Ozark Hiker

Feeds 2 or so (depends on how hungry you are and how many noodles you use)
Time:  ~5 minutes + however long it takes to get your water to a boil

Ingredients:
angel hair pasta
1 pkt. McCormick creamy garlic alfredo sauce mix
1 pkt. dried milk
1 tube Amore pesto paste
4 mozzarella cheese sticks
grated parmesan cheese
crushed red pepper
Hormel real bacon bits
Alessi garlic breadsticks
spice mix (see original post)

Gear:
titanium cooking pot
MSR pocket rocket stove
Light My Fire utensil

Step 1:   Packing it in
Break the pasta in half and stick it in a zip-lock bag.  I usually keep a quart-packet of dried milk for my morning oatmeal, so that’s already in the kit.  Cheese sticks, sauce mix, and pesto tube are individually packaged.  Use a snack-sized zip-lock baggie for your parmesan cheese, crushed red pepper, and bacon bits.  The Alessi breadsticks are hard and will likely crumble during the hike.  Take them out of the box and put ’em in a zip-lock baggie.

Step 2:  Cooking
Dump the sauce mix, bacon bits, parmesan cheese, red pepper, and about three heaping spoons of powdered milk into about 2 or so cups of water.   Squirt roughly two tablespoons of the pesto paste.  Stir it up (don’t worry much about clumps, it’ll level out) and set it to boil.   Stir constantly.
Once you have a good rolling bubble going, add the pasta.  Reduce heat to a simmer and stir for 5 minutes.   Take care not to let it stick to the pot.   The starch in the pasta has a tendency here to make the sauce gummy.   If it gets too thick, add some water and stir it in.   The sauce will definitely thicken up later.  Kill the heat after 5 minutes.
Quickly slice the  4 cheese sticks into half-inch chunks and stir it into the pasta.  They’ll melt into gooey lumps of goodness while the dish cools enough to eat.

Season it to taste with red pepper and/or the spice mix, shake the breadstick crumbs onto the top.  Dig in.

Step 3:  Cleaning
When you’re finished, offer the pot to your buddy who is sitting across from you – glaring while trying to choke down his Insta-crap side dish as he is watching you savor this meal, eyes half-closed in gastronomic ecstasy.  Maybe he’ll lick the pot clean for you if he doesn’t impale you with a titanium spork before you can offer.   You could bring a few extra tortillas and use them to wipe out/sop up the sauce.  Otherwise, just pour a little hot water into it and wipe it out.  Or, maybe, you could offer to share with your buddy under the agreement that he who cooks does not have to clean.

Variations
The sauce mix only calls for 1 cup of milk – and since you’re using 2 cups of liquid for this recipe, I guess you could add two packets of mix if you really wanted it to be creamy.  I’ve never tried it that way, though, so it might end up thick as a brick.
Be careful about adding too much pasta – it can have a tendency to clump together and not cook all through.   You could cook the pasta separately and add it to the sauce later.  In that case – only let the sauce boil for about 2 minutes before you take it off the heat.  Still boil the noodles for 5 minutes.  I prefer one-dish meals, though.

I love food, but not just any food.  I love really good food.   I mean really good food.  And the best way to eat the best food is to learn how to cook it yourself.  My weakness?   Italian food.   I love the hearty red sauces, the artery-clogging white sauces, rich green pesto.  Oh and pasta. . . all kinds of pasta.

With our crew, if we’re drop-camping or backpacking through the mountains, I’m the camp chef.  You just can’t eat good Italian food without whipping up something dense with astonishing caloric counts – so as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better trail food.  Here are a few staples to add to your food bag:

1.  Amore brand pastes. They come in 2.8 oz tubes.  My favorites are sun-dried tomato and pesto.  I’m also experimenting with the black olive and Italian herb blend pastes.  They’re about $6 a tube at Walmart – but a little goes a long way for flavoring purposes.  They all seem to be around 300 calories per tube and most use olive oil in the paste.  They aren’t the meal, they just make it much, much better.

