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!

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

If you’re cooking up breakfast for a crowd:

• If you’re cooking for a crowd and you own a dutch oven, this Dutch Oven Breakfast Casserole is a sure hit.

  

• Dust off your old pie iron and make some Campfire Cinnamon Roll Waffles. It’ll work just fine if you have a regular pie iron, but waffle irons are fun if you’re looking for a new camping toy.

  

• Campfire Breakfast Potatoes are perfect with scrambled eggs and bacon.

  

For snacking during the day:

• Make this Spicy Peanut Dip at home and dip carrots, cucumbers and bell peppers in it for a healthy and satisfying snack.

  

• These Spicy Potato Flatbreads are one of my favorite snacks. They’re savory, and totally satisfying even if you eat them at room temperature (i.e. they’ve been sitting in your pack all day)

  

• Sometimes a packaged bar won’t do. Take these Blueberry Coconut Almond Bars along for a day hike.

  

Some of our favorite hearty and easy camping main dishes:

• We’re all about communal eating and a Bruschetta Picnic Potluck is one of our favorite ideas. Lots of little dips and spreads complement each other to create a fun eating experience.



• This Albondigas Soup is warm and filling, yet still feels summery and fresh.

  

• For a simple and delicious meal, Crunchy Skillet Fried Tacos are a crowd-pleaser.

  

Dessert, of course:

• If your trip includes kids, s’mores are a must, but mix it up a little bit and make some Campfire Cones one night.

  

• Impress your friends by making a from scratch caramel sauce at camp. This Toasted Pound Cake with Pineapple and Coconut Rum Caramel recipe is easier than it sounds!

  

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!

This weekend, we wanted to focus on the holiday season while camping at Leo Carrillo (our favorite standby local spot- especially in the winter). We decorated camp in festive lights and centerpieces, and played Christmas music that we’d downloaded onto our phone before the trip. We’ve been doing mostly homemade gifts for each other this year, and wanted to start a tradition of homemade ornaments as well.

I wasn’t sure about this salt dough ornament recipe, but it worked out great on the campfire!

Salt dough is a quick and easy dough that you can easily make at camp with kids. It becomes the consistency of Play Dough, and you can shape it into whatever you want. We made one in Ravi’s favorite shape- an ‘O’- and another in Asha’s favorite shape- a rocketship.

A few notes:

• When forming your ornaments, don’t forget to poke a hole for a string to feed through later. We used a glow stick bracelet as our hole poker, but a stick would work just fine.
• The children tried to eat the ornaments as soon as I handed them over. They do resemble cookies, but they do not taste like them. Don’t worry- there’s nothing toxic or dangerous in the dough if this happens to you.
• Cookie cutters work great for this project, but I just cut out freehand shapes with a knife.
• The original recipe for these suggested to bake them in a low oven for 2 hours. I tried baking one in a pie iron directly in the fire, and the rest were done in a cast iron skillet on the grate. All dried out well. The one baked in the pie iron turned a lovely golden brown.

Decorate your ornaments with markers or paint after they dry. Then hang them all over camp, or on your Christmas tree back at home. Happy Holidays!

We highly recommend using park rangers to your advantage when planning a backpacking trip. They always know the best places to go. The ranger sent us over to Yoho National Park onto the Iceline Trail, stopping at Yoho Lake for the night.

It was only a few kilometers (less than 5 miles American), but still deep enough into the woods to be surprised to see Adirondack chairs, picnic tables, and tent platforms when we arrived in camp. They don’t require bear canisters there because they’ve installed huge poles with cables for hanging bags. No need to worry that you may be doing it wrong. They do, however, require that you carry bear spray with you in many areas, and travel in groups of at least 4 (or sometimes 6!) to keep yourself safe from large mammal encounters. Yoho was one of the few places we went that wasn’t as strict with these rules, helping us feel more at ease.

The campground was right on the beautiful little glacial blue Yoho Lake. We threw our beers into the water (you can bring beer when it’s less than 5 miles) and the boys jumped in behind them. We ate jerky and licorice, and played cards until dinner. It started raining just as we started cooking, but we found a perfect little hideaway among a trio of douglas firs.

