Drying your own food before embarking on a backpacking trip or expedition means you eat good, wholesome food, prepared by yourself, that's lightweight and low cost.
After a particularly uninteresting culinary experience in Patagonia in 2006, I started looking for solutions to our expedition food problem.
We existed on dried pasta, soya and powdered soup for a week.
It kept us alive but was hardly very exciting.
Sure, we could have taken commercially available dried products, but from my experience, these taste like cardboard and cost the earth! The solution was to be found at my home in Lanjaron in Andalucia, Spain.
We started experimenting with the age old process of "drying" food to preserve it.
We cut the food up small to aid the drying process, prepared our normal homemade recipes and placed these on outside drying trays.
Of course, in Andalucia there's a lot of sun but this can still be done by people from northern Europe.
There are many cheap, commercially available dehydrators available and the process is open to everyone.
We now produce such tasty delights as "Moroccan Stew", "Vegetable Curry", "Pasta Arrabiata", " Bulghar Wheat Chilli" and our own dried fruit packages.
Go on.
Have a go.
Dry and prepare your own camp food.
It's good, cheap and wholesome.
You know what's gone into the meal and it will ensure you look forward to the next one.
Above all it's a satisfying and rewarding way of preserving food.
Perfect for the mountains.
Recommended reading: Trail Food by Alan S Kesselheim (Ragged Mountain Press ISBN: 0-07-034436-1) Backpack Gourmet by Linda Frederick Yaffe (Stackpole Books ISBN:978-0-8117-2634-4)