2.  Parmigiano. Your basic Parmesan cheese.  Travels well, reasonably priced.  If you’re a fast-food condiment hoarder, or just eat a lot of pizza, you can get it in little single-use packets from your favorite pizza place.  To reduce packaging waste, just dump some in a zipper-top snack-size bag.  You want to really eat well, spring for parmigiano-reggiano and grate it yourself.  Some things are just worth the price – especially on the trail.

3.  Mozzarella cheese. You can buy ’em cheaply by the stick and lots of folks carry them around just to snack on.  You could spring a bit more and buy a ball of it (smoked!) in other places, but it doesn’t take much to kick up a pasta dish.  Peel the cheese stick into feathery strips before adding it to your pasta so that it’ll melt quicker and give you that nice texture we all expect from melted mozzarella.  Or, better yet, buy it wrapped in prosciutto and basil.

4.  Dried red pepper flakes. Key ingredient in my shrimp fra diavolo, and goes real well with any kind of creamy cheesy pasta dish.  Unless you really love it hot, you’ll probably only need a few single-use packets of the stuff.  Get ’em from your favorite pizza guy whenever you order extra parmesan.   I buy it by the jar, though, so just tend to shake a little into my spice mix.

5.  Herbs ‘n Spices. Buy a jar, one of the little small ones, of generic Italian seasoning and that’ll do you all you need.  Or, you can save one of those little jars and fill it with a mixture of granulated garlic, dried basil, dried oregano, dried parsley, dried red pepper flakes, and a little salt ‘n pepper.  That will do you better.  You won’t notice the weight in your pack.  You will notice the taste.  Grow your own herbs and stuff a baggie with them fresh from the garden.  A few sprigs of rosemary alone will do wonders to the smell of your pack.

6.  Pasta. Comes dried and in more shapes and names than you can remember.  Angel hair pasta cooks in about two minutes.  I’m fond of spinach fettuccine, but it takes a little longer to cook.  Don’t overcook the pasta.

Making a passable cream sauce out of a backpack in the middle of an Arkansas summer was the biggest hurdle. Once you work around how to make that happen, it really gets good.

At its most basic level, you need only three things to make the cream sauce happen:  cream (heavy or half’n’half), butter, parmesan cheese.  Using powdered milk, because it is skim, kills your fat content. . . and I’m not about to pack a stick of butter in July.  The olive-oil packed paste concentrates really seem to fit the need for fat.  What that doesn’t fix, is fooled by the texture of melted mozzarella.

Other things you can add to a basic cream sauce on the trail:

* chicken – but please don’t just dump it straight from the can or pouch.  You do that and your chicken will taste like the container and not like your sauce.   Squirt a bit of the pesto paste into the bottom of your pot prior to mixing up the sauce and dust the chicken with the spice mix.   Let it sear, stirring frequently for just a minute or two, as it soaks up the flavors of the oil and spices and gets a little texture.   Set it aside to add at the end.

* crab – yeah, you read it right.   You can buy lump crab meat in a can just like you do tuna.  It is fully cooked and ready to go.   If you really want the seafood flavor kick, drain the can into your pasta water.   Stir in the crab right at the end, so that it has about a minute to warm up into the sauce before you stop cooking.   If you have a favorite brand of cajun seasoning – it compliments this sauce real well.

* tomato paste – either in a tube or from one of those tiny cans.  This takes your cream sauce into a creamy tomato sauce.  Particularly good when you use the real bacon bits and chunks of mozzarella.  I like mine real heavy on the basil and garlic.

I love food.  I love to cook food.  I love to eat food.

Backpacking and good eats just don’t seem to go together.  Head into any suburban outfitter or the campin/huntin/fishin section of your local supermarket and you can drop lots of money on all sorts of insta-meals.   I won’t claim to have done a comprehensive study of each brand, variety, and flavor but the ones I’ve eaten either taste like crap or they taste fine but have the texture of shredded cardboard.  I’ve even read in guidebooks and similar texts about how wonderful it is to find many “pack-friendly” offerings in the grocery sections.  Everything from instant noodles to “just add water” sauce sides or vac-sealed packets of meats.   Again, I guess they get points for being light-weight and convenient.  They definitely supply calories and, well, when I’m done eating them I’m not hungry any more.   For my first couple of years on the trail, I faithfully ate what appear to be backpacker staples:   instant oatmeal, energy bars, jerky, cheesy-sauce-and-noodle sides, GORP, and candy bars.

