With homegrown tomatoes ripening in gardens across the Northern Hemisphere, this issue of Trail Bytes features a recipe for Tomato Carrot Soup that you can dehydrate and enjoy on the trail or make for dinner tonight.

In Switzerland, the majority of people live in flats (apartments). That doesn’t stop them from gardening if they want to exercise their green thumbs. There are outparcels of land along railroad tracks and at the corners of farmers’ fields, near the flats, where a person can rent a small rectangular garden plot. I’d estimate the size of the typical plot to be between three hundred and five hundred square feet.

The photo below and at the top show a garden village I passed the other day while riding my bike. Most gardeners put up a shed to store tools or just to hang out in. The more extravagant garden huts have wood-burning ovens, grills, solar panels, and curtains on the windows.

When I was a kid, my father and I worked a tomato patch in the corner of our yard in New Jersey. His secret at planting time was to add one scoop of peat moss and one scoop of composted cow manure to each hole. We also fertilized with composted fish heads from our annual deep-sea fishing trip. As the summer progressed, we picked basket-loads of tomatoes, many of which went into bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.

Whether you grow your own tomatoes or buy them at the farmer’s market, try this recipe for tomato-carrot soup:

Tomato Carrot Soup

Ingredients:

• 4 lbs. tomatoes
• 1 lb. carrots
• 2 small onions
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1 cup water
• 12 grams vegetable bouillon
• 1 Tbsp. sugar
• ½ Tbsp. Herbs de Provence
• 1 tsp salt
• ¼ tsp black pepper
• ¼ tsp chili mix powder
• ¼ cup half-and-half cream (not included in dehydrated soup)

In a small frying pan, cook diced onions and minced garlic on medium heat for about five minutes

Add cooked onions and garlic to carrots in soup pot and continue simmering.

Tear dried leather into smaller pieces and store in an air-tight container. I recommend vacuum sealing with the FoodSaver wide-mouth jar sealer attachment. Do not leave soup leather out in the open. It will quickly reabsorb moisture from the air.

One cup of soup will yield approximately ⅓ cup (tightly packed) soup leather. The dry weight of one cup of soup should be about twenty-four grams (.85 oz.).

For each cup of soup that you want to reconstitute, combine one cup of boiling water with ⅓ cup soup leather. I find two cups to be a good serving size which also works well if you want to reconstitute it in a 24-ounce capacity Thermos Food Jar. The soup rehydrates well with a few minutes of cooking and stirring in a pot or shaking in a thermos. If reconstituting at home, stir in a little half-and-half cream to make it extra creamy. For trail use, the soup tastes just fine without cream, but if desired, you could add powdered milk or coffee creamer.

That’s it for this month. Enjoy the bounty of summer gardening and be sure to dry some of that homegrown goodness for the trail. The next newsletter will come earlier than usual, in the middle of July, since Dominique and I will be on holiday at the end of July.

Warmest regards,

• Recipes for Adventure II
• Recipes for Adventure
• Menu Planning & Food Drying Workbook
• Action Guide: Dehydrating 31 Meals
• 1001 Miles on the Appalachian Trail

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