Buttery goodness

When we finished up our journey on June 27, the first thing I ate was chocolate. And peanut butter. And crackers. Hig, Eric and I devoured nearly the entire contents of the care package my dad and stepmom had mailed for our ferry ride home.

On the ferry, we progressed to a steady diet of salmon burgers from the ferry’s dining room. And here in Seldovia, we’ve been greedily gobbling a diet stuffed with all the fresh normal foods we’ve hardly had in a year, trying to keep up a high enough activity level to keep burning it all. There’s nothing so good as an orange!

But by popular demand, I wanted throw in a few recipes and tips from our expedition eating.

Buttery Goodness

Cooking from the tent

Buttery, creamy, sweet, melt-in-your-mouth, wonderful, goodness…

It doesn’t get old, even after eating it regularly for 10 months. 10,000 calories can fit in a gallon-size ziploc. It lasts for weeks of hiking (at least in Alaska’s climate). Eating just a handful, you can consume an amazing number of calories in a very short space of time. And like all perfect foods, it packs as many calories as possible into a tiny weight and space. Don’t you want some buttery goodness?

Buttery Goodness Recipe:

4 pounds butter (salted)

1 canister regular oats (2lbs, 10oz)

1 ½ pounds brown sugar

Half a spice jar of cinnamon (less if fresh-grated, more if the jar’s really old)

Mash up butter, then mash in oats, then mash in sugar and cinnamon. Fingers work best, utensils can be used if you’re more couth than me. Don’t let the butter melt. If you like, add extras like dried fruit or nuts. Divide mixture into 2 gallon ziplocs. Keep cool. Makes about 4 person-days of food, if the person’s days involve many hours of physical labor.

For easier use in below-freezing temperatures, break into chunks and roll each chunk in oats before putting it in bags. Will be good up to about 70 degrees or so, but its lifespan is reduced in warmer temperatures.

The Tyranny of the Food Clock

Nude chef

Gear, we can repair. Bays and rivers, we can cross. Storms, we can weather. But we were bound by the tyranny of the food clock. It was rare that we could get a significant number of calories from the wilderness. So it was a question of human logistics: Where could we buy food? How could we get food to the villages without stores? How many pounds of food would it take us to get from one village to the next?

Village Stores

Sometimes, an area the size of a large living room would be filled with shelves and freezers, stacked high with non-perishable or frozen goods. Other times, the “store” was merely the back room of someone’s house – a few shelves thrown in, open whenever they happened to be home. Or a warehouse of a building, a few dusty boxes standing forlornly in a sea of empty shelves, open only if you call up the owner and ask.

We walked through each one with a focused determination and a practiced speed, picking up likely looking items. I hardly even looked at what the food was, scrutinizing each package for net weight, reading the hand-scrawled price tags, and counting pounds as the items fell into our basket.

It had to be dry. Any extra water makes food unreasonably heavy, which quickly eliminated the dusty canned goods, frozen meats, and soda drinks that made up a good portion of village store contents. It had to be edible as is, or easily prepared on a campfire. That cut out big sacks of flour, dried beans, etc… And it had to be affordable.

Long-exposure cooking

Our standard was $1 per 100 grams of food. Each time I picked up a package, I’d compare the price tag to the net weight, doing the quick math, deciding whether it was over or under our line. I catch myself doing it still (yogurt is definitely over the line).

Ideally, this kept our food cost at about $10 per person day. Eating twice as much as normal people, shopping in remote and high-priced spots, this was the best we could manage. Sometimes, we spent more – either because we couldn’t find cheaper food, or because we splurged on treats. More often, we spent less – in larger towns with better prices, or because of all the generous people who gave us gifts of food.

What’s For Dinner?

Coffee and breakfast

So we ended up eating a lot of pasta. Spaghetti, instant mashed potatoes, cheese, oats, butter, sugar… These are the staples that nearly every store carried. We had to figure out how to make them into palatable meals for a year. When it’s your 200th one-pot fire-cooked spaghetti meal of the year, how do you keep it interesting?

