How to Cook it

Once everything is dehydrated. You can build your meals. Keep them in hermetic bags that are strong enough so when on the move, they won’t break. 

See our example in below link of the meals we have chosen for our Expedition 2012. It consisted of 10 different breakfasts, lunches, dinners and desserts. They were all packed individually and each day meals were sealed together in a bigger bag as our day food. We also had another bag which was our weekly bag with the beverages, cereal bars and chocolate bars for the week. The dog had his own weekly bag where all 7 days worth of food bags were (3 meals in one bag) plus the weekly treats in its own little bag added in his weekly bag. I also want to add that each daily pack of food where carefully matched as so we didn’t eat rice twice in a row, had meat daily and such.

2012 Meals Cooking Steps  (select to open link in new tab first)

Cooking Method:

The cooking method is different for each meals and since we weren’t experienced in cooking each meal, we printed our meals cooking steps on a waterproof paper kept in our food bag. 

Some required reheating, other required cooking. Mainly, it only meant to warm the food up for the main meals and cooking for all bakery items such as pancakes, bannocks and brownies. We used fire 90% of the time and the rest of the time it was warmed up with our fuel stove which wasn’t great at cooking things so we avoided meals that needed to be "cooked". When cooking on fire, we used the ambers which were the best. So no big fire, ”Shy fire” as I called them, just big enough to produce high heat and not burning the food, or ambers.

Re-hydrating Time:

Most of the recipes ask for about 15 minutes of rehydration for the food prior to cook or warm up. We always needed more (like 30 or 45 min) so we figure that the best way was to be one meal ahead. We prepared our lunch meal at breakfast time and our dinner at lunch and next day breakfast at dinner. We had conveniently a Billy Can that we use for boiling water on the fire. When new or cleaned, it is usually stainless steel color, but we had it on the fire everyday and no scraper to clean the outside so it has become quite black. This had the benefit to hide the smell of the food that we were re-hydrating overnight so we could keep it in our tipi.