Reviews > Books > Cook Books > Lipsmackin Vegetarian Backpackin > Steve Nelson > Long Term Report

Long Term Report: Globe Pequot Press "Lipsmackin' Vegetarian Backpackin'"
May 14, 2005

Reviewer's Information

Name: Steve Nelson
Age: 44
Gender: Male
Height: 5' 9" (1.75 m)
Weight: 150 lb (68 kg)
Email address: nazdarovye at y'hoo • com
City, State, Country: San Francisco, CA, U.S.A.

Backpacking Background:

As an interface design and usability consultant by trade, I'm always excited by analyzing and improving designs and processes; backpacking provides a fertile and fun arena for that. I have been backpacking since I was a kid growing up in upstate New York: we backpacked and canoe-camped in all seasons, throughout the Adirondacks and nearby areas, ranging as far as La Verendrye Wildlife Reserve, Quebec. As an adult, I've backpacked and hiked extensively in California, but also have taken trips throughout the West, from New Mexico to British Columbia, and return often to the Adirondacks.

In the past year I made the transition to lightweight and ultralight backpacking. I like moving fast, and lightening the load facilitates that. I also enjoy urban strolls, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, kayaking, and aviation in addition to hiking and backpacking, so my gear gets exposed to a wide variety of uses and conditions.

Product information

Overview

"Lipsmackin' Vegetarian Backpackin'" ("Lightweight Trail-tested Vegetarian Recipes for Backcountry Trips") is a 231-page book of recipes and cooking tips for veggie-friendly campers

I've now had the chance to test over a dozen recipes in the field and at home, and this report covers my experiences to date. I provided additional details and initial impressions regarding the book itself in my initial report, and two months worth of field experience with the book and its recipes in my field report, which you may wish to reference as well.

In the course of testing this book I've tried more than three dozen recipes. In my field report, I focused mainly on the recipes, and wrote about them in two distinct phases: preparing the recipes at home, and cooking (or reconstituting) them in the field. For this long-term report, however, I'm instead focusing on two separate aspects of the book: its success and usefulness as a cookbook, and the success of the recipes themselves. This way, my personal, subjective opinions about the recipes will remain separate from the overall impressions of the book.

Long-Term Field Locations and Conditions

I've now tested recipes at home in San Francisco and on trips on the California Coast, Henry Coe State Park, several locations in the Sierra Nevada (from Yosemite to Lassen and a number of locations in between), as well as Flagstaff, AZ. Altitudes ranged from sea level to approximately 8,500 ft (2,590 m), with temperatures from 4° to 65°F (-16° to 18°C). Weather ranged from balmy to rainy, windy and snowy, and most everything in between. Recipes were prepared on a canister stove and campfire in the field, and a gas stove and dehydrator in a kitchen.

Long-Term Impressions of the Book

After six months of experimenting with recipes from this book, my feelings are split. On the one hand, I enjoyed the format of the book, the consistency in visual presentation and organization, the notes on how best to use the recipes (including tips on dehydration), and the ready availability of most ingredients required to make the recipes. It's also a fun idea that most of the recipes were collected from long-distance hikers, and I enjoyed the comments from them that are interspersed with the recipes.

On the other hand, the fact that the recipes were collected from dozens of sources led to what I think are some of the shortcomings of the book. First, the recipes themselves are in no way consistent in terms of portion size, calories and nutritional make-up. I would love to see a future version of the book do one or more of the following: make the portions more consistent by calorie count or volume; make the recipes more consistent by number of people served; assemble recipes using standard quantities of ingredients sold, rather than arbitrary ones, wherever possible (e.g., not using 2/3 of a packet of a sauce mix). Not all of these are possible at the same time, but it would be nice if more thought had been paid to these issues, particularly the portioning ones.

