Soup's on!

H:  

While we were house sitting last week we took advantage of a table, something we don't own.  That's right, we don't own a table in our RV and apparently I haven't told absolutely everyone that we live in an RV.  So if it's new to you, we've been living and travelling the country for the last 10 years in a 29 foot travel trailer.  But for this episode we had a table, so I will continue... 

When we began putting together soup packet options based on a pack of soup that I bought at the store and a rough idea of how many calories we wanted per pack (excluding perishables, like oil, that will be added when it is cooked on the trail).

We attempted to make our own version of the Corn and Potato Chowder by Canterbury Naturals, we added the following dried ingredients:

Tomatoes

Onions and chives

Corn

Shredded potatoes

And beans (of course!).

These weren't in the original pack but we've added beans to every pack that we made.  The image shows a can of beans 15oz (sans label) and next to it is its dehydrated equivalent 1.5oz.  Some have asked why we were dehydrating beans, they already come dried.  Dehydrated beans are able to be re-hydrated in hot water in 10 minutes versus dried beans which require soaking and prolonged cooking.  Also, if you're desperate you can eat the beans dehydrated.  I found myself doing this often when I was packaging them for storage.  They're quite like a chip when they're dehydrated.

To start, we calculated calories for the items we were putting in the soups.  Then we weighed out a single packs worth to figure out proportions and total caloric amounts in the pack.  Our soup packs are large enough to serve both of us, so they weigh between 8 to 12 ounces.  The variance in the pack weight is based on ingredients and "eh, that's good enough".  We tried to be scientific but we worked on this for 3 days and may have, at times, put extra vegetables in depending on how tired we were getting with the whole process. 

Below is our adaption of a another soup that I bought.  It was a boxed soup that was a really great combination, so we put it on our list for replicating:

Potato, Quinoa, and Spinach Soup: 

And, of course, beans for good measure!

This is a soup that we made and tested out while we were fixing packs.  I just added a little bullion that was at hand.

When we're on the trail, bullion cubes will be added to each pack to boost the flavor.  This is my preferred brand.  It comes in a few other flavors and will pack and travel well.  We contemplated putting these in before we sealed up packaging but I didn't have enough to fill them, so we'll just toss them in our food boxes that will be shipped to us.

Another common combination was whole wheat couscous, dried vegetables and... beans!

After a day and a half we had about half the pack figured out.  We got a lot faster as we went.  Eventually it became a game... "Hey Dave, pick a bean, any bean... okay black beans."  Then I'd figure out what else we had that would end up getting mixed in to flush out the packs.

We would dump sandwich sized Ziplock bags of different ingredients into a big bowl, stir to combine, measure out a bag's worth with the scale, figure out how much volume that was (1 cup, cup and a half, etc), then we'd start scooping to fill bags as fast as we could.

This is our Whatchagot Stew:

This particular mix came about by having small amounts of different soup packs left over.  They wouldn't be enough to fill one pack completely.  We'd set them aside and eventually we'd end up with a mixing bowl's worth that would be a hodge podge of everything.  It tasted pretty good with not really planning it out.  That made our pack making even faster.  We ended up with a fair number of this style.

2 servings plus half a pot's worth left over for 2 non-hungry hikers which means it will probably be be just right for when we're hiking.

Dave, lost in a sea of plastic bags and bean dust:

Below is a large mixing bowl of our Three Bean Chili mix:

Spices we added to each bag of the Three Bean Chili:

Another common meal:  Black Beans and Corn Soup

All said and done we have ended up with enough packs to last 6 months of hiking and a little extra for good measure.  Some of these we will use to test out our stove over the next couple of weeks.  More on that to come.