Grilled Jambalaya

Hello World,

I'm heading out to the sierras for a backpacking trip in the greater hetch hetchy ecosystem of the sierras. On the menu is a variety of goodies, including a smoked jambalaya, good bars, and fake meat. The jambalaya is a more robust version of the stuff I made last season. I added some shredded chicken to the mix, and more veggies.


I soak some apple wood over night for generating smoke


and prepare some fresh veggies


GARLIC


onions and jalepenos


bell peppers


smoked over low heat for a while


Cook it up with some diced tomato, rice, and chicken broth


shred the chicken with forks


Dry 10 hours and flip over


until dried completely


Gratuitous grill photo !

Cheers y'all, I'm out of here for a very well deserved vacation.

Yours,
Cayenne

Strawberry Electrolyte Gel

Greating my friends, I made these for my trinity alps trip. Due to getting stuck in a snow storm, I didn't get to push myself hard enough to properly evaluate the functionality of this snack. I enjoyed the taste, but think I can improve on the texture of these.


I start with 1/3 flat of fresh organic strawberries ( 0.5kg)


Strawberries are scored in parallel lines, 5-8 cuts per berry, and flavor
is extracted by covering with evaporated cane juice (200g)


After a short rest, and a quick stir, it should look like this gooey mess


There are lots of ways to get the juice from the mix, I use cheesecloth


drain, drain, drain, drain . . . rinse with OJ . . . I collected almost 100ml of juice.


Add the juice from some oranges to bring volume to 100ml.


Pastuerize the liquid, and add in some dissolved gelatin (21g), then pour into a container to set


Cube, and toss lightly with a small amount of sugar. I cut mine so that I could easily squeeze them out of my refillable squeeze tubes. This amount filled one tube completely.

I hope to get the write up done for my trinity alps trip soon.

It's backpacking season, be safe out there,
Cayenne

Good Bars

Hello Internets,

I needed a bar that I could stand to eat, so I made one. I set out to make something deceptively sweet, crunchy, and chewy. This is the basic bar, with more flavors to come as I do more trips. Simple sugars come from evaporate cane juice, agave nectar, and a local honey made from bees pollinating blackberry shrubs. Oats, rice, amaranth, and millet add complex carbohydrates, and some protein. Butter, seeds, and nuts add fat and texture.

FWIW, these bars are 4.8Cal/g.

The full recipe should appear in the list on the right soon, enjoy the picture show.

INGREDIENTS

• 170g Evaporated organic can juice (~1cup)
• 185g Peanut Butter (~2/3 cup) (12f:8p:5c)/32g (200Cal/32g)
• 120g agave nectar (1/4 cup) (360Cal)
• 115g butter (1/2 cup)
• 10g vanilla (2tsp)
• 270g rolled oats (3 cups) (140cal/39g)
• 71g oat flour (1/2 cup) )140cal/39g)
• 80g sunflower kernels (1/2 cup)
• 30g sesame seeds (1/4 cup)
• 15g amaranth, toasted/puffed (1/4 cup) 374cal/100g
• 35g millet (1/4cup) 119cal/100g
• 80g corn syrup (1/4 cup) (120cal/30g)
• 116g blackberry honey (honey from black berry plants, not fruit honey combo) (1/4cup) (60cal/20g)
• 50g crisped rice (120cal/30g) (four or five hand fulls)
• 30g hemp seeds ( 174cal/30g) (a couple of plam fulls)
• 88g peanuts (802cal/144g) ( about 1/5 lb)

Crunchy Peanut butter, agave nectar, honey, vanilla evaporated cane juice,

some butter

mix the butter, PB, and sugars

puff the amaranth and millet, separately, over fairly high dry heat

add the puffed millet and amaranth, oats, oat flour, sesame seeds, hemp seeds, sunflower seeds, and peanuts. Mix it up

pack into baking sheet, 3/8" thick

bake 20 minutes @ 350F, and then dehydrate at 150-180F for 4-6 hours. Cut into 100g bars.

Thanks for reading, Electrolyte gels and Trinity Alps trip report coming soon.

Cheers,

Calories per gram ratio

Lets brainstorm about Calories per gram.

Fat is 9Cal/g
Carbs are 4Cal/g
Protein is 4Cal/g

For most intents and purposes, Calories only come from these components of food, and the amounts per unit of the food is known from internet databases.

Looking only at these components, there is a linear relationship between percentage of Calories from fat, and Calories per gram of digestible matter.

