Field Report: “Lipsmackin’ Vegetarian Backpackin’”.

January 11, 2005

Tester Info:

Name: Heather Oakes 

Age: 27

Gender: Female

Height: 5’7” (1.74 m)

Weight: 140 lbs (64 kg)

Email address: alekto-at-yahoo.com     

City, State, Country: Decatur, GA, United States

Backpacking Background: I have very little experience hiking and backpacking; only about three years and only on weekends or vacations from work. Day hiking and weekend backpacking comprise most of my limited experience and I have not spent more than three consecutive nights out. I tend to backpack in warm, humid climates such as Georgia and Florida, with a good amount of hiking in the mountains of north Georgia and I have rarely hiked in below freezing or snowy conditions yet. I am moving towards lightweight backpacking as I get a better feel for what I really need on trips that are longer than a weekend.

Product Info:

Author: Christine and Tim Conners

Publisher: Globe Pequot Press

Website: http://www.globepequot.com

MSRP: US $15.95

Format: Trade Paper

ISBN: 0-7627-2531-1

Length: 256 pages

Weight from local post office: 12.9 oz (366 g)

The cookbook includes recipes separated by chapters such as: breakfast, lunch, dinner, breads, snacks and desserts, and drinks. Other chapters and appendices in the book include recommendations and tips, dehydrator usage/instructions, notes on how to use this book, sources of ingredients, metric conversions, acknowledgments and contributors, and trailside cooking instructions in a small, travel format.

Field Information:

Testing conditions have included overnight backpacking and day hiking in Arizona from 2600 to 6200ft (792-1890 m), overnight backpacking and day hiking in Georgia from 1700 to 4400ft (518-1341m).  Trail cooking conditions have included temperatures that have ranged from mid 80’s to mid 20’s F (26.7 to -6.6 C), and other weather conditions such as light rain, and pretty strong wind preceding a winter storm (I have no way to measure the wind speed, but let’s just say that we wasted a pack of matches lighting the stove and the tent had to be filled with all our gear to keep it from blowing off a cliff). General trail conditions have also included light snow/slush, and ice.

My equipment included an Esbit stove with homemade windscreen, a 2-quart (1.89 L) aluminum pot, and a titanium spork. At home I utilized an Excalibur 9-tray dehydrator with Teflex™ sheets for liquid stuff.

Field Report:

The book arrived a short time before my fiancé and I were to leaving to spend a week in Arizona. As time was an issue for meal-planning, we decided to try out recipes that were easy and tasty. Our dinners were all dry ingredients and just boiling water and mixing on the trail. We did not copy the trail instructions, just boiled water and ate the dinners when we thought they were done. I didn’t treat the directions and ingredients as if they were set in stone and got away with substitutions and using trailside cooking instructions more like guidelines than rules. I baked two of the recipes (Cheese Coins and Apricot Almond Bread) before the trip and took them to Arizona. As baking is more of a science than an art, I was more careful with the ingredients and followed the directions precisely. I made enough of the Apricot Almond Bread to have leftovers, keeping some at room temperature in a Ziploc bag and the rest in the freezer at home. The baked goods left in the Ziploc bag at room and trail temperature did not last more than two weeks, when I checked on them for a day hike they were decorated with green spots. The bread will keep in the freezer, in fact I still have some left right now!

We generally do not have oatmeal or granola for breakfast on the trail, and we do not have the gear to make pancakes, I have not tested any recipe in the breakfast chapter instead using breads and trail mix recipes for breakfast. I noticed that the lunch recipes were very much a mixed bag most likely depending on personal eating habits that vary on the trail. My fiancé and I tend to have our lunch as a series of snacks throughout the day and do not sit down and cook until dinner. We utilized a few lunch and bread recipes for all day hikes as well with no complaints. The Cheese Coins were a great break from the sweetness of trail mix, the Algonquin Fruit Leather was tasty, and the Bear Bait was a learning experience for us when we discovered that it froze over 6200ft (1890 m) at 20F (-6.66 C). We were in fact, happy to eat new things and not have to eat Clif bars and our old trail mix the whole time.

