 Larger | Trail Food: Drying and Cooking Food for Backpacking and PaddlingBuy from www.amazon.com | |
| List Price: www.amazon.com's Price: $8.76 You Save: $2.19 (20%) Condition: New Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Average Customer Rating: 4.5 Lowest New Price: $5.58 Lowest Used Price: $5.57 | I am really loving this bookI have no idea about camping, but my husband is trying to get me into it. My attitude has been open, but honestly I felt he would have a better time taking our cats on a trip through a drive-thru car wash than me camping.I'm really trying to figure it all out, starting with 'whats the point?'. I visualized it at first as a trade-off; we (well, I) suffer in the woods for the sake of saving money on a hotel or being closer to what we traveled to see. Now, I still haven't gone camping yet as I am still putting the pieces together, but this book really did come across in a way that I can totally relate to. Here is what I liked- the author flat out stating how at one time he really just endured the outdoors, much as I visualized myself doing should I give in and go camping with my husband. For me, I saw days of cold sandwiches, bitter black coffee, and M&Ms. How thrilling. The author admitted that before he really clued in to the importance and value of trail food, he would pine away for a nice, hot pizza. My thoughts exactly! So, why suffer, when there is room service and take-out? And thats what this book is about: putting food right up there front and center as an essential part of the whole experience of camping. Some of the reviews that I have read here state that the little short stories sprinkled throughout the book and at the beginning of the chapters has nothing to do with this book's intended topic: Trail Food. I don't feel that way, because I cannot for the life of me imagine enjoying the wilderness and feelings described those little stories while staring at a vertical rock wall I have to somehow navigate, or while under a tarp in a rainstorm in some anonymous part of the forest, miles from the nearest take-out. But, with the right food? A nice mocha? A hot pizza? Spiced eggs? Suddenly that tarp is..kinda cool sounding..and that rain, well, even better :) Thats what this book connects for me: that the overall experience of on the trail is highly correlated to the type, quality, and variety of food that you make available to yourself and others in your party. I am starting to see from this book that camping in general is not something that has to be endured, if properly approached and executed. And that means giving food its rightful spot on your gear list: an alpha-item, not an afterthought. Really, nobody here is more rank beginner noob than I am when it comes to things outdoors, but I will hazard a guess that one can have the most top-flight tents, sleeping bags, etc in the world and still have a miserable time on the trail, a time spent enduring. This book has steered my thinking away from any such notion of enduring to one of enjoying, and with the simple recipes and some rather new things to me (like 'food dehydrators'), I can actually have some chance at making that happen. Yes, at my tent, lean-to, tarp, or whatever..its going to be pizza time! :) Newer/better trail food books out thereI am in charge of packing the food for my sister and I each Spring and Fall for ten days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I started drying our own food after the first trip (up to 15 now).I bought this book because I like Alan S. Kesselhelm as a writer. While Kesselhelm has in-depth wilderness experience, I fear I was spoiled by owning Teresa Marrone's "The Back-Country Kitchen" first. Good basics, of course, but my fav parts were the illustrations by Marypat Zitzer and the short introductory essays about life in the wilderness. Great information hereI got this primarily for the food drying ideas and was impressed by how much information is in it. Fantastic for backpackers and hikers, I'll use some of these techniques for food storage in my home as well and for making soup mixes that can be made easily when my family is in a rush. The author suggests precooking foods like rice and noodles, then dehydrating them so they cook faster.There are extensive tables explaining what texture your finished dried food should be at, tips for storage and many recipes. Some of them are vegetarian and many of them could be easily adapted to being vegan as well. He also includes plans for building your own food dehydrators, one heated by a light bulb, the other, solar. A wonderful inspiring book for finding new ways to pack nutritious and good meals. Not via KindleExactly the book I was looking for but it was a mistake to purchase it via Kindle. Some of the recipes are in very small type and unreadable on the Kindle screen even using the largest font selection.The actual book would have been a better purchase. Nice helpful little pamphlet, but not much more.I have done very little backpacking and moderate camping, and I waited with baited breath for this book to arrive (fortunately delivery was very fast so I had little time to form my expectations). When it did arrive, I read the book in a matter of a couple hours. Granted, I did not read through every recipe. This book does have some good common sense information about food drying, but not much more than typical instructions of most driers supply. From there the book goes through the other issues of packing, carrying and preparing trail foods in the very briefest of manners. There are many recipes included, and I will invariably use a few of them, but this is not the information I sought as I know how to cook. The book was weak on many issues that I hoped it might contain, such as information on nontraditional means of food production, such as solar cooking. The short piece on choices between stoves and fires, and the choices in stoves was near useless, even for an beginner, but it did help to fluff out this very tiny 88 page book to a bit more reasonable expectations of what defines a book. There are many line drawings that also stand in place of the diction I expected, and the majority of them have little to do with support of the text. My biggest disappointment is the complete lack of mention of plant based foods gathered along the way. I know there are many books on this topic, but I was more than a little surprised to find a total lack herein. I guess I was looking for a useful trail book, and this is certainly not it. The space in my pack is too valuable.If you are looking for a recipe book with other basic tips, this book will serve you very well. Strangely, what I enjoyed most are the bits of prose at the chapter heads, but of course these had nothing to do with the book's subject. If you removed these from the book, and the useless line drawings, you would have enough left over for a lengthy magazine article, not a book. I am glad to have read this book, and I will refer to the recipes from time to time, but unless you have money burning a hole in your pocket, I would look for a used copy or go with another book altogether. Like most of you, I picked this book because of its high review ratings, and this time the ratings let me down. Product Description" . . . a book that will appeal to everyone who has ever choked down the pre-packaged, bargain-basement camp food (or gone bankrupt buying the good stuff)." --Canoe & Kayak. . . if you're on the lookout for a way to bring real meals to the field, [this book] might have the answer." --Field & Stream Life in the outdoors revolves around food--cooking it, eating it, packing it, carrying it. We even fantasize about it, especially after a week of eating store-bought provisions. This book is all about fulfulling those food fantasies and avoiding those expensive disappointments. Trail Food tells you how to remove water from food, to make it lighter and longer-lasting, without removing its taste. Learn to plan menus and prepare meals just like the ones you left behind, using fresh foods from your garden or market, prepared and seasoned the way you like them. Why fantasize when you can have the real thing? 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