Ahhh. So true! And I don’t even have any kiddos at home now. However, I have a health challenge (adrenal disfunction / histamine Intolerance so I need/choose to cook a lot since hubby doesn’t like very many choices. Thanks for all your tips! It still is great to get outa the desert during summer in Phoenix, AZ.

Recipe coming soon!

Hope that helps!!

I normally use glass pans to store frozen meals…

That’s obviously much harder to do, but when our family has flown to vacation destinations, I’ll typically meal plan before hand, then grocery shop once we get there or have groceries delivered to the location we are staying so I can batch cook there.

I didn’t freeze it entirely, just put it in a cooler on the way down. It refrigerates well for 4 days or so 🙂

Even though I’ve spent 14 weeks in the backcountry on various types of trips over the last 6 years, I’m by no means an expert, but I hope that helps at least a little bit. It takes research and planning to not only bring healthful food but also make sure you have balanced meals for the entire trip that are designed for the type of activity you’ll be doing (e.g. you’re going to need a lot more energy (and therefore more and/or better fuel) if you’re going to be backpacking every day for a week than if you were staying the week at a base camp and doing just a few slow easy hikes).

I would have to think about what I would do for dinners if I was out for longer than I had frozen dinners – rice? pasta? I wonder if you could dehydrate bone broth and have it reconstitute decently, then put a soup mix in to make soup with it – even better (here I’m just thinking out loud, not necessarily making a suggestion, since I’ve never tried it myself and don’t know if it would actually work), if that works, then bring some dehydrated cooked/drained (therefore low fat) ground meat, add some butter or coconut oil, then put it all together once the broth is reconstituted: backcountry chili – yumm. Jerky is definitely a good idea if you like it; of all the kinds I’ve tried, I’ve only ever liked one, and it was a homemade one that a friend of mine brought with her on our longest trip (3 weeks backpacking in the mountains) – no chance of me getting any more, so jerky’s not really an option for me.

If I was going in a much smaller group (never been with less than 8) or for only a few days and I was allowed to design the menu, I would plan everything ahead, only bring what was on the menu, take a frozen homemade real food meal or two like Katie suggests, and bring as much fresh food as the space in our group’s packs and the produce’s durability allowed. If it was something that would just be too heavy fresh or frozen, I would dehydrate it (thinking soup and the like here, since that’s one thing I actually really miss when I’m in the backcountry, though, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t realize it until you mentioned it). I would bring butter, bacon, nuts (cashews for me), Lara bars, eggs if feasible (a friend of mine has chickens), tea, some fruit (probably a combo of dried and fresh, depending on space and weight), maybe some crackers (I’d have to think about that one because they break so easily) and veggies (probably a combo of dried and fresh and use the fresh first) according to what we were going to be making. I would definitely try my hand at making pemmican – I’ve heard it mentioned in books but never actually seen, made, or tasted it.

We could bring whatever else we wanted to, we just had to carry it ourselves. I was known on my last 4 trips for bringing extra apples (on one trip almost a dozen, and they all got eaten), extra-sharp white cheddar cheese (I couldn’t have anything milder b/c lactose intolerance), Lara bars, my own trail mix (with only things I liked – cashews, craisins, dried peaches, M&Ms), and a compact 30-spice kit that I put together myself (it came in handy many times, esp. on the trip that had 18 people), among other things.

(This is a bit long, so I apologize for that, but I wanted to adequately answer your question. I hope it posts in the right order.)
Brianna,
Thanks for the response.

The small amount of fresh food that we got on our trips made me sad – for 3-4 people for 8 days: 1 piece of fruit (total) per person (usually apples), 1 onion, 1 pepper, 1 garlic bulb, 1 lb cooked and de-boned chicken (used by 2nd day or went bad), 1 lb cheddar cheese, 1/2? lb butter, 2 small cans of tuna (not sure if plain packed in water would be considered processed or not), and that’s it. For either a few days or 1-2 people it wouldn’t be bad, but for 3-4 people for a full 8 days it was meager. We had quite a lot of other food, but it was all processed to at least some degree. In a way it made sense: we were out for 8 days and didn’t have anywhere to keep it particularly cold – for the chicken, bacon, and veggies, we had to rely on the 30-40 degree temperature drop overnight to keep them from spoiling quickly. As for the dried veggies, I’m not sure what the deciding factors are, but I’ve never had a problem with these so long as we rehydrated them as fully as we could – we usually let them soak the entire time we boiled the water for and cooked whatever we were mixing them into. We didn’t use backpacking meals, either – kinda expensive when the school has to pay for enough food to send 100+ students on trips 3x/year.

Chicken in the Instant Pot is always a great option. I would bring my own spices along or a natural BBQ sauce from home. For simple hotel overnights, I’d probably just serve that with raw fruits and veggies.