

The reason I bought the dehydrator though, is so I could get into making backpacking food. Dal was what I was most excited to try dehydrating, and I’m so happy with how it turns out. In this recipe, I add sweet potatoes and some kale for an extra boost of nutrition, because I always feel like we’re lacking veggies on the trail.

Before you dehydrate this, make sure that the sweet potatoes are broken down enough so that there aren’t huge chunks of them in your dal. If you start with a small enough dice, they should break down pretty quickly, but if it seems like the dal is pretty chunky anyway, you can mash it up a bit with a potato masher. This will prevent chewy bites of sweet potato in your rehydrated dal.

When the dal is dehydrated, it will be crumbly. You can just throw it in a bag. Don’t worry about breaking it up in small pieces or blending it.

If you’re car camping, you don’t have to dehydrate this. You can make it at camp or even make it at home ahead of time and freeze it. Then use it as an ice pack in your cooler for the first day or two of your trip.

One thing I’ve learned while on a plant-based diet is that in order to feel satiated, I’ve really had to fill up on healthy foods like fruits and veggies, beans, nuts and seeds. This seems obvious, but it’s easy to be a junk food vegan. Before I would reach for things like cheese and crackers when I got hungry and that would be enough. Without the cheese, I’ve had to retrain my brain to make these other healthier foods my go-to. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s getting easier.

Breakfast feels like an opportunity to cram in as many nutrients as possible in order to start the day feeling satiated. My breakfast of choice lately has been oatmeal and I’ve been making it on a timer in my rice cooker, so it’s ready to eat when we get up in the morning. I always mix in some flaxseeds and top it with homemade almond milk, but the other toppings vary depending on what we’ve got in the house.

One of my favorite combinations has been raspberry, almond butter and cacao nibs. I love this combo so much that when I ran out of fresh raspberries I even started reaching for the freeze-dried ones in the back of my pantry that I had purchased for a backpacking trip. After I did this a couple of days in a row, it occurred to me that this is perfect backpacking food. It’s filling, but still energizing, and it tastes delicious.

I would use regular rolled oats for this because I don’t care for gluey instant oats and I don’t mind the bite of slightly undercooked oatmeal. If you are concerned about fuel use and don’t mind the stickier instant oats, then you can certainly use those. This recipe serves two, but can easily be scaled up or down.