Keep in mind that most of my hikes are 2 or 3-night weekend trips between 20 and 30 miles long.  We’ll stretch out a shorter trail by yo-yo-ing it or wrap around a loop trail a few times, but none of what we do involves carrying weeks of food on our back.  Even water is easy to find on most of the trails around here.  With that in mind, I asked my buddy to let me try out a few culinary challenges.  Welcome to Mattdaddy’s Wilderness Bistro.

Since I referenced it in the trip report, I’ll start with the latest one.   One one of our recent Autumn hikes (I think we were on the Butterfield Trail), when it was nice and cold overnight, we started bouncing ideas about bringing some steaks out on the trail.  Since BHT is a loop, one idea was to leave the meat in an ice chest in the trucks up on Hwy 74 and pick it up on the way down to Rock Hole for dinner.   That seemed a little too much like drop camping, though, and you gotta have standards.   (Now that I think about it, our conversation started while we were hanging out at the Devil’s Den State Park picnic area and watching a trio of guys gearing up to pack the trail.  One was carrying an ice chest strapped to his pack and the other was carrying a grill.  Seriously.) I spent most of the trail thinking about how I could make it work using only my cook kit and carrying no more weight than usual.

So, when time came for our winter hike this year there was no question that the culinary challenge would be steak.

Here is what I pulled together for dinner the second (and last) night on the trail:

2 8 oz. filets
smoked cheddar & rosemary mashed potatoes
sauce chasseur (mostly for the taters, but served one other important role)
asparagus in goose fat

Pre-hike prep:
Two nights before I left, I shredded about 6 oz of smoked cheddar cheese and made the sauce chasseur (which is a red-wine and veal stock, heavy on the tarragon. I make mine with lots of mushrooms and about twice the shallots). Froze the butter, cheese, a cube of goose fat, and sauce. Kept the filets in the butcher paper and just put them in the fridge. Wrapped the asparagus in foil and put that in the fridge. I had a freezer-pack like you’d use in insulated lunch boxes, so I froze that solid.

Packing it in:
Meat, asparagus, fresh rosemary, and freezer-pack in one ziplock freezer bag.
Frozen butter, fat, cheese, and sauce (all in separate bags) in another freezer bag.
*wrapped both freezer bags in my fleece pants/shirt and stuck them in the bottom of the pack.

By Saturday evening, the butter was still hard and the meat was cool, so it worked.

Cooking it:

I have 2 titanium nesting pots and a little 4×4 no-stick skillet I picked up at Walmart. We were at a site with a fire pit, so we got that going. Sliced up the goose fat and smeared it on the asparagus. Dusted them with salt/pepper/garlic and wrapped them back tight in the foil. Placed beside the coals to cook.

Boiled the rosemary in 2c. of water. Shredded it off the stems, added powdered mashed potato flakes & shredded cheese.

Reheated sauce chasseur in the other pot. Brought it to a simmer, then lowered the heat.

Put about a tbs. of butter and a squirt of olive oil into the skillet and set it atop the hot coals to get sizzling hot. Dusted the filets liberally with salt/pepper/garlic pwdr mixture. Seared them about 10 seconds on each side and the edges, then set them both in the pot with the sauce. Kicked up the heat to a boil and let them sit just long enough to be alllllmost but not quite mid-rare. (We like ’em bloody ’round here.)

Poured the remainder of the sauce onto the potatoes, ate the steaks with our fingers and the potatoes straight out of the pot.

To make up for the pack weight, since this was a trail full of creeks, I kept my 2 qt. pack-bladder empty and carried no more than a quart at a time of water.

How I’ll improve it next time:

* I need to add a spatula to my cook kit.  Flipping steaks with my fingers was not fun.

* Need a better container for olive oil than a double-nested ziplock bag.  It leaked.

* Didn’t need so much butter & oil. (even though, we just added it to the taters)