Since I don’t hike to eat, but eat to hike, the lightest and simplest food packaging is the goal. So breakfast is a mix of instant breakfast or a similar product, mixed with best quality instant coffee. Lunch is a smaller size energy bar – used to use Tiger’s Milk. Dinner is pasta mixed with freeze dried turkey or chicken, plus seasonings made from various ingredients sold at supermarkets. For some flavors, like Asian, the seasonings are sifted out of packaged meals, and used separately.
The energy bars stay banded together in their wrappers; but the other foods are divided up at home into portions that each require a large cup of water from a Ti cup. The breakfasts work better dissolved in cold water, then heated to coffee temp. For dinner, the longest cooking items, like pasta and freeze dried meat, go into a Ti bowl, hot water is added from the spouted Ti pot that is used only for boiling water, and the bowl is simmered on the canister stove with stirring until the contents are soft. The seasonings are then added, and simmered briefly until ready to eat. How good it tastes depends on how well the seasoning is selected and measured. The bowl and a fork and spoon are the only items that need to be washed.
The BF and DIN meats and pasta are stored separately in heat sealable plastic bags from ULINE, and a ULINE sealer that looks like a very large stapler seals each bag tightly around the contents, and cuts off the excess plastic; so the sealed bags are roughly in the shape of small cylinders, and are easy to pack in a light WP nylon bag that is sized to just hold a week’s worth of food (caches are a week apart). That bag goes into an Ursack that is kept separate from the other gear, usually shockcorded to a shelf on top of the pack. The seasonings are packed in much smaller plastic bags from ULINE that are sealed and placed inside the larger heat sealed bags. Tea bags are carried in a small covered container that fits into the Ti cup that in turn, fits into the bowl. A gas canister and some PIC coils fit well into the spouted Ti boiling pot.
The trash from all this is plastic bag remnants stuffed into, you guessed it, a ziploc bag stuffed into the bottom of the WP nylon food storage bag. It’s all hung high in the Ursack overnight (along with the dog packs that also contain separately packaged food). This is for the southern Rockies and northern New England. For caches, and populous bear country, an Opsac is added with double closure clips and a heavier Ursack is used. I’ve hiked and kayaked over much of Maine, the most bearish of my haunts, and never had a bear go after the hanging ursacks, although they’ve visited my campsites a few times.
All of this seems to have provided the lightest and most compact system for a week, and works fine for shorter trips, with the Ursack cinched and rolled around itself as it would be in the middle of a week long trip. More recently there have been dietary restrictions, but have found that the supermarkets still come through with gluten-free rice pasta, like the small elbow macaroni that packs tightly. Still looking for a dairy free instant breakfast, though.