Also, to my taste and preferences, many—probably a majority—of the recipes have a very high sodium content. Now, this is due in large part to the use of pre-packaged foods and seasonings, and through substitutions (e.g., using garlic powder rather than garlic salt; using dried onions and seasoning rather than commercial onion soup mix), I was able to reduce the amount of sodium and sugar in many of the recipes. However, I would love to see the authors address this head-on, perhaps updating some of the recipes to reduce the sodium content, or at least to provide more thorough suggestions for healthier substitutions.

That said, the book also provides thorough and, as far as I can tell, honest nutritional information on each recipe. These statistics allowed me to adjust some ingredients in advance, but also were useful for planning my meals (especially on winter trips, where calorie density was of importance). Equally important was the ease of noting which recipes require cooking in the field, rather than simple rehydration (with hot water or not). Again, I found this especially useful for planning winter trips, allowing me to select recipes that would minimize fuel usage and the need to melt snow for water.

An expanded index would also be useful; the current index lists recipe names and some ingredients, but not all. Better cross-referencing would be helpful for (for example) making use of odd quantities of ingredients left over from other recipes in the book, or for putting a favorite flavor or ingredient to use on a trip.

Kudos to the authors and publisher for the following: the summary of instructions for all of the recipes, which is provided as an appendix to the book, is also available for download online. While a majority of the recipes I tried simply involved adding water (boiling or cold) to a zipper lock bag, some of the recipes require additional steps and/or cooking, and it's easy to print out the instructions from that downloadable file and either tape them to a zipper lock bag or create an overall instruction sheet for a trip.

Physically, the book has held up well to usage—I've thumbed through it innumerable times, propped it open with cans or other heavy objects, and dog-eared and tagged pages. The book's binding and paper have met this challenge—the book is still in once piece and completely usable. That said, one thing I'd love to see in a future version would be a spiral binding that would allow the book to lie flat while open to a recipe.

Finally, I'll note two other positive aspects of the book:

First, it caused me to rethink my backpacking meals, making me realize that there are a lot more options than I thought for eating well in the backcountry. In addition to using recipes from the book, I now have an expanded set of tools for creating my own meals, through doctoring of instant foods, combining convenience ingredients in new ways, dehydrating foods prepared at home, and baking goods in advance of a trip. Prior to reading this book, I pretty much stuck to freeze-dried or pre-packaged foods; now I have a lot more choices and variety.

Finally, though because of my backpacking style, personal schedule and recent obligations I took less advantage of this, the book offers a number of appealing recipes for people who have a dehydrator and/or the time to cook or bake before trips, or who are willing to bake or cook while camping. For those who consider the trade-off in time worthwhile (plus fuel in the field, for those recipes cooked there), those recipes provide better nutritional profiles and some genuinely creative taste options (more on that below).

Long-Term Recipe Impressions

I've now tested about forty recipes from the book, as well as read through each and every recipe at least three times. Due to my backpacking style (lightweight to ultralight, even in winter) and time limitations outside of this test, I've selected for actual testing mainly recipes that require no cooking on the trail, and tried only a few that required home preparation beyond measuring and assembly of ingredients. In most cases I simply boiled water with the trip's stove of choice (usually a lightweight canister stove, but occasionally an alcohol or white gas stove), added the specified amount of water to the zipper lock back containing the recipe's ingredients, placed that bag in a covered Reflectix pot cozy, and waited the specified amount of time.

There are a number of "recipes" that actually just involve tossing together ingredients in a rather common way (e.g., pasta, parmesan and parsley flakes; cheese sticks and almonds). While I appreciated the inclusion of their nutritional information in the book, and I tried several of them, I'm not going to count them as actual recipes for the purposes of this review. Many of the other recipes were really just very simple ways to dress up prepackaged foods (e.g., adding rice and additional spices to instant chili). While I enjoyed some of those, and there's a continuum of minor dressing up to major, I'm also not commenting on the simpler ones in this review.

