Camplore

A little planning and shopping at the regular grocery store can save a world of trouble when cleanup time rolls around for the lightweight backpacker, even without freeze dried backpacking meals. Just remember to pack it out, and you’re in business with even a potentially messy meal when you use oven bags to line your pots.

I can vouch for greatly improved clean up of chili (chili!) by using Reynold’s Oven Bags to line a backpack pot over a backpacking stove. We cooked the 2 pounds of ground beef at home and dried it before vacuum sealing it. On site, we put an inch or two of water in the pot, lined the pot with a large oven bag (just make sure the bag will fit your pot, and squeeze out as much air as you can between the water and the pot), added water to rehydrate the beef, and heated it. We then added our preferred chili seasoning (in this case, Wick Fowler’s 2-Alarm Chili mix, cranked up to a 3- or 4-alarm), a small can of tomato sauce (the only can we carried - don’t forget a small can opener or suitable knife blade) and the required quart or so of water.

We left it to simmer and heat up while we moved to the cornbread, which we made up in another pot using a real Bakepacker.

It was a nice meal, topped off with chocolate pudding mixed in a baggie using powdered milk and left to sit for a while before eating.

Not bad for a little planning, straight from the grocery store. You don’t need the questionably flavored freeze dried meals, as long as you have a few friends to share a substantial meal like this with. You can even use the water in the bottom of the pot to clean up.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2005 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Equipment, Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.