I’ve played around with adding cashew butter to my backpacking meals and it often works great. You can buy little packets of cashew butter at natural food stores or online, and if you mix the cashew butter with some warm liquid at camp, you can add that creaminess to lots of different dishes. This Creamy Grits With Kale and Sunflower recipe is one of my favorites.

But as much as I love the simplicity of adding a little cashew butter to my meals at camp, sometimes it doesn’t work as well as I want it to. I tried using cashew butter and powdered tomatoes to replicate my favorite sauce on a backpacking trip last summer, but I just couldn’t get the same creaminess that I was looking for.

When I got my dehydrator, a whole new world opened up to me! I’ve had fun blending up my favorite creamy sauces and seeing how they dehydrate. The results have been impressive.

For this recipe, make the sauce, blend it and pour it on dehydrator sheets. When it is dehydrated, it’ll end up looking like fruit leather, but more brittle (if it’s not brittle, it needs a little longer in the dehydrator). In a completely dry blender, blend up the tomato sauce leather to create a powder. This step is important- without blending it the sauce doesn’t rehydrate as nicely.

The pasta comes together easily at camp. You could definitely rehydrate the sauce in a separate pot from your pasta pot, but to minimize dishes I’ve found that you can just sprinkle the tomato sauce powder directly into the pasta cooking pot. You’ll want to set aside some of your pasta cooking water so that the dish doesn’t turn into soup. I take some of the water out and then slowly add it back in once the pasta finishes cooking and the sauce is rehydrated (see instructions for more details).

The recipe is written for two large servings, but you might want to double or even triple it in order to make it worth the effort of dehydrating and blending the sauce into a powder. You can store the powder in the freezer to ensure a longer shelf life.

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!

I bought soba noodles this week, because I want to cook more at home. I cook outside because I have to, and it’s part of the excitement of going outside. But I am pretty lame at home. I have lots of recipes to try, and one is this Tahini Soba Noodle Salad. It’s Mai-yan’s recipe. It’s delicious. And it’s perfect if you’re trying to find a healthy recipe to keep you on track, or if you’re trying to find the perfect picnic/camping recipe to take on your next backcountry ski trip. It’s always nice to have something bright and fresh in the winter.

Do you have any bright fresh recipes that we should test out? Send ’em on over. If we like ’em, we’ll post ’em!

We ate this meal on the last night of our Sawtooth Ridge trip last August. The trip was a feat for me to overcome, because Wes and I rarely eat the same meal. He’s vegan, and LOVES vegan cheese, hot sauce and pickles. I don’t particularly like pickles and hot sauce on everything, but I definitely HATE vegan cheese in (almost) all its forms. Before this trip, we’d gone to a vegan market looking for non-perishables to turn into backpacking meals, and found a vegan cheese sauce powder. I nervously agreed to try it, and the recipe it was tried on was this one.
I’m not suggesting that you make this meal vegan, or even vegetarian. By all means, use a real cheese sauce and/or real bacon bits if you want. I am only here to tell you that if you do want to try a satisfying, rib-stickin’ vegan recipe, this is the one to try.

We spent literally the entire hike back the next day (7 miles) naming all the things we could make with the vegan cheese sauce when we got back home. I was like Bubba Gump rattling off shrimp options. Seven miles.

Bacon bits are an easy, inexpensive way to bring a lot of flavor and some protein to any camping meal. This is a classic recipe eaten in many households, but not one often thought of in the backcountry. Now you can!

We got our permit at 4pm in Bridgeport, and the ranger strongly encouraged us to start our hike out that evening. The trailhead started at Twin Lakes, a place described by SummitPost as an “RV Hell Hole,” so hiking out sooner than later sounded great. But Wes wanted to take enough time to get our packs together well, so we chose to car camp first,

It was an experience trying to find a site to put up our backpacking tent among all those RV’s. SummitPost couldn’t have been more right. We looked at it as a social experiment, though, and really tried to embrace the chaos. And it made it that much more exciting to head out into the wilderness first thing in the morning.

