What's Cooking? One of the most frequent questions we get about our Ashley’s Return trek is about the food we carried and how we ate. Over the years I have tried many different things from carrying some form of original stable bread, to jerky and even pemmican. The disadvantage we have today is our inability to hunt wherever and whenever we go to the woods for a trek, whether for a weekend or 95 days.
In
today’s world we must follow hunting and fishing seasons and based on our jobs
and time off available, cannot always trek during a hunting season. The main
stay of Longhunter’s, fur trappers and soldiers was always meat in some form. I
read one account that one soldiers daily ration in the Revolutionary War was 7
squirrels. In the end, that is not a lot of meat, but it is a lot of shooting
for a forager!
We
carried a couple sets of food. Starting off with breakfast we made a simple
bucket of coffee. The night before the bucket was filled with water, coffee
dropped in it to soak overnight and then boiled in the morning. While the coffee
was on to boil, we each made a simple breakfast of oatmeal. To that we added
dried fruit and nuts. This, to me, is the perfect breakfast. No mess of carrying
and cooking bacon and no digestive issues while trekking. As a bonus, oatmeal
is light in weight to carry and staves off hunger well. During the day, for
lunch, we passed around the bag of dried fruit and nuts to snack on. Amazingly,
it is filling and gives great energy to get through to dinner.
Prior
to eating dinner, we ate what our companions called “pupu’s”, Hawaiian for
appetizer. It consisted of cut up raw cabbage, garlic, onion, ginger, and
cheese. All these last a long time on the trail. Cabbage can last up to a
month. These are a great combination to settle the stomach and help regulate
the digestive system. This was enjoyed while one of us cooked a stew with the
fresh meat we carried.
The
raw meat was wrapped in cotton, then put inside the cooking bucket and put in
the pannier on the pack animal where it would be out of the sun and heat,
mostly. Each night we would stack all the meat on top of the cooking tripod to
slowly smoke to preserve it. Meat carried in this fashion can last up to 16
days. For a weekend trek it is a great way to go. The meat was cut up and mixed
with dried or dehydrated vegetables and the spices we carried to form a stew.
Dehydrated vegetables are excellent to carry. Depending on what you buy, they
hydrate rapidly, have great nutrition and once again, are lightweight.
A
simple weekend trek or event menu for one person would be half cup of oatmeal,
a pound of dried fruit and nuts in a bag, half pound of fresh meat per day and
2 cups of dried/dehydrated vegetables, spices of choice and of course, enough
coffee to keep that headache away! Next month I will detail the food storage
bags and how to carry your provisions the way we did. I hope this helps you
plan your next event and I hope to see you around a fire.
