For some really great ideas, find the book The Hungry Hiker's Guide to Good Food by Gretchen McHugh. It's a cook book/tip-book especially for hikers and campers. It includes lots of tips for dehydrating your own food (including plans for an inexpensive, do-it-yourself dehydrator), as well as recipes for meals which can be made from store-bought and home-dried foods. I've tried many of her ideas, and I've been very pleased.

Michael Helft
dwm@fibercom.com
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A lab mate of mine went on a 10 day trip last year and used recipe she found in a book called The Sierra Club Guide to Backpacking Recipes or something like that. He can't seem to remember the exact title, but he says the food was great, especially the ANZACS (stands for Australian New Zealand Army Corp), little cookies that are essentially crystallized brown sugar and oatmeal. I know, he brought some into the lab. But they become little rocks, you can use them in a sling-shot if you get hungry for meat.

But there are also recipes for polenta cakes, etc, high carbo food. It sounds like he ate very well on this trip.

lim@boulder.Colorado.EDU
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Many, many people suggested Natural food for the Pack which is published by the Sierra Club Press. It isn't strictly a 'vegetarian' cookbook, but most recipes are meatless and many can be made with or without meat.

The Moosewood cookbook also works well on camping trips (I use it almost every night at home and it almost never fails me!) The chili is especially good.

Someone sent me a baked-lentil casserole recipe, which looks great! I won't reproduce it without permission here, but check out a Mennonite cookbook called more-with-less cookbook--form the description it sounds like this could be a useful camping cookbook.

Gorp, Glop, and Glue Stew was suggested as a fun, tongue-in-cheek cookbook written by mountaineering types. The authors are Yvonne Prater and Ruth Dyar Mendenhall, and is published by The Mountaineers (out of Seattle).

Valerie
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Of the several books on wilderness cooking that I have read, Supermarket Backpacker by Harriett Barker is by far the best. It has nice selection of one-pot meal recipes. But it's real value is in the sections on planning, food sources, and general tips. She obviously speaks from broad experience.

She is an advocate of drying your own food, and suggests that almost anything can be easily dried at home. Detailed instructions are given. (Make your favorite gourmet casserole recipe at home, dry it, store it in a plastic bag, then reconstitute it on the trail). She says that home-dried foods generally have a six-month shelf life.

She describes a number of clever bread and biscuit recipes and techniques.

Believe it or not, you can have salad! Shredded cabbage and carrots can be dried and reconstituted, and mixed with dried fruits for an interesting trail salad.

She even tells you how to have Tacos and Nachos on the trail.

The One-Burner Gourmet, by the same author places more emphasis on fancy recipes and less on backpacking practicality - this book would be very valuable to regular car-campers.

This book has a section on "living off the land". I learned that wild watercress looks just like the supermarket stuff, is easily found in cool moving water almost anywhere, and makes a great addition to sandwiches in the wild. {ed. note: when I first posted this, someone pointed out that watercress and hemlock (the plant, not the tree) look very much alike and grow in the same environment. The latter is poisonous. I can't verify this: use your own judgement and your own reference materials}

David Damouth
damouth@wrc.xerox.com
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The NOLS Cookery, which is put out by the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), is an excellent recipe book for taking into the backcountry with you. It is more of a pamphlet (yet very durable) than a book, which makes it very packable. It survived a month of recent Colorado backpacking in almost-new condition, and it's 200 + recipes proved very useful in solving the "so, what new interesting thing are we going to cook tonight?" problem

NOLS uses the bulk-food pantry packaging method, that is, rather than take prepackaged individual meals, they just take lots of ingrediants; the book describes numerous way to combine some of those ingrediants for Breakfast, Lunches, Dinners, Soups, Baking, trail snacks, desserts, etc.. If you're intent on prepacking (going on a short trip for instance), the Cookery can still be handy because a lot of the recipes are way good! You could consult the book at home and prepackage the the ingrediants. Their Bulgar-Miso Lasgana has worked supperb on several trips as has their instant-bean sauce pizza.

The cookery also has a lot of nice info on minimum impact, fuel use, and suggested caloric intakes for different activities. It costs under $10 and you can order by writing or calling:


National Outdoor Leadership School

Box AA

Lander, WY 82520

(307) 322-6973

David Rosenberg
der10@cornell.edu

Table Of Contents Introduction Breakfasts Lunch/Trail Snacks Dinners
Deserts Meat Dishes Assorted Assorted Vegitarian
Further Reading Index Recipe Submission Form