I received some great stories after the last newsletter. They really touched my heart. Thank you. Keep'em coming!

Drew wrote:

“I've been using your recipes from emails and books to dehydrate my own backpacking meals since 2020, and my friends love them. Dehydrating my own meals adds even more fun to the hobby of backpacking, and I rest easy on the trail knowing I'm getting all my calories. My backpacking friends call me Chef on the trail. No more canned beans and tuna packets for us!”

Julie wrote:

“Last year was the first year I made your recipes, mostly for hiking. But we quickly found out that the dry meals were perfect to take with us while we went out house hunting. They’re more nutritious and honestly tastier than fast food.

I set to work making sixty meals using your Action Guide: Dehydrating 31 Meals, and that made the process so simple. We found our perfect house in June, a precious 1940s Cape Cod house set on eighty acres in the hills of western New York.

Our new house is an hour drive from our old house, so as we drove back and forth while moving and getting our old house ready for sale, we would have a dry meal soaking in our thermos.”

A Soup Story – The Pot Thickens

This past Sunday morning, Dominique and I decided to take one of our long hikes. She says, “What have you got for us, Chef Glenn?”

I had leftover butternut squash soup from the night before, but with five hours of hiking ahead, we wanted to take something more substantial than just soup. There were no “ready-to-go” assembled meals left in my stash.

Of course, there were lots of jars in the drawer with dehydrated ingredients in them. But, I wasn’t sure how well they would rehydrate in the thick soup.

To give them a rehydration boost, I filled a tea cup with the extra ingredients: ground chicken, macaroni, tomatoes, peas, and carrots. I poured boiled water over them just to cover.

After ten minutes, I added the ingredients with the water and a pinch of salt to the soup, which was heating up on the stove. I let the fortified soup simmer a few minutes before filling the thermos. Then off we went for our Sunday stroll.

How was it? The ground chicken and other ingredients rehydrated perfectly, and the soup turned into a substantial and flavorful meal.

For ideas on how to use up your miscellaneous dried ingredients in soups and thermos meals, these pages will give you some tips and recipes:

Thermos Cooking

Dehydrated Soup Recipes

Dehydrating Ground Chicken

GSI Canister Stove & Windscreen Review

I published the GSI Canister Stove and Windscreen review this month, the last in my 4-part review of GSI Cookware. I used the stove and windscreen while cooking with the .6 L Minimalist Pot up to the 1.8 L Dualist-HS pot. How do these pots and stoves compare to your kit? Take a look and let me know what you think.

New Pages:

GSI Cookware Overview

GSI Pinnacle Canister Stove & Windscreen

New Mailing Schedule

Somewhere along the line, I fell into the habit of sending the newsletter out near the end of the month. I’m sure you’d rather get the February and future newsletters at the beginning of the month. Makes sense to me, too. So this is the last, last-minute newsletter. Starting in February, newsletters will go out on the first Friday of the month.

We took along some dehydrated pineapple on Sunday, so I’m already queued up with a tasty topic. I’ll share the challenge of picking a ripe, but not overripe pineapple, and what to do if you get one that is not-so-ripe.

See you again on Friday, February 7th.

Freundliche Grüsse,

Chef Glenn & Dominique

Visit my Backpacking Chef Facebook page for the lastest posts. Be sure to "follow" the page to continue seeing posts.

If you received this newsletter from a friend and would like to subscribe (it's free), subscribe here.