It really felt like summer by 9pm when there was plenty of daylight left. Even though it was raining, we decided to take a short little hike to look for wildlife. We found none, but it was good to play before bed.

The next day, we hiked up to Iceline Summit on the Iceline Trail. From here, you can see the icefields and glaciers that are completely hidden from the trailhead. It always feels so satisfying to see stunning views that you know you could never see without walking yourself there to see them. The trail continues to several other lakes and falls, but we headed back down to Takakkaw where we started to continue our adventure back in Banff the next day.

You don’t have to go far into the backcountry to experience the incredible sites that Banff National Park has to offer. Yoho Lake is a perfect destination for balancing easy access with getting a little off the beaten path.

Adan is a pro fly fisherman (we’ll be demanding lessons soon), and he doesn’t just cook his trout- he smokes it. When I was growing up in Florida, I had a few lucky New Year’s parties where my best friend would show up with her family’s smoked mackerel. That was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever eaten. I haven’t even had Adan’s smoked trout, but I’m sure it’s just as delicious.

Where are you going to camp with your ENTIRE family and all your friends next year? Now’s the time to start planning (especially since the planning process requires a BBQ!) Let us know so we can be your neighbors!

Through this association, I recently discovered some new food and lifestyle magazines such as: Lucky Peach, Wilder, Kinfolk and Gather. My new favorite is Lucky Peach, which has themed issues and comes out on a quarterly basis. What makes it special are the substantive articles about food culture, history, trends and even fiction stories, all done in a fun casual style. On top of great content, one of the editors is Momofuku empire founder chef David Chang (my new celebrity crush). I highly suggest you check out the Anthony Bourdain narrated PBS Series: “Mind of a Chef” featuring David Chang.

Sooo… How does this all relate to Dirty Gourmet and getting outdoors? Well part of our fun is how to translate these sometimes out-of-reach food ideas into recipes that you and I can actually make AND take on our adventures.

This Walnut Pea Pesto Panini is a great example of that. I used part of a salad recipe in the last issue of Gather, added some sliced Swiss cheese and bookended it all with some ciabatta bread. A little twirl in the pie iron and you’ve got a Walnut Pea Pesto Panini.

This pesto is super simple to make, the main ingredient being frozen peas (straight out of the bag!). The peas bring a freshness and delicate sweetness to the pesto, which makes this ideal for a warm summer day lunch or dinner.

It felt like kayaking in a land that time forgot. Paddling across the Salton Sea, there wasn’t a drop of water out of place, glassy conditions prevailing during our kayaking and bird watching excursion. The only distinct sounds on the water were thousands of American White Pelicans. Feeding, frolicking and preening in the shallows, they were enjoying their winter stopover in this accidental manmade habitat as pink and orange hues swept across the Santa Rosa Mountains to the west.

Depending on your point of view, the Salton Sea can appear like a dismal, lifeless wasteland or a vibrant desert oasis for 400 bird species seeking refuge here each winter. California’s largest lake was created in 1905, when the Colorado River swelled and breached levees and dikes on its way to becoming the Salton Sea. We were paddling 228 feet below sea level in what was once known as the Salton Sink directly above the San Andreas Fault.

Once deemed the next Las Vegas in the 1940s and 50s, the Salton Sea held a resort-like atmosphere. Waterskiing, fishing and boating were favorite pastimes. There was a time when 400,000 boats used the sea each year when more people visited the Salton Sea than Yosemite National Park. But over the decades the Salton Sea has endured more flooding, which thwarted further development. Because there are no outlets for flood waters and the Salton Sea is 25 percent saltier than the Pacific Ocean, over time high salinity levels have induced mass die-offs of fish and birds. There used to be several species of fish living in the sea, but tilapia has proven to be the only fish able to tolerate such high salinity levels. Eventually the 110-mile shoreline lost its luster.

However, the Salton Sea still holds a certain allure, and it remains one of the best birding locales in North America. We paddled and explored its mud-cracked shorelines littered with dead fish, while scattered flocks of Western Sandpipers and Black-necked Stilts foraged in the crunchy brine. Eighty to 90 percent of the entire American White Pelican population winters on the Salton Sea. Statuesque Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets stood motionless in the shallows waiting patiently to skewer a tilapia swimming beneath them.

