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Reviews > Books > Cook Books > Lipsmackin Vegetarian Backpackin > Heather Oakes > Long Term ReportLong Term Report: “Lipsmackin’ Vegetarian Backpackin’”.May 10, 2005 Product Info:
Author: Christine and Tim Conners 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 an index of the trailside cooking instructions to be copied and taken with you on the trail. Long Term Report of “Lipsmackin’ Vegetarian Backpackin’” General Impressions: The book is a large, 176-recipe collection varying in difficulty from adding water to sautéing a semi-complex sauce for a night in the dehydrator. A glance through the ingredients and recipes demonstrates the variety of tastes and foods, some of the ingredients being difficult to obtain in-person outside of a large metro area. One appendix at the end does list online retailers of various ingredients that would be very useful to someone without easy local access. The book is divided into chapters by meal types such as: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Breads, Snacks and Desserts, and Drinks. Many recipes can be put into multiple chapters, various breads and trail-bar type recipes being my primary example. The overlap of recipes can cause confusion since I usually do not remember which chapter the Niagra Bars are in, are they dessert, lunch, or breakfast for me? Several appendices and extra chapters provide information including; recipe author acknowledgments, metric conversions, recommendations and tips, and the aforementioned ‘where to buy’ list. The index sorts by main ingredients and recipes names, a very helpful function when I can’t remember all the cutesy recipe names. See my Initial and Field Reports for more information. 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), and my apartment. 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 a gas stove, various culinary accoutrements, and an Excalibur 9-tray dehydrator with Teflex™ sheets for liquid stuff. Living in metro Atlanta, I shopped primarily at the local farmers’ market or a generic grocery store for most of my needs only venturing to a Whole Foods once or twice. Field Report: After six months of weekend backpacking, day hiking, and cooking at home to try these recipes, I have tried over 30 different recipes. We tried easy recipes that were just mix and boil, such as the tasty Triple Crown Curry Couscous and Cheesy Breakfast Grits. We then moved on to recipes involving the dehydrator; starting easy with the various fruit leathers, jerky, and recipes like the Kalalau Quinoa Cereal. Then we tried the more difficult recipes that involved actual cooking, then drying, then rehydrating on the trail such as: Anasazi Trail Food and South Sister Stroganoff. We also tried the baking recipes, and even the easy to pack but a pain to prepare on the trail recipes like the boring Trail Angel Cheese Soup. I feel that we tried a variety of tastes and difficulty levels of preparation with the recipes we tested. My husband and I are not fond of warm breakfasts in general because we don’t like to waste time with the cooking and cleaning aspect. But we did manage to try a few hot ones on the trail, and at home. The Ketchican Couscous being the ideal kind of hot breakfast for us, not too sweet, and very easy to make since couscous is pretty much boil and let sit. Since we rarely eat hot breakfasts, the breads and some of the lunch power-bar type recipes made for a better choice than Pop-Tarts. We loved the Greybeard’s Apricot Almond Bread, Dusty Roads Date-n-Walnut Bread. I found that the breads would keep only a couple of days without a refrigerator or freezer. The breads are dense and filling, with a little going a long way so luckily we were able to freeze and re-use a few portions as much as a month later. How lunch is done on the trail is a discussion onto itself. It is no wonder that the recipes in the lunch chapter ranged from hummus to cookies. My husband and I tend to start lunch about an hour after we start hiking and it last until we start talking about making camp. We graze and rarely rest for the amount of time it would take to cook, so the recipes we tried for lunch involved almost no trail preparation other than opening something. The tofu jerky recipes have a place in our hearts for several reasons, the main one being cost. One dollar will buy us a pound of tofu, we marinate it overnight or during the day using whatever is handy from soy sauce to jerk, then we stick it in the dehydrator for about five hours, then we have a great savory snack that is full of protein. The only lunch that involved any trail preparation was the Anasazi Trail Food as we had to stop and rehydrate the bean dip, but the recipe tasted so good we created new adjectives for it and did not complain