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.

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.

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.

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

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!

Food is usually tricky on our weekend trips. Different friends show up at different times throughout the weekend, so most expect to just cook for themselves. We have food all over the place, all the time. We still end up sharing a lot of it, so we finally thought to change the process last week. Everyone was responsible for one complete meal. Each meal was easy, and everyone only had to be responsible for one meal’s worth of prep and cleanup. And it was BYO plates and sporks. I was in charge of a camping dinner, which I was able to prepare almost completely at home, and just reheat in a dutch oven over the campfire. On a cold night under the stars, there’s nothing better than a hearty soup like this albondigas.

Soup is hard to impress. It usually tastes fine, but just that. At least my soup. So lucky for you, this is Wes’s. This soup is hearty, but ends with a burst of zippy freshness from lime and cilantro. Spicy chipotle keeps your belly warm long after your bowl has been inhaled. Crispy chips and melty meatballs help complete a truly perfect balance of flavor and texture. I really love this soup.

You can make this soup at camp, but I recommend preparing it at home sometime during the week, and finishing it off in a dutch oven the night you arrive. We like to make open-faced quesadillas to go with the soup. Go ahead and fry them cheese-side down. My method: lay the cheese in the pan first, then top it with a tortilla. Flip once the cheese is crispy. These aren’t as pretty as you’ll want them to be, but they are extremely tasty, and act as a sort of handheld crouton. This is a great recipe to share, so plan an adventure with your friends soon!

I’ve been baking with brown rice syrup recently, with great results. It’s not as sweet as honey or maple syrup, so I thought I’d try it instead of the honey in our granola. I’m so happy with the results! Win!

For Fall, I switched out the almonds for toasty pecans and pepitas, and added some golden raisins for some chewy bits. We took a double batch of this on our recent trip to Cuyamaca and it was devoured on the first morning.

Gunsmoke is an uber-classic bouldering problem in Joshua Tree National Park. It is a 85 foot long V3 traverse that I’ve been playing on for about 7 years, never with any hope or intention of finishing it. But I feel like it’s possible if I really put my mind to it. And train.

During climbing season, our food focus shifts a little. We go outside any chance we get, which may mean running out to the park after work, sleeping outside, and climbing for half a day before work again. It may mean leaving the house at 4am and getting home the same evening. Food doesn’t necessarily have to be nonperishable, but it has to be easy, and preferably ready to eat at whatever time we get off a rock, with little to no prep.

We’ve gotten into loving salads for this purpose. Pasta salads, bean salads, grain salads. This particular one is heavy on the salad portion and lighter on the pasta. It can be eaten cold like a salad or hot like a pasta, which makes it great for lunch or dinner. It’s filled with fresh ingredients that can be swapped with almost anything fresh in your house, and requires very little to make a dressing (just lemon and olive oil).

Wes likes to put pasta in his salad, and I’ve always thought it was weird. But I get it now. Sometimes you need a lot of vegetable bang for your bite, but the comfort and energy from a sprinkling of pasta is always welcome.

Hope to see you out at the crag!

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.