Field/Long Term Report

The Hiker’s Guide to Preparing Home-Cooked Meals on the Trail

Personal Bio

Name: George Griffin

Age: 42

Gender: Male

Height: 5' 7" (1.7 m)

Weight: 205 lb (93 kg)

Email: griffin42 (at) tiscali (dot) co (dot) uk

City: London U.K

Date: 03 August 2004

Backpacking Background

I have been backpacking since 1986, mainly in the Peak District, Lake District, Wales and Southern England. I am also the London liaison member for the Backpackers Club. In the early days I backpacked solo but in recent years I have backpacked with two friends. Most of my trips are from September through to May, I normally get four 4+ day trips in that time, plus the occasional weekend.

Terrain and elevation on these trips can be anything from coastal paths to mountains, sea level to 3,000-ft (900 m). Temperatures range from -5 C to 23 C (23 F to 75 F).

Product Information

Author: Steven A. Mroz

Type of cover: Prefect bound paperback

Price £9.01 (from website)

The book is a 134 pages long and broken down into eight chapters, plus an introduction and an index.

The eight chapters are:

Chapter One : The Backpacker`s Oven

Chapter Two : Breakfasts

Chapter Three : Soups

Chapter Four : Gravies & Sauces

Chapter Five : Delectables

Chapter Six : Meat & Vegetables

Chapter Seven : Dinners

Chapter Eight : Stir-fried dishes

There are 84 types of recipes in the book.

As this was the first hiking cookbook, I have ever seen or used I was expecting it to be quite detailed in the preparation of the meals (like a normal cookbook) but this wasn`t the case. Most of the recipes take up less than a page, which isn`t a bad thing but sometimes, I felt that a bit more instruction would have been helpful.

A lot of the meals were “two or three part” cooked recipes which needed a sauce or gravy mix to be made to accompany the meal, this meant making sure that you picked up the correct sauce to go with that particular meal, it also meant a lot of preparation and time.

For example one of the meals `Chicken & mushroom over hash browns`, needs a gravy, hash browns and the chicken/mushroom part to make the meal; it took nearly an hour just getting the ingredients prepared, and then 6/7 hours to dry them. Doing this for 5/6 meals, was really time consuming; and towards the end, I was getting a bit fed-up with it.

Most of the meals are what I would call straight-forward/typical backpacking meals or variations of them; chicken, mushrooms, rice, noodles, couscous. There are some that are different, like pizza; which requires the use of a backpackers oven.

The backpacker’s oven is a piece of equipment which the user can make to enable the cook to bake while on the trail.

I for one, like to get a meal on pretty quick and not have to spend too much time messing around cooking, so all the meals I used from the book were ones that just needed to be re-hydrated.

When preparing the meals, I tried to keep as much to the recipes as possible (some of the names of the ingredients are different in the U.K). I did find that the meals came up smaller than I expected; whether it was because of the dehydrating, I don`t know. If making them again I would increase the main ingredients by half again.

I took 5 meals with me on my 6-day backpacking trip on the South West coastal path in May/June. We would normally arrive at a camp site between 4-6 pm, and get a brew on and start to prepare dinner. I would soak the meal for an hour then cook it, by bringing it to a boil and then simmering for 5/10 minutes, this was normally enough time to cook the meal properly. All the cooking was done on a MSR pocket rocket.

As this was the first backpacking cookbook; I`ve used or seen, I can`t compare it to any others, but my impression is that it is a basic cookbook. There is some variety in the recipes but the preparation takes a long time. If I was going on a weekend trip, I don`t think I would be prepared to use a lot of time and energy getting a couple of meals ready, and on longer trips, I think I would need to start preparing quite a few months in advance.

One of the meals, I dehydrated 6 months ago and kept in a ziplock bag in the fridge was cooked on Saturday and it looked, smelt and tasted fine.

In my Initial report one of the first recipes I tried was scrambled eggs, which I had a lot of problems with, after 18 hours dehydrating the mixture was still 60% liquid, and I reported that I would look into making another batch, I have since been made aware that dehydrating eggs can be a risky thing to do and should be avoided.

I found the book to be a reasonable cookbook, I was happy to make the main meals like chicken & mushroom, chicken & noodles beef stew and the soups, but the gravies and sauces didn`t always seem necessary. The preparation time was consuming on top of the dehydrating and sometimes I felt that buying a ready-made meal and dehydrating that would be easier.