DIY Trail Food: Eating Healthier and Homemade for Backpacking, Survival, and Travel

Do you want to eat healthier on the trail without breaking your budget?  Have a hankering for beefing up your Bug Out Bag (BOB) but can't stand the thought of MRE's?  How about having a taste of home when on the road in hotel rooms?  If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, but don't know where to start, then this post is for you!

Craig with his dinner

When backpacking with a group, dinner time around the fire is like show and tell for grown ups.

Frequently heard at meals: "What are you having?" usually followed by "do you want to try some?"

Also heard: "Yours looks better than mine?" or  "how much salt is in there, anyway?"

Much more rarely heard: "Yuk, this is nasty!" Because everyone knows that any meal on the trail is:

1. Flavored by hunger so everything tastes better than at home.
2. This stuff is expensive and you carried it, so you might as well eat it.
3. You don't have anything else to eat because you planned out each meal before leaving home, so you either eat it or starve.

After setting up camp and gathering fire wood, everyone sits around the fire and pulls out their food bags.  The requisite blue foil of Mountain House, the tan paper of Mary Jane Farms, the clear plastic of Packit Gourmet.  Except me.  I am one of those who beat to a different drum. Living on the fringes of society. Walking the line of sanity.  What can I say, I am a hammock hanger :)

DIY Trail Food: Building a better backpacking meal, Step One - Base

My first post in this "DIY" series on how to make your own trail meals introduced how making trail meals at home can be a cheaper and more nutritious alternative to store bought trail foods, and discussed why outdoorsmen or preppers should make our own dinners. This article begins the actual "how" to put your meals together, and is the second in a  series of how-to articles...

Start Your DIY Meal With the Right Base

DIY Trail Food: Building a Better Backpacking Meal, Step Two - Meat (or Meat Substitute)

Like I mentioned in my little ramen rant from Step One, some people rely too heavily on simple carbohydrates and junky food for calories on the trail, and forego nutrition for taste.  Step One  provides the simple carbohydrates for your meal.  This post is the second in the series, focusing on how to add adequate protein to your DIY trail meals.

Adding Protein to Trail Meals is Easy and Delicious

Read more by clicking the "Read More" link below!

DIY Trail Food: Building a Better Backpacking Meal, Step Three - Veggies

Now that you have your base and protein picked out, we will add some color, flavor, and nutrition with veggies!  Backpackers and survivalists are not interested in counting calories to lose weight.  Just the opposite is true: backpackers count calorie per gram of food in order to get the highest calorie content from the lightest amount of food.  Packing nutrient dense food in your BOB or backpack will give you the most calories but with a pack that weighs less, which is helpful whether you are hiking up a mountain or running away from zombies :)

Fruit and vegetables are often sorely lacking from trail food bags for several reasons; fresh, they are heavy (most fruit is ~80% water weight), they bruise and spoil easily, and they provide few calories per gram of weight.  This article focuses on:

•  why we should include veggies in our trail meals,
•  ideas on easy ways to add them to our meals, and
•  tips for home dehydrating  

Fruits will be touched on, but I will cover fruits more in depth in future articles about breakfasts and snacks.

DIY Trail Food: Building a Better Backpacking Meal, Step Four - Sauces and Fats

While I love to dabble in the kitchen, I continue to be confounded by sauces.  No different for my dehydrated dinners. Perhaps because I am a firm "meat and potatoes" kind of girl who thinks cheddar cheese sauce from a can is the perfect condiment, I have never mastered the talent of good sauce making.  Not to say I haven't been inspired to try; I do make a decent hollandaise from scratch, which methinks is something to brag about.

Homemade Pesto

Using sauce to pull together all the elements of a dish is no different whether eating rehydrated food from a freezer bag in the wilderness or eating fresh ingredients at home. This article is the fifth in a series of posts on making your own dehydrated meals at home, from scratch, using ingredients found in your pantry or grocery store.

Earlier articles covered:

• Why You Should Make Your Own Trail Meals
• The Base of the Meals, or the carbohydrate portion
• Adding Meat and Protein to your Meals
• Using Vegetables to Boost Nutrition

DIY Trail Food: Building a Better Backpacking Meal, Step Five - Spices, Toppings, And Putting it All Together

"He who controls the spice, controls the universe." ~Frank Herbert, Dune

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Bags of Spices in a Market

Now that you have made a new trail dinner masterpiece, it's time to spice it up and top it off!  Herbs and spices can feed the senses as well as the body; changing the flavor profile of a dish in a jiffy, while also adding protective nutrients to food. Toppings can add crunch or texture to any dish that lacks that "something extra."

How to Travel the World in a Freezer Bag

Eat Homemade Dehydrated Food on Vacation to Save Money and Time

This is a post for anyone who likes to enjoy hot beverages or eat hot food on the road but do not enjoy waiting in restaurant lines or paying exorbitant prices for fattening, unhealthy food.  Being a hot tea junkie, I can't stomach paying $2 for a cup of hot water with a 20 cent tea bag when I am away from home.  For short trips, such as a day trip, I carry a thermos of hot water and keep tea bags, sugar, and creamer in my car, along with snacks.

But for longer, overnight trips, I carry a backpacking stove.  That's right!  Those cute little backpacking stoves aren't just for the back woods.  I carry mine just about everywhere.  Instead of stopping at convenience stores for cups coffee or hot chocolate, stop at rest areas and fire up the stove.   Likewise, prepare pre-portioned dinners from dehydrated foods at home in ziploc freezer bags and simply add hot water to rehydrate in the bag.  This method, called "Freezer Bag Cooking," or FBC, has been used by backpackers for years to savor homemade goodness when on the go.