Food Prep Round 1

Remember all of that math I was doing in my post about our food plans? Yep. There really is no way to prepare yourself for the amount of food that is. Remember, it is highly suggested that we eat 5,000-6,000 calories a day for the amount of exercise we are doing. It is physically impossible to do more than a day or two of carrying and consuming that many calories while hiking that much. That said, I'm trying to prep as many calories as is possible, in the form of meals.

And that leads to lots and lots of food prep!



The first step is shopping. Lots of shopping. These pictures are from one of my trips. I have done at least one more similar trip for just camping food, as well as all of the other food I have purchased over the year for dehydrating. More on that later.

 

I had a friend ask how much food I had purchased. At that time, we had about six hundred dollars worth of food in her house, maybe? And I have been adding to that number since. That also doesn't include dog food, which is expensive in its own right.

So once I have all the food, you know I'm not just going to say let's pack it in as it is. That doesn't really work. Too much bulk of packaging, as well as all the stuff that needs dehydrating. Beyond that, we also don't want to get sick of eating the same thing every day.

I've been prepping dehydrated food for a while now. For veggies and such, it's fairly easy when using canned veggies. Yes, I know, they aren't fresh, but canned veggies are way easier to dry. Open, drain, rinse, dump, and dry. It's crazy how much water you lose when you dehydrate stuff. I can fit six to eight cans of corn in one sandwich bag.

Over the past few weeks, I have been going over to Jenn's house (one of my wonderful pre-trail trail angels) to work on food. She has a much better kitchen for doing something like this than I do. Yes, all of those tubs everywhere are mine. I packed up all of my food and brought it over.

While Jenn worked on meals that were straight forward or just dog food, I worked on the mixes for breakfast. With oatmeal and couscous, I'm doing a lot to add nutrition to it, so there is a scoop from each one of those bags going into a bag. Yep, assembly line, here I come!

This doesn't even begin to show all the work we did. And that is only scratching the surface of what all I need to finish. Yes, lots and lots of work. We have finished one tub of food, a mix of dog and human food. 

But there is still more to process and make. I'm working on it, but slow going. The whole working while prepping is a bit of a struggle, as well as the fact that I really should have started this way sooner, but live and learn. 

The pictures above are all the stuff we haven't used yet. Yep. They all need to be broken down and mixed together, and then sealed using the vacuum sealer.

This is the evidence of me working on the small mix stuff. When doing meals from a box for backpacking, you have to mix in all of the powdered milk and butter before you leave. Since these are more finicky, I'm prepping the boxes before we actually put them in bags and seal them. This way, all Jenn would have to do is dump everything into a bag and go.