Food Drying Workbook

Menu Planning & Food Drying Workbook

The Menu Planning & Food Drying Workbook provides printable worksheets and recipe cards that will help you review and customize recipes, plan a menu, and estimate how much food to purchase and dry for your trips.

The workbook is a great planning tool to use with Recipes for Adventure: Healthy, Hearty & Homemade Backpacking Recipes.

Customize the Worksheets & Recipe Cards

Most of the food items you will need and the estimated yields are listed in the Food Drying Estimator Worksheets, but extra blank rows are included so you can add more.

The workbook includes 48 recipes from Recipes for Adventure.

The Recipe Cards also have blank rows so you can vary the ingredients and there is a blank column to write down the serving size for two or more people.

Extra blank worksheets and recipe cards allow you to add even more notes and recipes.

8 Steps to Successfully Plan & Dehydrate Your Backpacking Meals

Write down your Trip Itinerary – the distance you plan to cover daily and how many days of meals you will need.
Review the Quick-Reference Recipe Cards and choose the breakfast, lunch, dinner, side, dessert and snack recipes you want to prepare for your trip.
Write down your meal selections on the Trip Menu Planning Worksheet.
Refer back to the Quick-Reference Recipe Cards and total up all the dried food ingredients from the recipes using the Food Drying Estimator Worksheets. After you tally up your entries, you will know much dried ground beef, tomato sauce leather, dried corn, etc. you will need for the recipes you have chosen.
Continuing with the Food Drying Estimator Worksheets, compare how much dried food you need to the yield estimates of commonly purchased units of food provided to estimate how much of each food to purchase and dry. Use the completed form as a shopping list when you go to the store.
Dry the food, utilizing all trays of the dehydrator whenever possible for maximum efficiency and time savings. Similar foods such as peas, corn and green beans may be dried at the same time.
After your food ingredients are dried, refer back to your menu and recipe cards to combine the dried foods into bagged meals. You can even cut out and enclose the recipe cards with the meals since they include cooking instructions and the amount of water required.
Organize the meals and snacks into daily rations which can be bagged together or vacuum sealed for maximum food security and tight packing.