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!

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.

The location was findable by GPS coordinates only (and no phone service), about 40 miles down a washboardy single lane dirt road. We packed our rented rear-wheel drive Sprinter van full of gear, food and about 200 gallons of water and headed out. Luckily we made it to within 1/2 mile of camp before we got stuck. Even more luckily, a few magical helpers saved us from a $4000 towing fee- but not before dinner was supposed to be ready. We decided to unpack and start cooking while we worked on digging the van out, and got a lot of practice packing/unpacking it by the end of the weekend (which is good news because we’ll probably buy one soon).

The rest of the weekend went smoothly for us, and we enjoyed wowing the event’s participants with the possibilities of incredible food in the backcountry.

Breakfast included our signature Cheddar Bacon Pancakes, but we made this caramelized banana topping for those that preferred a sweeter option. We recommend this for your trip, but we especially love how it tastes in oatmeal, which is how we’re presenting it here.

The recipe here uses rolled oats because they cook quickly on a camp stove. If you have the forethought, try making steel cut oats using our Overnight Steel Cut Oatmeal recipe. The slightly chewy texture is great with the soft bananas.

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.

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.

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.

Aimee is the baker. Mai-yan and I like to bake for Aimee as a joke. You should’ve seen the soggy granola-crusted cheesecake we attempted for her birthday last year. (“Water bath? Springform pan? Wait-what? We have to chill it for 4 hours? It’s 10pm now and we are ready to sing Happy Birthday!”). So it was an equally funny joke when my friend from work brought me some sourdough starter. I kept it alive because I couldn’t let him down.

Aimee lent me her book, Josey Baker Bread, and I spent a day off following the rules and baking some bread. It came out “great.” Brown, sour flavored, bread shaped. I didn’t love it, though. There wasn’t anything special about it. So I gave it away.

I tried again when I visited my parents in Las Vegas a few weeks later. We were at the stage when you let it sit on the counter for 3 hours before shaping the loaf, and after 1 hour, it had blown up like a balloon and oozed out of the bowl all over the counter. My mom made me bake it anyway, and it turned out like bread again, and everyone ate it (I told them I was testing their politeness threshold).

It took me months to want to try again, and by that time, it was last week, and it was 100 degrees outside. I did NOT want to turn on my oven. I decided it was time to test this thing out as a Dirty Gourmet recipe, so I set up my backyard fire pit and got out some charcoal and a dutch oven. I followed the recipe for a “hearth loaf,” which is free form and you get to slash the top of the bread with a scalpel, leaving that beautiful crack in the top. I followed the Dutch Oven Temperature Chart we often use, but it doesn’t go high enough in temperature so I added a few extra coals. The first loaf baked quickly and burned all across the bottom, but I’ve never seen such color and texture on a homemade crust before! The coals had died down significantly by the second loaf’s turn to bake (have an extra batch ready), so it took longer, but it still baked up crusty and sour like I wanted.

This is how I’ll be baking my bread from now on, and I’m going to be baking a lot more often now that I can avoid turning on my oven.

Camping and baking can be more tricky. I recommend doing the whole process at camp, rather than trying to travel with shaped loaves. Start with your backyard. That still counts as getting outside in my book!

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.