Calories_Per_gram = (PercentCaloriesFromFat / 20) +4

A "perfect" food would contain only these components in significant quantities. Crafting a recipe for any given Caloric density would be a simple matter of punching in the numbers into the equation to determine the needed fat percentage, and building from that.

PercentCaloriesFromFat = 20 * (Calories_Per_gram - 4)

Protein : Carbohydrate ratio would be a matter of when the fuel was to be burned. I like proteins at night, and carbohydrates in the day, both with generous amounts of fat.

I have a variety of isolated proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. Preparing a menu could be a simple matter of seasoning protein and carbohydrate blends and preparing those with water and fat on the trail. Except I want, and need, texture to my foods.

The challenge in optimizing the Cal/g ratio then becomes a function of creating enjoyable texture from carbs and proteins, that can be dried and rehydrated later. These should be crafted in a way that would allow the maximum amount of fat to be tolerated during the meal. This would seem to be the next step in the fake meat project I started last year, but I am not sure. If I want to push the Cal/g ratio higher, I need to be able to find a texture I enjoy when prepared in fat.

Since I've never kept stats before, the bars are my current record on a Cal/g scale. I typed up the recipe for the bars today, so as soon as I select some pictures it will be ready to post.

I'm thinking I can make a hot dinner that breaks 6 Cal/g.

Cheers,

COMING UP !
Trinity alps trip report, and strawberry electrolyte chewable gel.

Ravioli :: No Recipe

I haven't posted anything in a while. I got sick with bronchitis, and pretty much took a month off from life. I'm still a little bit depressed, but things are starting to look up again.

I am thinking about making a ravioli for the trail, a nice protein rich packet of flavor wrapped in a high carbohydrate dumpling. My gut instinct says I want beef stew inside a chewy dumpling, with a gravy type of sauce. I'm still thinking about the best way to go about doing such a thing for the trail.

While I don't have a recipe to share yet, I do have some gratuitous photos, just keep scrolling till you find them. I'm still playing with the fake meats, here as a ravioli filling.

Enjoy, and Thank You,
Cayenne


Four egg yolks, some egg white, and a splash of oil are massaged into one cup of flour, wrapped in plastic and set out to rest for an hour at room temperature.


roll it thin, and cut out ravioli halves with metal shot glass


add some filling


put another circle of dough over the filling, and seal with a fork


repeat until you have enough to cook


cook and serve. I ate these with browned butter and a carrot chutney

A Masala Sauce (recipe)

Okay, so lets start with the masala sauce. This sauce forms the body and soul of the worlds most popular pseudo-indian dish. I'm working to bring it on the trail with me next weekend. Because heavy cream is not trail friendly, I've decided to substitute mori-nu tofu for the heavy cream. This dish, as prepared, is vegan and vegetarian.

I got distracted when cooks illustrated covered chicken tikka masala in their current issue. I made their recipe, and I didn't see what was so great about it. Honestly. I found it lacking in flavor, and color. It had great texture, but with heavy cream, texture isn't much to brag about.

I've tried to keep this recipe as trail friendly as possible. I didn't take pictures during the preparation because my battery was charging. I'll take pictures when I prepare it for this weekends adventure.

To make this dish backpacker friendly, I will prepare a simple spicy tomato sauce and dehydrate it at home. This will give me a fresh flavor tomato sauce without weight. It will also save me the need to carry an extensive spice rack with me.

On the trail, mori-nu tofu will be whipped into the sauce to add protein and thickness.

Masala Tomato Sauce
---------------------------

• 6-8 ripe tomatoes
• a slice of butter/veggie stuff (optional. I don't use fats in things I want to dry)
  
• 2tbls minced garlic
• one medium white onion, minced and optional
  
• 1-2 jalepeno or equivalent chillies
  
• 1-2 tsp Paprika
• 1-2 tbls fresh coriander
• "1/2 amount of coriander" cumin seed
• 1/2-1 tsp cinnamon
• 1-2tsp garam masala spice blend
• 1 inch minced ginger root

1. toast whole coriander and cumin seeds till fragrant and aromatic before grinding with mortar and pestle.
   
2. puree tomatoes with Jalepenos, seeds and ribs included
   
3. Cook onion in butter over medium -medium high heat 3-5 minutes
4. add spices (parika, coriander, cinnamon, cumin, garam masala blend ) and cook 45s-1:30, till fragrant
5. add tomato-jalepeno puree and minced ginger
6. cook 10 minutes
7. dehydrate on parchment paper till dry . I use my over on the lowest setting with the door propped open. I flip the sauce after 8 hours to dry the other side of the slap.

