An Introduction

It's Thursday night, and I'm sitting at home thinking about dinner. I'm not thinking about dinner for tonight though. I'm thinking about what I would like to be serving on an upcoming trip to the Yosemite wilderness. Because the hiking will be exhausting, by design, I want the food to be easy to prepare. Our intentions are to go high, fast, and far, so I will be cooking with a pop can stove to save weight. I will design the meal to be as close to instant as possible, so I can carry less fuel. I'm aiming for 5 minutes or less of actual cook time. The closer to "add boiling water and wait" the better.

I'm starting this blog to share my passion for creating robustly flavored, lightweight backpacking food. I will use the next two weeks to develop a recipe for the yosemite trip.
I will detail the recipe creation and preparation, the dehydration process, and the final preparation of the dried food.

Bonus :

Because I have never tried to photograph food before, I will post these shots of a dish that was close, but not quite there. It is a grilled jambalaya, made with grilled garlic, onions, bell peppers, corn and tomatoes. Obviously, with a little garnish, this could be made to look a lot better, but I don't carry parsley on the trail. The flavor was a little softer than I would have liked, but I had solid heat from the red chilis, and robust sweet flavors from bell peppers and onion. This rice can be prepared in vegetable stock with dried veggies as a soup, or prepared with lentils as a dinner entree.

These are the first pictures of my food ever released anywhere. Clockwise from top left, we see the dehydrated state, immediately after adding boiling water, fully rehydrated, and served with black beluga lentils.