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.

Making pancakes while backpacking is easy and just what you need to fuel you up for another day on the trail. We made these Cornmeal Blueberry Pancakes on our last day of a short 2-night trip. It was perfect for a leisurely morning while enjoying the tranquility and immensity of White Chief Dome in Mineral King, Sequoia National Park.

All the batter ingredients where pre-measured at home and put into a gallon-size zip-top bag. At camp, the only thing left to do was to add water directly in the bag and mix. Tip: write how much water to add on the bag before you leave.

The Trader Joe’s dried blueberries we used are moist and naturally sweet. They melted in the batter and made for delicious sweet and tart bites against the earthiness of the cornmeal. If you don’t care for a sweet breakfast or want to save the weight of maple syrup, these pancakes are perfectly good without syrup as well.

As I cut into the pancakes, I discovered cheese, scallions and bacon all mixed into the batter. I was intrigued. I added a little bit of maple syrup and suddenly I had the perfect combination of sweet and salty flavors. I was hooked.

After many attempts of recreating this at home, mostly struggling with a good pancake batter, I am excited to share this with you. It’s my favorite new dish, and, since it’s savory, I think it’s fair game for dinner.

These are all typical ingredients, but combining them in a slightly different way transforms them into a delicious and surprising dish. It will make you happy! I suggest making the pancake batter at home to reduce prep time at camp.

We drove up to the mountains on Saturday morning, and acted as if it were a long multi-hour road trip. We couldn’t get out of town without first going to find the very rare but most important road trip food, Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. This is a food I have loved since I was a little kid at the snack bar of elementary school, but it was new to Aimee and Mai-yan. Aimee got a chance to eat hot fries on our Pacific Coast road trip a few months ago, and has been truly addicted since then. We went to the gas station near my house where Wes found the hot fries before, after begging him for the location (it was hard to convince him to divulge the location for fear that I would start going there every day). Our mouths watered as we got nearer. We rushed inside, looked around frantically, and more frantically, and after searching the store with three pairs of eyes for about 10 minutes, realized they weren’t there! It was horrible.

We then went across the street, hoping we’d just gotten the wrong gas station. Not there either. So, sadly, we got back in the car, drove a little ways, and ended up stopping at four more gas stations looking for them, with no luck. At the last station before the mountains, we gave up and bought Chester’s Hot Fries (two big bags), which are an acceptable stand-in, though not perfect, and ate one whole bag in the next half hour (which was the last half hour of the 1.5 hour drive).

The weekend was a success, and we were impressed with how little time it takes to bake 120 bags of granola in an industrial convection oven with 10 full-sized racks. Aimee is now on a mission to get an industrial kitchen in her own home stat. We were also lucky that our bake-a-thon happened in a camping setting, because we were met by Aimee’s parents and two friends who hiked San Gorgonio Mountain while we cooked. This also gave us an extra few hands for cleaning, labeling, and packaging, and made it a party weekend. It felt very appropriate to be cooking our Dirty Gourmet granola in the woods. It’s beautiful up there right now- the leaves of the black oaks are just starting to turn bright yellow. Don’t miss out on this fleeting season!

This beef stroganoff has been made for several trips already. We made the vegan version for all our meat eaters, and even the very most weirded-out-by-fake-meat person demolished their bowl. Fake sour cream really is quite good, and we used Smart Strips beef strips, which are our favorite fake steak substitute. If you don’t care about making this vegan, feel free to substitute the fake stuff with the real ingredients to make this Beef Stroganoff as dairy and/or meat filled as you’d like.