**NOTE: If you are making this at home, you could puree the tofu in with the tomatoes and jalepenos, or whip it in by hand during the cooking. **

On the trail, rehydrate the dried tomato sauce in boiling water, and add mori-nu silken soft tofu to cream up the sauce. I recommend mashing the tofu up right in the box with your knife or spoon before adding it to the sauce. This sauce is delicious with rice, noodles, dumplings, falafel balls, breads, and eaten plain with a spoon.

I'll be posting an update on my fake meat recipe soon . . . Thank you for reading my blog,
Cayenne


Tofu and Tomato sauce with masala spices (below)

teaser, recipes coming soon

Hello internets, I babble on and on in this one, just keep scrolling, there are pictures down there . . .

I have a shiny new hard drive, and I am glad to be online and posting again !

A little background information : I'm a few years old, and I work as a chromosome mechanic for a world class university in Berkeley California. I hold a degree in biochemistry, and I have 10+ years experience covering protein chemistry, molecular biology, fermentation science, DNA & RNA sequence manipulation & analysis, and computer programming.

I need to be honest with my eaters. I think I can make a better fake meat than the seitan I used in my amaranth soup recipe. I'm not vegan, and I was challenging myself to work without rice, lentils, and soy for the last trip too. I chose to do seitan because I thought it would be reasonably easy for the trail. I found it fussy. Without having control of the water termperature, and measurments, the recipe was hit or miss. I felt that without limiting my ingredients, I could I achieve a better texture, better chew, and better appearance than anything on the market. I was wrong. There are some incredible fake meats on the market today, but, I couldn't find anything particularly friendly to the lightweight backpacker.

So, I set out to develop a backpacker friendly recipe de novo. I've made a half dozen attempts, and I am near ready to share my progress with you. I have a short trip coming up this weekend, and I will be developing a new dinner recipe. My ambition is to develop a trail friendly tikka masala , using the fake meat. I will be releasing several versions of the fake meat to appeal to my vegatarian and vegan readers, as well as my backpacking audience in the next few weeks.

Anyways, I have myself back online, new recipes later this week !
Here are some pictures of fake meat development, enjoy.

Lassen Volcanic National Park

( Text up front, pictures at the bottom of this post, enjoy )

I suffered a hard drive failure on my computer, so this blog is being thrown together quickly before I leave work on a Friday. I am sorry if it sucks.

I made it back from Lassen Volcanic Nation Park. I enjoyed this park a lot. The soil was soft and easy on my joints, lots of trees meant lots of shade, and the elevation was low enough as to not be a problem. I had a blast. I hiked in 5-7 miles to rainbow lake saturday night, and then did 12-15 miles Sunday to run out to Butte lake, stopping at CinderCone and then back to the car. I can see myself heading out here again in the near future. Hopefully I can motivate some friends to come with me next time.

I made the Amaranth soup with Seitan. It was as delicious on the trail as it was at home. I really liked amaranth, and I will be using it on more trips. I was dealing with strong winds, and less than ideal fuel for my stove. Boiling lots of water was out of the question, so I used smaller chunks of glutten. It turned out a little spongy, but it is hard to make one serving of gluten under any conditions. This meal was a success.


Anyways, here are some pictures from the trip, click for bigger picture, visit my flickr page for more complete photo collection.


I entered via the SouthWest entrance

Sulphur works is closed, but here is a little guy spewing out some gases

I made my way back to the lakes from summit lakes trail head

And camped at rainbow lake

In the morning I ran out to Butte Lake, and saw this volcano called Cinder Cone along the way.

This is the view from inside the volcano. There are 3 people in this picture.

A single tree struggles to survive on the side of Cinder Cone.

A nice shot of Mt Lassen.

here are some pictures of food from the trip.

The uncooked glutten

Potato was diced fresh, but the rest of the veggies were dried from fresh at home.

Cooking over the pop can. Isopropano is a crappy fuel. And the winds weren't helping much.

Dinner is served, a wilderness version of candle lit dinner.

With the flash it looks like this. I made it with extra broth. I think it helps make the full sensation last longer.

Breakfast was porridge of corn, wheat, oat, barley, millet, and amaranth. Seasoned with honey, allspice, and cinnamon. I would walk 14 miles before I ate another meal. Better than my usual cream of rice.