Food???

[PineMartyn]

Thank you very much Martyn. This helps immensely, you may have convinced me to drop 100 bucks on a food dehydrator.

I should mention, for you and anyone else who is concerned about the cost of a new dehydrator, that it is quite easy to find them secondhand online on sites such as E-Bay, Kijiji, and Craig's List. People buy them to make jerky and fruit leathers for kids, and once the novelty wears off, they seek to sell them. They are a lot like breadmakers that way. There has also recently been a raw foods craze which inspired a lot of people to buy dehydrators and when people discover that a raw food diet isn't to their liking, many of them seek to sell their dehydrators. Unless one is a camper or a prepper, most people find they get little use out of it. Consequently, you can get them for a fraction of the cost, and instruction manuals can now be found and downloaded from online sources because manufacturers of appliances make the manuals for their products (including discontinued ones) available online as PDF files.

And a dehydrator needn't clutter up your kitchen. Ours is stored in the back of a closet all year, but gets used intensely for 4-5 days each spring, which produces all the dehydrated meals we'll need for the forthcoming year's camping trips and day trips. That saves us hundreds of dollars in commercial freeze-dried meals every year. Because the technology is simple (it's just a small heating element, a fan, and a temperature dial), they don't wear out or fail for years and years, so there's no need to worry about obtaining one secondhand.

Hope this helps,
- Martin

[moab]

Might I add the most important food item in my pack?

Metamucil. Metamucil. Metamucil.

No matter what I eat hiking (which usually consists of alot more starch and meat than I normally intake). It seems to stop me up. And can make for a very uncomfortable trip. Metamucil lets you eat pretty much whatever you have on hand without getting bloated like a dead cow in the sun.

[Hunt4lyf]

This!

I make this and dehydrate it and I've eaten it for days on end and it is great.

Mtn House type foods are so full of salt it's ridiculous and ramen is just empty carbs and if you use the flavor packet it has wayyyy to much salt in it.

I got this from the Kifaru forums.


Ingredients:


2 lb. venison or beef cut into 1/2" chunks
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup chopped celery
1 cup chopped green peppers
1 cup chopped green onions
1 cup broccoli florets
1 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 cup chopped spinach
1 can sliced carrots, drained
1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
1 can Rotel
8 oz. dry cous-cous
10 shakes of Datil sauce


I used a huge skillet.


Brown the meat in olive oil and set aside and keep warm.


Start stir-frying the vegetables in the order they appear above. It will look like alot when you first get in in the wok, but it cooks down. Keep adding ingredients (you may have to add a touch more olive oil in the process) until you have a batch of the casserole that has the consistency of thick oatmeal. Add the browned venison back into the wok. The cous-cous will help thicken it up. You can tweak the amounts of each ingredient as you wish. I didn't make my first batch too spicy because the wife and girls were eating it, but in the future I would spice it up some.


This one-pot meal is great! You can dehydrate it and it'll store for a LONG time. You can eat it fresh and hot out of the wok, or take it in your backpack, dry in a ziploc. Reconstitute it in the field or eat it dry. It's good both ways. I'm taking a healthy batch with me bowhunting this fall.


Also, this meal has great nutritional value. Patrick swears, and I'm rightly convinced, that you could live on this stuff indefinitely in the field. Thanks, Patrick, for sharing this tasty meal!