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.

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.

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 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.

When we go skiing, we usually bring a couple cans of beer with us. Last time, Wes got the bright idea to bury them in the snow so they’d get super cold for when we were ready to take a break. He found the perfect spot in the woods near the top of the mountain, and started digging a hole. Well, guess what he found- somebody else’s beer! I guess it was the perfect spot after all.

Later, when Wes decided it was time, he went to dig our beers back up. He chose his ski pole as the perfect digging tool, and ended up stabbing one of the cans. So of course, he had to shotgun it immediately (he’s a zero waste kinda guy).

In conclusion, beer is good, but having a hot cocktail like this Mexican Hot Cocoa is even better. If you are among the millions who received a Hydro Flask for Christmas, this is the perfect thing to use it on. These bottles do the best job I’ve seen of holding the heat in.

Mexican Hot Cocoa is warm and spicy, which is perfect for a cold day in the snow. You’ll get some necessary calories to keep you playing longer, and a jolt from the cocoa cafe flavored tequila. Take advantage of the winter if you’ve got it!

Everyone knows kale is a superfood, filled with with tons of nutrients. It’s also sturdy, ultralight, and goes with just about any type of meal you would like to make. There’s still a chance that fresh kale could be ruined in your pack on a hot day, but once it’s dehydrated, it becomes invincible.

Yes, you can dehydrate just about every vegetable (great news!), but kale and other dark leafy greens are what to choose before everything else. They dehydrate quickly, but also rehydrate quickly, which is more important. If you’re looking for a side of creamed greens to go with your dehydrated mac n’ cheese, no problem!

This recipe takes dried kale a step further, though, by crumbling it into super versatile flakes. No more worrying about it breaking up in your pack- it’s already broken! No need to worry about a separate pot, or the disgusted faces on the picky eaters of the group. Throw some of this into every meal, and it will melt right in. If you’re short on time, try roasting your greens instead of dehydrating them.
The flavor deepens and you can eat them sprinkled right on top of your food instead of cooking the greens into it. Here’s a great recipe for how to roast them.

Some of our favorite options:

• Roasted kale flakes as a popcorn topping
• Green mac n’ cheese
• Quinoa and eggs with kale crumbles

Try this recipe out for your next trip (which will hopefully involve some snow!) and let us know what recipes you put your dehydrated kale flakes into!

We started planning last winter. Everyone had grand ideas of the activities we should include in our week. Climbing in the Bugaboos, backpacking, peak bagging, and paddleboard camping in Banff National Park, roadtripping up to Jasper National Park on the Icefields Parkway, and hot springs of course! Planning as a group of 4 (our husbands got to come) ain’t usually easy, because people aren’t often on the same page. It was only hard for us because we were all into cramming in everything!

When the trip finally happened, we decided officially on “the no plan plan,” which worked out very well. Though some of our activities were thwarted or cut short due to constant rainstorms or long drives, we did mostly everything on the list! Except see a moose. Still waiting for that one…

I was responsible for all the camping food for the trip, so I spent a month or so dehydrating things. Probably the best thing we ate was this Backpacking French Toast. I dehydrated my own eggs at home (here’s how), and we simply dipped fresh Canadian bread in them, fried the bread up, and smothered it with local Canadian maple syrup. It was a perfect mix of lightweight, hearty, locally sourced, and rustic.

It was wonderful to finally get to spend a whole week with my Anne and Drew, especially in such an incredible place. It’s rare to find people you get along with so easily that you can all truly go where the adventure is, but these people are those people for us. I can’t wait to plan another adventure in another new amazing location. The world has a lot of them!

Eggs can be tricky both car camping and backpacking. They are perishable and fragile. However, they offer so much versatility to camping recipes that they are often worth the effort. They are an excellent source of protein for either a quick or a lavish camping breakfast, and can also be used to bind dishes like baked pastas, or coat things like french toast (recipe coming shortly).

Here are some tips for dealing with them in both contexts:

• REI sells egg holders for carrying whole eggs, but they don’t hold very large ones. I like to use them for holding hard-boiled eggs.
• Another great way to transport eggs is to crack them together into a jar. You can squash the jar into a cooler this way without worrying about breaking them, and just shake the jar when you’re ready to scramble them.
• Backpacking is obviously the most difficult scenario to bring eggs into, unless they are dehydrated. You can buy them dehydrated, or try making your own.

I did a lot of research before attempting my own powdered eggs, and none of it sounded good. Some people dehydrate eggs after already cooking them, and some try raw. Many people have difficulty grinding the eggs into a powder. They complained that the rehydrated texture was grainy, or that the egg clumped up in the food processor from not drying completely or evenly. I had issues with getting the amount of water correct upon rehydration, and they turned out too thick the first time. But since then, I’ve gotten them right. And they are impressive.

I’m including my method for making your own dehydrated powdered eggs here. The recipe I made with the powdered eggs on my last trip is pictured here. I just rehydrated hash browns, eggs, and dehydrated cheese, and scrambled them together in some oil.

Please let us know if you have any of your own great methods for dealing with eggs while camping.