Our first night was spent at Crown Lake, and the second all the way up near Burro Pass, Yosemite. We battled the crowds in Yosemite Valley later in our trip for Wes’ sake, but both of us decided that backpacking in the Yosemite Wilderness was even more beautiful, and we only saw about 4 other people.

I’m not posting recipes in the order we ate them, because I’m excited to report on my experimentation with making my own backpacking meals. On our first night at Crown Lake, we ate a store bought backpacker’s meal- Pad Thai. We cleaned out the packaging as good as we could by feeding Wes “the big gulp” (add hot water to make a clean-out-the-bowl soup), and saved the pouch for future meals.

Broccoli cheese rice is one of my favorite meals. Those pre-mixed packets you can get at the grocery store are great for hiking, but they really know how to mess up a pot. Cheese is hard to clean and rice has a habit of quickly burning to the bottom- especially if you’re using a highly efficient stove like the JetBoil we brought with us. But if you throw the whole thing into an old aluminum backpacker’s meal pouch, you are virtually mess free, and have no need for simmer control! After a quick dinner, you can just focus on relaxing. Genius!

This recipe is for Broccoli Cheese Orzo, because I was making rice for several other meals on the trip and wanted to change it up. I pulled together the individual ingredients rather than buying the premixed kind, because I wanted orzo, and because Wes is vegan (we used fake cheese).

You can do whatever works best for your family! Add chicken, use a four cheese mix, throw in some dumplings, etc. The most exciting thing about this recipe is that it can easily be made using a lightweight, efficient stove, and requires no dishes to be cleaned at the end! (exept the little red bowl I used for the sake of photos).

Enjoy!

This salad is great extra cold and on its own as a light meal on a hot day, though we did put it inside our wraps when we were starving. This is another make-at-home meal that will thrill you to have out of the way so you can focus on the things your trip is really about. Running, hiking, surfing, kayaking…Get out there and get hungry!

Our trip started out a little late on Thursday because I had this nagging unexplained pain in my left calf. I decided it would be smart to go to urgent care before we left, just to make sure it wasn’t anything serious. They did an ultrasound to make sure it wasn’t a blood clot, and when that came back negative, they said it was probably tendonitis or shin splints. The thing is, I’ve been pretty sedentary for the last few weeks, so that explanation doesn’t make much sense to me. Anyway, I had some peace of mind and we went on our way and made it to Yosemite.

On Friday, we explored the valley, taking short walking trips to see the sights. By the middle of the day though, I could barely walk! We made our way back to our cabin and sat around for the evening.

Saturday morning everyone went out for a hike to a local waterfall, while I stayed back to baby my leg. By the afternoon, a storm came in, and I was secretly thankful because it gave me a valid excuse for staying in. We did a 600 piece puzzle, played games, and made this Sun Dried Tomato Pesto Pasta. I had made the pesto in my food processor at home, so it was a cinch to throw together.

I’m disappointed that we didn’t get to do more exploring because of me, but I’m happy that we at least got to go. It was a fun trip, and it was great to have some quality family time. I think they were even impressed.

We drove up to the mountains on Saturday morning, and acted as if it were a long multi-hour road trip. We couldn’t get out of town without first going to find the very rare but most important road trip food, Andy Capp’s Hot Fries. This is a food I have loved since I was a little kid at the snack bar of elementary school, but it was new to Aimee and Mai-yan. Aimee got a chance to eat hot fries on our Pacific Coast road trip a few months ago, and has been truly addicted since then. We went to the gas station near my house where Wes found the hot fries before, after begging him for the location (it was hard to convince him to divulge the location for fear that I would start going there every day). Our mouths watered as we got nearer. We rushed inside, looked around frantically, and more frantically, and after searching the store with three pairs of eyes for about 10 minutes, realized they weren’t there! It was horrible.