First, be hungry. After a year of eating camping food, I’m convinced that the “all food tastes good when you’re camping” wisdom is false. But hunger helps. Hunger and cold together help even more, making hot meals sometimes the great highlight of the day. Even on the most miserable windy rainy stormy days, there were two things we could always look forward to: dinner and sleeping.

Second, add as much fat as possible. A 1.3 liter pot of food is never complete without a stick of butter – sometimes two. And a half pound of cheese or more is never a mistake. These ingredients are more expensive. They’re worth it.

Third, bring a few key spices. Whenever possible, we liked having a good curry powder and a good blend of herbs – used on alternating days, they provided tasty but distinct flavors we didn’t get tired of. Salt. Citric acid powder (a substitute for vinegar or lemon). Cayenne or red pepper flakes. Milk powder (not a spice, but a great thickener for sauces). And when we could get it, fresh garlic.

Cheesy Noodles Recipe

Our all-time favorite camping dinner. Makes one very full 1.3 liter pot.

2/3 pound spaghetti

2/3 pound medium cheddar cheese

1 stick (1/4 pound) butter

About 1/3 cup powdered milk

Curry powder to taste

A few cloves garlic

Alpine cookfire

Chop (with knife or teeth) cheese and butter into small pieces, place in a ziploc. Boil water, cook spaghetti until done. Drain most, but not all of the water. Add butter and cheese. Return to fire (preferably in a not-too-hot spot). Stir frequently, careful not to burn cheese and noodles to the bottom of the pot. When cheese and butter are melted and mixed in, stir in powdered milk and curry powder. Add chopped garlic. For an intense experience, try crushing garlic by chewing it up and spitting it into the pot as a quick alternative to chopping (or if you’ve lost your pocket knife). Not recommended if you’re serving someone other than your spouse. Eat.

Serves 2. A bigger pot (like the gallon pot we were carrying in the winter) can make even more cheesy noodles! If you’ve got them, wild greens or mushrooms are a wonderful addition to the meal.

Wild Foods

Gathering mushrooms

Living off the land… A romantic ideal. An impractical reality, most of the time. People have lived off the land in Alaska for thousands of years. A few still do so today. However, we got very few of our calories from wild sources. We regretted not being able to do more, but living off the land simply didn’t mesh with our modern-style journey – traveling rapidly through unfamiliar country. Eating wild requires heavy tools (particularly for hunting), a large amount of time spent gathering and preparing food (eliminating those 15-20 mile days), and preferably a deep knowledge of local resources.

But for nutrition, flavor variety, and occasionally a few calories, we gathered wild foods as a supplement whenever we could.

Summer:

Berries: As we walked and paddled coastal Washington and Canada, the berries ripened. We snacked on thimbleberries, huckleberries/blueberries (all 5 species), and blackberries. At urban fruit stands, we bought piles of the season’s first cherries and strawberries.



Hedgehog mushrooms

Fish: In calm Inside Passage waters, we tried a little fishing from the packrafts with a handline. Unlike on previous trips in the Kenai Fjords, in BC we only caught barely-big-enough rockfish, and soon gave it up.

Intertidal life: We didn’t spend much time at it, but gathered limpets, snails, and mussels a few times.

Fall:

Berries: The early summer fruits faded, and we ate lingonberries on the alpine tundra and bog cranberries in the muskegs.

Mushrooms: We aren’t huge mushroom hunters, but are eager eaters of many of the easily-identified “idiot mushrooms”. Sulfur shelf (the bright orange shelf fungus), was excellent, but only when we caught it at just the perfect stage. Eat only the bright yellow fringe, and gather it only if it bleeds vigorously when cut. Bear’s paw we found only once or twice, but it was tasty. Hedgehogs, angel wings, and chantrelles were all far more common, and spiced up many a dinner of cheesy noodles. Chantrelles we were able to use even after the first few snowfalls before it decayed.


