Lipsmackin' Backpackin', Lightweight Trail-tested Recipes for Backcountry
Trips, by Tim and Christine Conners. Three Forks Books, Falcon Publishing, Inc., 2000. ISBN 1560448814
Reviewed by Nancy K. Zimmerman
If you are a dehydrator, this cookbook
might be for you. I say might because I am not
a dehydrator and thus could not test any of those recipes.
Of the recipes I was able to test, three out of five
were good enough that I intend to use them on the trail.
One of the others tasted awful and the last did not have the right timing
and amounts.
Even though I have hiked for
several years under the trail name "Gourmet Gang," I am only willing to whip
myself into a cooking mode at the end of the day when I know what lies ahead, so I
spent my review energies on the 59 dinner recipes. A few statistics will tell you why
I would not buy this book for myself (even if I had a dehydrator). Forty recipes
require this device, and at-home preparation looks formidable. Only seven had less
than 1,000 mg of sodium. Six had more than
3,000 mg. For one serving. Does your stove "simmer"
anything? Thirteen recipes required simmering or
some other maneuver my stove refused to do. On the
positive side, 32 of the recipes were vegetarian (sometimes with a little
brand-name substitution) and more could easily be converted to vegetarian. Some
required no cooking, and many called for only a quick boil, so if fuel
consumption is important to you, this cookbook is
very specific about minimizing cooking time. An excellent feature is a section that
has nothing but on-the-trail instructions for each dish. Each instruction is
approximately 1.5 x 7 inches and can be cut out and put into a bag with the
ingredients. There are a few no-clean-up recipes
that truly are, too.
Alternate review by Walt Daniels, Webmaster
Like Nancy, we have not tried many of the recipes, but we
have tried 6 of them extensively as we submitted them to the book. However, the
recipes were changed, usually using commercial ingredients where we make our own
low-salt versions. Some of ours were adapted from high salt recipes and changed
to low-salt versions, e.g. we make our own biscuit mix without salt. The recipe
for Tamale Pie, page 70, throws in both a commercial (high salt) taco seasoning
mix and our combination of spices (no salt). It should be pointed out the
authors are long distance hikers and that is a sweaty business, where a little
extra salt is easily handled.
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