Soaking in the Salton Sea

Diversity of birdlife is what makes the Salton Sea so attractive to birdwatchers. Kayaking around the entire lake exposed us to throngs of American Wigeon, and Northern Pintail, Long-billed Dowitcher and Least Sandpiper, Herring and Ring-billed Gull. When we camped along its shores we saw Ferruginous Hawk, White-tailed Kite and Red-shouldered Hawk. Burrowing Owls were spotted several times close to our camps.

Busily working around our tents, the desert flora of creosote bush and cholla cactus was alive with Say’s Phoebe, Horned Lark, Verdin, Cactus Wren, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, American Pipit and Yellow-rumped and Orange-crowned Warbler.

Continuing southward, we pushed our kayaks into the silky smooth water just east of the sand dunes between a covey of Long-billed Curlews and American Avocets feeding in the brine-covered rocks. Nearby was an abandoned military test site. It appeared like something out of the apocalypse. A long black point extended far off the site and out to sea. At least a mile offshore it slowly began to move, almost rolling, as the desert played tricks on squinting eyes. Then in a massive flurry of black, thousands of Double-crested Cormorants took flight, running on water, flapping furiously for liftoff all in one direction. We soon discovered that the cormorants were the current keepers of the abandoned navy site.

Established in the 1940s, the test base was involved with the Manhattan Project and for atomic testing. Today it looks like it didn’t survive a nuclear blast, although there are reports of maneuvers in 1991 during the first Gulf War. Guano-covered pilings still stand, now prime nesting and roosting habitat for hordes of cormorants.

Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge

Paddling nine miles east, we skirted around Mullet Island, an extinct volcano and the edge of the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge winters up to 30,000 Snow, Ross’s, and Canada Geese, and 60,000 ducks from November through February. Endangered species we observed on the refuge included the Southern Bald Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, California Brown Pelican, Yuma Clapper Rail, and Desert Pupfish.

A significant Yuma Clapper Rail population nests on the refuge. Sensitive species utilizing the refuge also include the Fulvous Whistling Duck, Wood Stork, Mountain Plover, Western Snowy Plover, Burrowing Owl, and White-faced Ibis.

Sonny Bono Salton Sea Refuge was designed to reduce waterfowl depredation to adjacent croplands. Management practices benefit the high concentration of waterfowl and shorebird species that flock each winter to the refuge. They include an intensive farming program that involves cooperative farmers growing crops for waterfowl consumption during the winter. The refuge also manipulates water levels in ponds to provide ideal habitat for shorebirds and waterfowl. The refuge extends a couple of miles out to sea, and small aircraft is required to stay clear of the multitude of avian species that hone in on California’s southeastern corner.

More recently, the refuge has become heavily involved with fish and wildlife disease and contaminant issues. The refuge routinely surveys the Salton Sea for dead or dying fish and wildlife. Fish and wildlife are removed from the area in order to prevent the spread of disease and sent to the lab for investigation.

Our last night on the Salton Sea, we camped on a sandy finger where the Alamo River and the Salton Sea converged. We barely had to leave our tents to absorb all the birdlife surrounding us. Flocks of American Avocet and Western Sandpiper tiptoed in front of us. A platoon of American White Pelican flapped their creamy white wings bathing in a fading sunset. Bird activity lasted well into the night, lulling us to sleep during a cool, crisp night on the Colorado Desert.

For more information

The best time to visit the Salton Sea is in the winter when day time temperatures are mild to warm. Evenings can reach freezing temps. Fall through spring is also the best time for bird watching. The Salton Sea is on the Pacific Flyway, and is one of the most important winter stopovers for migratory birds.

The Salton Sea State Recreation Area is located on the northeast shore. This is currently the best, most convenient place to leave your vehicle and begin your paddling trip. Call the park office at (760) 393-3052,www.parks.ca.gov.

Contact the Sonny Bono Salton Sea NWF at (760) 348-5278, www.fws.gov.