Overnight backpacking trips and car camping called for more dinner recipes to be tested. Of the dinners we tested, only one utilized the dehydrator and one recipe’s directions called for pouring boiling water in a Ziploc bag which we did not do as we feared for the stability of our ghetto bags. All of the directions were easy, and the food pretty tasty. Some highlights were: Triple Crown Curry Couscous, Flyin’ Brians’ Garlic Mashed Potatoes, and South Sister Stroganoff. The portion sizing is not uniform in the book, so you have to look at the recipes carefully and adjust accordingly. Also, we noticed that portion size also needs to be adjusted for how much activity you had throughout the day. If you’ve been hiking all day eat the recipe portions as described in the book, but for car camping or doing a short hike to your campsite we found that we pretty much needed to cut the portion size in half or we couldn’t eat it all. Some of these recipes are for thru-hiking when you eat everything that doesn’t fight back, but not everyone who uses the book will need that amount of food all the time. The nutritional information included is very useful in determining how much of the recipe you are going to need or want to eat if you already know how much activity you plan on doing.

Dehydrator Rant:

While I understand that dehydration times will vary from dehydrator, a little guidance from this book on how long to expect certain things to dry would have been great. Even “dry until it feels like _” directions would have been useful to the total newbie. My dehydrator did not have very good instructions at all on its usage for anything other than jerky and drying fruits and veggies. Armed with ballpark temperatures and football-field sized drying times, I met with a stumble or two on the tofu jerky and sauce recipes requiring drying. The sauce for South Sister Stroganoff never quite turned into powder even after a 12 hour drying cycle; instead I packed it up when it had dried to something resembling greasy fruit roll-ups. It only hung out in my pack until the evening when we easily rehydrated and cooked it, so I can’t vouch for how long it might keep in a Ziploc baggie. The tofu jerky spent 10 hours in my dehydrator with me peering and poking at it like a mother hen until I was convinced it would break my teeth if I kept it in another minute.

Summary:

I tested the recipes using the following criteria in the field report stage:

1. Are the directions easy to follow and leave room for substitutions?

2. How easy are the recipes to prepare on and off the trail?

3. How well do they keep on the trail, portability?

4. Most important: how do they taste?

The recipes I chose to test were all very easy to make on and off trail for me. I do bake a lot, so I was not intimidated by the baking recipes. The dehydrator recipes were more difficult as I am still just breaking in my dehydrator, or possibly my dehydrator is still breaking me in. Substitutions have been used with no disastrous consequences. For instance in the Apricot Almond Bread recipe I substituted oat flour for some of the whole wheat flour and added wheat germ and flaxseed. The South Sister Stroganoff called for sour cream, but we had plain yogurt handy.

The recipes all kept well on the trail but as I do not have a kitchen scale, I do not know if the actual weight mirrored the weight in the book. The breads and baked goods were all fairly heavy as expected, and the recipes with potato flakes tended to be light. Portion sizes are tricky, but reading the nutritional information helps you plan how much or how little you may need of a specific recipe. The recipes are not one size fits all.

Tofu drying could be addressed in LVB as the book is intended for vegetarians. Also, liquid meal drying such as the sauces was not covered by the dehydrator instructions nor did the book give me any tips on that aspect of drying.

Overall, none of the recipes tasted bad, but some were tastier than others and a couple of recipes with packaged dehydrated beans did not sit well with my fiancé who is not known for his cast-iron stomach. Some of these recipes you may want to think twice about using if you will be sharing a tent with another human being, you will already smell like the trail, don’t make it worse.

Recipes we can’t wait to use again: Cheese Coins, All jerky recipes, Triple Crown Curry Couscous, and South Sister Stroganoff.

 The underwhelming: Burrito Ole for Two, Boot-Stomped Spuds, and the Mexican Volcano.