Outdoor Gourmet
“Whether my clients are paddling in Alaska, New Zealand, Patagonia, Honduras, Florida’s Everglades or here in my cherished home waters of the Great Lakes, they all share one thing in common: eating well.”
This article gives recipes and advice for a couple of fabulous meals that will wow your guests at home or amaze your paddling friends.
Backcountry Green Grocer
As we head into the 21st century and have grown so used to having every convenience at out fingertips here in the “first world”, we tend to forget that people thrived quite well before frost-free refrigerators and microwave ovens. In fact, many of the items we refrigerate today survive quite well without the big chill. This is especially true for many fruits and vegetables – some of which may even taste better if kept at “room” temperature.
The following is a list of those fruits and vegetables that can travel with you and their life expectancies as additions to your moveable feasts. Extreme cold or extreme heat will greatly effect these estimates, but there are always ways to cheat…
Many of the recipes Michael uses on trips have now been compiled into to form his classic backcountry cookbook, Hey! I’d Eat This at Home!
Backwoods Baking
The allure of hot baked goods fresh out of the oven is universal, but when translated to the outdoors it can be downright transcendent. In the last few years much attention has been given to new gadgets to help people bake biscuits, brownies, and even apple pie in the backcountry—where something chocolaty and steaming can mean the difference between a miserable storm and an easily shrugged off shower.
Backcountry Gourmet
This is not so much a presentation of recipes, but a provisioning method that I’ve adopted over the last 20 years of guiding as a reaction to the dubious quality and expense of most commonly available pre- packaged backcountry foods. Most of these items are commonly available in supermarkets and will require a little organizing and re-packaging at home, but the results are very tasty and healthy meals while you are investing your precious vacation time.