about the minimal preparation. Dinner can be the most important meal on the trail, it’s a reward for the day’s labors, the last thing eaten before passing out, and the meal that sits in the belly all night. The dinners tended to be the largest in portion sizes, and the most salty. In general the trail directions were very easy to follow but when we did vary from the exact directions, nothing exploded. My husband and I have tried pre-made backpacker meals but before we tested this book we mostly ate packaged pastas with extra spices or oils that we added. We found that many recipes were very similar to what we were already eating and very simple such as Dirt Bagger’s Pasta Parmesan which has four ingredients: pasta, cheese, spices and oil. I’m sure we could have figured that one out on our own, but recipes like South Sister Stroganoff and Golden Bear Gado-Gado were well worth learning and eating. With the dinners; I would also like to add that in our testing we discovered that some meals could disturb weak digestive systems and we will not be using some of the dinners using beans again, with the Mexican Volcano recipe being a good example. On the negative side; the lack of dehydration direction or even guidelines, plus the inconsistency in portion sizing made preparing the recipes in this book a little like gambling. I realize that all dehydrators are different, but having any kind of guidelines in generic drying times would have prevented me from making tofu jerky projectiles. I think that most of the recipes were created with the thru-hiker in mind, which would explain the huge sizes and high sodium content. We found that we had to halve almost every recipe after we had a half pot full of Mexican Volcano one night and no appetite left. When we were doing heavy hiking of about 15 miles (24.15 km) per day we happily ate the full serving size, but if we were car camping, hiking under 15 miles (24.15 km), or easy hiking; half size portions on pretty much all breakfasts and dinners were enough for us. As with many traditional recipe books, we substituted or reduced certain ingredients to reduce fat, salt, or sugar. Unless we are doing heavy activity we will most likely want to reduce some salt and fat and the full-strength recipe is just a bit too heavy for us. I found that by using about half of the garlic salt in the Black Mountain Potatoes recipe it was still very savory, as the black bean soup mix that is used with it has salt and flavorings already. Using less salt, less of the flavorings such as Butter Buds, and using non-fat or skim instead of whole milk (powder also), can reduce the fat and sodium. None of these recipes are so difficult that one false measurement will cause the whole thing to be off; substitutions can easily be used. Summary: Being a pretty decent cook and a food snob, I had high hopes for some tasty alternatives to Clif Bars and Lipton Pasta. Not every recipe is a taste winner, and some recipes were so easy I didn’t think they even qualified as recipes so much as just mixing a couple of things together, but taste is a matter of opinion and so is the quality of the recipe. Most of the recipes I would consider very easy to moderate labor/time intensive with the baking recipes being the most involved. Since the recipe difficulty levels vary so much, any cook would be able to do several recipes in this book but a cook with baking experience would be able to do all of them. As I already have a stocked pantry and a dehydrator, the materials costs for me were well worth the effort. Most pre-packaged dinners run about $6 for two people, Triple Crown Curry Couscous really only cost us about $2 for 4 servings for the cost of the vegetarian gravy because we already had everything else. Tofu jerky costs us about $1 for the tofu, and about $0.50 for the serving of pineapple juice needed in the recipe, again already having the other ingredients in our pantry. With a dehydrator courtesy of a local FreeCycle group and my well stocked cabinet, the costs and effort were well worth it for the variety and tastiness of the meals.
Pluses: 1. Tastes much better than ramen.Minuses: 1. Portion sizes are not consistent or usually just too much.Tester Info:
Name: Heather Oakes Backpacking Background: I consider myself an intermediate hiker/backpacker having been interested for five years without any long-term trips over three nights. Day hiking and weekend backpacking comprise most of my weekend warrior experience averaging one backpacking trip per month and two day hikes per month averaging between 10-15 miles (16.1-24.2km) per day. 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 a lightweight backpacker and buy my gear accordingly.
Reviews > Books > Cook Books > Lipsmackin Vegetarian Backpackin > Heather Oakes > Long Term Report | |||