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.

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.

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.

Fall is (slowly) taking over now, which is a great time for us to think back before we think forward to the next season. What went right? What went wrong? Did we find new places to explore more? Did we come up with any new ideas to put into practice? The answers are all yes for us. What about you?

Some things we learned:

• Maple sugar can be melted into water to make pretty perfect maple syrup that doesn’t spill in your pack. Coconut oil can be found in individual packets fairly easy, and is solid at room temperature, coming close to solving the same spillage issue for backpacking with oil.
• If you’re cooking for a crowd, this Camp Chef Explorer stove is an awesome thing to own. A cast iron griddle is, too. We’re excited about having a large propane tank so we don’t have to waste so many small green canisters, since we do so much camp cooking.
• Leave Los Angeles for a road trip north at 4:15am, and you’ll sail. You’ll be in San Francisco by 10:30am, or Tahoe by noon. This is very doable for a quick 3-day weekend trip. We’re going to start planning more camping trips around there.
• If you’re not sure how much fuel is left in your compressed gas canister, you can float it in water and it will float at the line the fuel is down to. Thank you to the Outessa participant that taught us this one!

While teaching our Campfire Cooking classes for the REI Outessa events this summer, we came up with a few recipes. The Mountain Berry Cobbler we recently posted was one, and here is another. This is a simple sandwich that reminded us how good simple can be. We used a spicy dairy-free pesto, which is a good option to have around for sandwiches in warm weather, where perishability is a factor.

We started looking at our pie irons as leftover transformers. The pesto and cheddar were reused ingredients from other meals we’d made. When we eventually ran out of these ingredients, we switched to a chocolate and Probar Almond Butter sandwich, which was also incredible.

Fall doesn’t mean camping season is over. It means you get your favorite trails to yourself. Let this beautiful season begin!

Nuts are a great vegetarian source of protein, so I have lots of them around my house. They can be used in all sorts of dishes, but if you make them flavorful on their own, they are perfect to take with you wherever you may go. These orange sesame almonds are similar to the commonly found tamari almonds I’ve seen around, but offer a more subtle and bright flavor combination. I throw a jar of orange sesame almonds into my backpack and take them to work, to the climbing gym, or even skiing.

You can make fries out of most veggies, and they are all delicious. I love zucchini fries and mushroom fries and regular ol’ potato fries, but I really love green bean fries a lot. The most difficult part of making a breaded recipe while camping is the egg dredge. We’ve avoided that here by using chia seeds instead. They can be mixed with water to create an egg-like texture that will hold the breading onto the veggies quite effectively, and there’s no perishability or transport factor to consider.

The breading on green beans generally doesn’t appear to do well holding onto the beans (due to their tough skin), but when baked, the whole thing has the crisp coated texture that you’re looking for.

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.

We had planned to paddleboard camp on Lake Minnewanka while we were in Banff, but the cold rain just kept coming. It had been raining all week, but Thursday was supposed to be the worst of it. We’d already made reservations, but called the very nice lady in charge at Bow Valley SUP, who helped us switch to a half day on Friday.We drove out to Canmore that morning, and the clouds parted. It became a perfect day.

They suggested we just drive up the road to the reservoir instead of heading back into Banff, since we now only had 3 hours. I was pretty disappointed when I heard that, but couldn’t believe how gorgeous just the little town reservoir was! A backdrop of the incredible Canadian Rockies and the glacial blue color of the water were still with us.

Paddleboarding was much easier and more relaxing than I expected. We rented inflatables, which were very stable, and took them up to a nice pullover point to have delicious falafel sandwiches for lunch. I wouldn’t recommend the chopping methods you see here, unless you’re desperate. Knives and inflatables usually don’t mix well. I had a LOT of supervision. You’d really “falafel” if you popped a rental board.