We then went across the street, hoping we’d just gotten the wrong gas station. Not there either. So, sadly, we got back in the car, drove a little ways, and ended up stopping at four more gas stations looking for them, with no luck. At the last station before the mountains, we gave up and bought Chester’s Hot Fries (two big bags), which are an acceptable stand-in, though not perfect, and ate one whole bag in the next half hour (which was the last half hour of the 1.5 hour drive).

The weekend was a success, and we were impressed with how little time it takes to bake 120 bags of granola in an industrial convection oven with 10 full-sized racks. Aimee is now on a mission to get an industrial kitchen in her own home stat. We were also lucky that our bake-a-thon happened in a camping setting, because we were met by Aimee’s parents and two friends who hiked San Gorgonio Mountain while we cooked. This also gave us an extra few hands for cleaning, labeling, and packaging, and made it a party weekend. It felt very appropriate to be cooking our Dirty Gourmet granola in the woods. It’s beautiful up there right now- the leaves of the black oaks are just starting to turn bright yellow. Don’t miss out on this fleeting season!

This beef stroganoff has been made for several trips already. We made the vegan version for all our meat eaters, and even the very most weirded-out-by-fake-meat person demolished their bowl. Fake sour cream really is quite good, and we used Smart Strips beef strips, which are our favorite fake steak substitute. If you don’t care about making this vegan, feel free to substitute the fake stuff with the real ingredients to make this Beef Stroganoff as dairy and/or meat filled as you’d like.

For our backpacking trip to the Sierras last summer, we planned most of our meals from a Sierra Club book called Simple Foods for the Pack. Most of the recipes turned out great and I remember them vividly as delicious and satisfying. When we got back, we tested the same recipes at home again to make sure they were Dirty Gourmet worthy, but somehow the results were so blah. It’s not that the recipes was bad actually, but it made us realize how contextual our experience with the food was. They just weren’t the type of meals you’d get excited about and crave at home.

We have spent the past year at Dirty Gourmet focusing on truly gourmet options for the backcountry, but we don’t discount the effectiveness of knowing how to create quick, hearty and easy backpacking meals. We recently found this formula for granola, and realized that backpacking recipes can be looked at the same way. With this formula, you should be able to put together backpacking recipes that will cost a fraction of the ready-made ones and that will be customized to your taste buds. If you’ve spent as much time outdoors as we have, you understand the need to switch it up often.

Main Ingredients:

• Grains, Pasta or Noodles

  This is the base of your meal. These carbs will fill you up and give you energy to get going in the morning. You want to choose things that don’t need too much water and have a short cook time. Coucous, quinoa, egg noodles, angel hair pasta and bulgur are good choices.

• Veggies & Protein

  The key here is to get some extra goods into the dish for some much needed protein and fiber (you need to keep things moving along). These ingredients will fill out your meal and give it some substance. We like to use fresh vegetables like carrots (shredded), bell peppers, broccoli, and sturdy greens like kale. When it’s getting late in the trip you’ll have to consider dehydrated or freeze-dried veggies. There are lots options but mushrooms, peas and corn are good standbys. As for protein experiment with edamame (soybeans), textured vegetable protein, canned chicken or tuna, pine nuts or even beef jerky.

• Spices & Seasoning

  This is what is gonna give your dish it’s personality and taste. The most typical seasonings used are salt, pepper and bouillon. For something more exciting, experiment with dried basil, thyme, parsley, herbs de Provence, curry powder, garlic powder, onion flakes, red chili flakes, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, ginger or any of your favorite spices not on this list.

Ultimately, you want something that is yummy, fills your belly up and cleans up quick so you can get right to staring at the stars or into bed for an early start the next day. We’ve provided a recipe adapted from Simple Foods for the Pack as an example for quantities but go ahead and experiment, and let us know what tasty combinations you come up with. Happy trails!