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I'm going on a 12 day hike with my boyfriend in a couple of months. We'll be at a mountain station that has limited supplies (e.g. meat) for sale every couple of days, but ideally I want to carry as much food as possible (buying food in the wilderness is expensive!). We'll be walking 15-20 kilometres a day. We'll be cooking food on a small gas burner (can only cook one thing at a time).

I've never hiked for more than 3 days before and I'm at a loss on how to plan to feed the both of us for that length of time. Whatever I bring needs to be low on weight/space taken up, and yet be high in energy and nutritional content. And preferably so that I can use the same ingredients for different meals. I don't want to bring something that I'm only going to use once.

I hope this is on topic here, because I would really need advice on what to eat, how to plan a menu/eating plan, how to make the food taste good with limited resources/time.

victoriah
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    I think tasty is the easy part - especially when backpacking, anything substantial is going to taste pretty darn good, and if you carry a couple packets of spices with you to dump into meals, they'll probably be like manna from heaven. Variety, though, that's tougher. – Cascabel May 21 '11 at 18:08
  • While this is a very interesting question, it is not a good fit for Seasoned Advice. If there were a stackexchange site for camping/hiking it would be better suited there. We are not equipped to address a 12 day meal plan, nor do we offer advice on _what_ to eat. – hobodave May 21 '11 at 21:46
  • Although I'd agree that if there were a hiking/camping site, it would be more appropriate, there isn't one, and this relates just as much to cooking as questions like [meat dishes for college students](http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/2706/) , [cooking for one](http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/11075/), [cooking for large groups](http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/402/) or [once a month cooking](http://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/149/) – Joe May 22 '11 at 19:41
  • I've voted to re-open this, as I think it still relates to cooking, but even if it does get re-opened, you might get more authoritative information from the various backpacking sites; You might try something like [Trail Forums](http://www.trailforums.com/), which is for long-distance hikers (eg, people trying to hike the *whole* Appalachian Trail in one go). I'm guessing that there are other sites out there. (I haven't done anything other than stationary camping in some time, and that's typically only 3-4 days at a stretch) – Joe May 22 '11 at 20:13
  • and you might want to see the discussion at http://meta.cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/1124 – Joe May 22 '11 at 21:19

1 Answers1

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We take home-dehydrated cooked meat (beef, chicken, ground beef) along with spices, tomato leather to make tomato sauce, pasta, rice, dehyrated potato-and-sauce (eg scalloped potatoes) from the grocery store, home-dehydrated vegtables, and dried fruit. From that you can make stew, pasta-with-meat-sauce, curry-on-rice, and so on. You might also be interested in making your own english muffins since bread products squish and don't keep well: http://www.gregcons.com/canoe/muffins.htm.

Backpacking is tougher than canoeing but as long as you can be sure of plenty of water, you should be fine with dried products. We usually bring a little frozen meat for the first night, and frozen bacon for the first morning, well wrapped in newspaper, but those might be too heavy when hiking.

Kate Gregory
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