That said, a substantial portion of the book provides creative ways to dress up prepackaged foods, as well as truly unique recipes. Many of those, as noted, have opened up my eyes to new ways to make use of prepackaged foods and ingredients, which is an added bonus of the book.

Some of my favorite "real" recipes included:

• Ketchican Couscous (breakfast; not too sweet, made with couscous and dried fruit but no extra sugar)
• Cheesy Breakfast Grits (breakfast, savory, with cheese and egg powder—simple and tasty, especially with the addition of black pepper or hot sauce)
• Adirondack Apricot Oatmeal (though I'd recommend adding the cashews after hydration, to preserve their texture)
• Boot-Stomped Spuds (note—this was really salty as presented; I adjusted ingredients after my first try to get it less salty, and also tried variations such as olive oil instead of butter buds, or adding a packet of tuna (yum!); Brian's Garlic Potatoes are similar and also tasty, though a little messier because of the inclusion of cheese).
• Cheese Coins—yum! (Note: these are baked at home, and consumed as crackers in the field).
• Lone Pine Lentils and Dumplings (cooked in the field; I tried this at home and enjoyed it, though I'd have to debate whether it's worth the extra use of fuel unless I were car camping)

There weren't too many recipes I'd consider complete failures or inedible, but a few did stand out as not as successful as I'd hoped. One was Taconic Mountain Cheesy Rice—it didn't taste particularly great, and the rice stayed pretty crunchy, and the cheese in a lump; this would probably be improved by adding instructions to shred or slice the cheese before adding boiling water, though the taste would probably remain just so-so-for me. Also, I and my companions were far less taken with the Whopper Malt Bribe drink—it sounded yummy on paper, but in practice turned out not-so-flavorful and with a funny texture (blobs of Whopper chocolate covering floating around a mix tasting a bit too much like powdered milk).

There are numerous recipes in the book I just haven't found the time to try yet, but which sound yummy. One I'm looking forward to is Chainsaw's Pumpkin Pleaser; because of the extended preparation time and dehydration, I wasn't able to fit this in my schedule, but it represents the kind of recipe I'd love to see more of in the book (that is, foods beyond simple assemblages of prepackaged and basic foods). I will post an addendum when I have tested this and a few other similar recipes.

Regarding the cost of preparing these meals: many of the recipes make use of pre-packaged foods, sometimes multiple types in one recipe (a package of mashed potato buds, package of sauce mix, bouillon cube, etc. might all appear in a single recipe). Other recipes make use of a dehydrator and a fair amount of home preparation time. The former category ends up being rather pricey for the results, in my opinion; while the latter category can be less expensive in terms of ingredients, but take a fair amount of labor to prepare, dehydrate and package. The net result for me personally is that cost-wise I feel I can do better buying freeze-dried or other complete pre-packaged meals; taste-wise (the serious issues of sodium content aside), many of the meals in the cookbook offer a nice step up from many pre-packaged backpacking foods, and I will continue to make the investment in time here and there to use them.

Summary

"Lipsmackin' Vegetarian Backpackin'" is a nicely-designed, user-friendly book of vegetarian recipes for backpackers. The book provides a good variety of recipe types and tastes, plus a well-thought-out set of accompanying tips, data, and background information.

Things I liked:

• Pleasing, well-thought-out book design and information layout
• Good variety of recipes
• Thorough information provided for each recipe, including portioning, preparation and packaging recommendations, nutrition and weight
• Some tasty recipes!

Things I didn't like:

• High sodium content or other nutritional deficits in a number of recipes
• Inconsistent index
• Inconsistent portioning
• Lots of reliance on pre-packaged foods without adequate suggestions for substitutions

Despite the above comments, I'm glad I was a part of this test, would recommend the book to others, and will continue to use it. Thanks to BackpackGearTest and Globe Pequot Press for giving me the opportunity to participate in this test.

Reviews > Books > Cook Books > Lipsmackin Vegetarian Backpackin > Steve Nelson > Long Term Report