Not Your Ordinary Bark

With only 11 more weeks to complete 16 weeks worth of food, (Feeling a little anxious? Absolutely!!!!!) I am dehydrating everything – even bark and leather. Bark – not your ordinary bark –  potato, barbecue potato, corn, butternut squash, and butternut squash pie. Leather – not the cowhide variety – tomato paste, salsa. Fruit – the ordinary dehydrated fruit – bananas. Leftovers too – breakfast casserole, unstuffed cabbage casserole, tuna-cheese soufflé casserole, and black bean stew. Interesting combination….

As I have investigated dehydration methods, I have discovered two different approaches to dehydrated meals. Method one is to dehydrate the ingredients and then combine them (back packing chef). Method two is to cook the meal and then dehydrate (Backpack Gourmet by Linda Frederick Yaffe). The jury is out on which method I prefer. I will keep you posted….

Using method one, last week, I dehydrated the ingredients bark, leather, and fruit. Bark can be eaten as a crunchy snack, added to meat and vegetables to create stew, or re-hydrated to make a meal or dessert. Potato bark (2 1/2 pounds dehydrates to 6 ounces) becomes mashed potatoes with meat and vegetables; BBQ potato bark  –  BBQ beef stew; Corn bark – corn bark stew with ham; Butternut squash ( The original recipe calls for sweet potatoes, but I didn’t grow sweet potatoes in my garden, so….) – butternut squash porridge;  Butternut squash pie bark (originally pumpkin pie) – butternut squash pie (This is delicious dry or reconstituted.). Leathers are similar to bark but are pliable instead of crunchy. Salsa leather (similar to tomato sauce leather)  can be used to create a Mexican-style meal by combining it with rice, chicken and/or black beans, and vegetables such as bell peppers and corn. Fruit can be added to trail mix or granola. The downside to this method is we won’t be taste-testing the meal before our trip. Kind-of scary! (But not as scary as our Science Experiment!)

Method two does provide us with the opportunity to pre-taste the meal. Cooking the meal and then dehydrating it also kills two birds with one stone (provides two meals with one preparation). Last week we ate and dehydrated breakfast casserole (Backpack Gourmet by Linda Frederick Yaff, page 21) , unstuffed cabbage roll casserole, tuna-cheese soufflé casserole (Backpack Gourmet by Linda Frederick Yaffe, page 121, and black bean stew (Backpack Gourmet  by Linda Frederick Yaffe, page 89),  – all were delicious.

Wow! All this in one week. This week  –  trail cake, beets, hash browns, rice, black beans, potato chips, more potato bark, lazy lasagna, tortilla chip casserole, who knows …….

 

6 Comments

  1. Lindsey said:

    Yay! This is so exciting! I am getting all amped about dehydrating meals for the PCT, but since we don’t have any place to store a bunch of meals and we wont actually start testing them until this summer I have to wait…. wa wa. You will have to let us know which were your favorites and send me the recipes!

    January 19, 2015
    Reply
    • We will keep you updated as we partake this summer. Hopefully, nothing will be as bad as the brownies or we will go hungry!

      January 20, 2015
      Reply
  2. Cassie said:

    I have been a bad sister, I just got caught up on all the updates. You have been very busy. Sounds like you have had a lot of successes and some test that weren’t so much a success. I look forward to see how your trip plays out and how God uses you through this.

    January 22, 2015
    Reply
  3. Becky Fahl said:

    Wow, I’m impressed with the research, experimenting and prep that you are doing for this trip! Will you be carrying all of your food/meals? How will you handle drinking water? Will you be
    purifying water as you go? You will definitely be in my prayers…for safety, as well as for what God will teach you through this journey. 🙂 — P.S. – Guess you won’t be planting a garden this summer…you are going to extreme measures to “avoid” that task…just kidding!

    March 22, 2015
    Reply
    • It has been quite a project to get the food ready to go. We will carry a week of food in our boats and pick up boxed supplies each week at various post offices along the way. Drinking water will definitely be a precious commodity! Thank you for the prayers – they are very much appreciated. Be sure to follow our website by entering your e-mail address so you can receive notificatiosn when we have new updates to the blog. Also, follow us on Instagram for pictures. (I will miss my garden!)

      March 22, 2015
      Reply

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