Mary Jane’s Farm Sante Fe Pasta

[Dwayne Thompson]

I first ate this meal when MSR distributed Mary Jane Butter’s meals back in the late ’90’s. It is a very very tasty meal, light in weight, the paper packaging is made so that it can serve as the eating bowl….ie dual functionality; the bowl can be burned if burning is permitted; Healthy Idaho Certified Organically Grown Ingredents; I guess I could go on and on. In closing I just like supporting small businesses like hers and since her meals especially the Sante-fe Pasta are great it makes supporting her business a plus.

[Richard Matthews]

Don’t forget Nick’s Couch Potatoes, Red Pesto Pasta and Mac & Cheese. Lots of olive oil with all of them. I generally add chopped turkey pepperoni or bacon crumbles.

[Greg Vaillancourt]

I have the odd problem of losing my appetite when backpacking.

I used to stare at my selection of freeze dried meals (Mountain House or BP Pantry) and home dehydrated selections and wonder what would taste OK.

Mary Jane's Farm meals are very good. I try to save them for day 3 or later when nothing else is appealing. I'm not a vegetarian but these are my favorite freeze dried meals.

Edit – Dropped the rating because I've had 2 very bitter packages in the last few months. When it is good it's good but boy have the bitter ones been awful.

[Dean F.]

I just got back from a Wind River Range traverse in which I tried a couple of Mary Jane's Farm meals for the first time- I had never heard of them- and I'm impressed.

Fist, my caveat: I have learned that I HATE instant rice, and the instant Red Beans & Rice MJF meal that I tried proved to be no exception. But I think that's my foible, not an issue with the meal.

Otherwise I tried two pasta dishes: the Mac & Cheese and the Red Pesto Pasta, and both were frankly outstanding! Both are boil-in-bag style, which is what I do. At the very bottom on each a couple of elbows (literally, 1 or 2) of pasta were still slightly crunchy, but I think that was a function of my impatience and hunger leading me to not let it sit long enough. The water volume quoted in the recipe otherwise seemed spot on.

As usual with prepackaged hiking meals, it probably takes more like two of them to satiate a ravenous post-hike 40-something male.

I'll make two further comments that I believe are apropos:

First, the bag: these are rather neat. They are a sort of waterproof lined paper in which the boil-in-bag meal can be made. It is much easier to trim this bag down to an appropriate bowl size with scissors than it is to do so with a ziplock. This avoids the need for a cumbersome long handled spoon or potentially-messy edge-folding schemes. They have fold-out flat bases so that they can stand upright, which work quite well and also makes for a better bowl. And they are burnable (we used one as kindling).

Second apropos point: I am delighted to learn on shop.maryjanesfarm.org that these meals are all available in bulk 3-lb (~18-serving) bags. I think that these bulk bags do NOT include the neat paper bags that I just mentioned, though. Still, bulk ordering is a nice feature.

Rest assured, I'll be trying out more recipes from MJF.

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