Last year’s lingonberries

Winter

Snow: We did sometimes eat snow, when skiing was hot or patches of open water were scarce. Unfortunately, most of the vegetable world was dead and buried, and we had no equipment to hunt the vast flocks of plump white ptarmigan. The kids at the Newhalen school did point out that we could have easily clubbed and eaten the porcupine we showed them a picture of.

Spring



Pushki – first spring greens

Berries: Lingonberries hang on through the winter, uncovered by the melting of the snow. Hig was particularly fond of these – I would look back from where I was striding briskly along the tundra to find him stooped over, grazing, and slowing us down.

Spring greens: The coming of spring (as late as it was this year) was one of the most amazing and most appreciated things I have ever experienced. By the time we finished up the journey in late June (definitely still only spring in the Aleutians), each meal was stuffed with a smorgasboard of wild vegetables – sometimes so many that we could hardly even fit the spaghetti and butter in the pot.

Fiddleheads: The most solid vegetable of them all. Throw it into any cooked meal in the last few minutes of cooking.



Picking fiddleheads

Fireweed shoots: Good when it’s really young (leaves not opened out at all, shoot still red). Pick it by pulling straight up so you get the inch or two below the ground as well. Break off the very top. Throw it into any cooked meal.

Dock: We like to pick both the leaves and stems, and cook them like spinach.

Pushki: Also known as cow parsnip. If we’d ever had sun, we would have had to be careful gathering it, since the juice gives you a severe chemical burn if exposed to ultraviolet light. Luckily, we rarely needed to worry. Pushki was one of the very first plants to sprout up in the spring. When it was only an inch or two tall, we picked it whole. When it was a few inches tall, we cut up the stalks like green onions. And when it was larger, we peeled the bulb that held the developing flower and ate the ‘pushki broccoli’. The pushki broccoli is the mildest part of the plant – natives in Perryville taught us about it. In general, pushki is strong flavored, and we only added a small amount, cut up small, to each cooked meal.



Dock

Petrushki: One of the wild celeries, also called beach lovage. This tastes a lot like parsley, and was best when torn up and added at the very end of cooking.

Beach greens: We sometimes cooked with these, sometimes just grazed on big handfuls as a snack. Their flavor seems to vary with where they grow – the ones on Unimak Island were especially sweet. We looked for them on gravel beaches, where less sand was lodged at the bases of the leaves.

Oyster leaf: Another beach green. Very tasty, but we ate it rarely, as it was less common.

Candy flower: Also spring beauty, miner’s lettuce, or claytonia. The stalks and flowers are a sweet snack.

Twisted stalk: Also watermelon berry. The young shoots taste nicely of cucumber.



Oysterleaf

Clams: We didn’t often end up in the right place at the right tide, but in Port Moller, we perfected the technique of finding and digging razor clams with our hands, and enjoyed a few more tasty clam meals as we finished off the end of the Alaska Peninsula. In 2001 natives of Chignik suggested we test for Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning by putting chewed up clam under our lip for 20 minutes or so. If tingling or numbness results, don’t eat the clams!

A World of Junk

I’ve given you recipes for a couple of my favorites (buttery goodness and cheesy noodles). I’ve raved about the wonderful spring vegetables we gathered. But most of what we ended up with was junk.

What foods are cheap, non-perishable, low in water, high in fat, high in calories, easy to snack on, and available everywhere? All your standard junk foods. Cookies, candy, chips, sugary drink mixes… We couldn’t spend a lot of time cooking, so most of our calories, especially in spring and summer (we cooked a lot in winter darkness), came from snacks.

Frozen granola bar

The processing, packaging, marketing, and environmental impact of all these foods leaves something to be desired. Nutritionally, it varies. Long lists of 5-syllable ingredients make me nervous, but when you’re trying to eat 5000 calories a day, empty calories can be just what you need.

We had similar mixes of junk food on many of our legs. Some things always got eaten first. Caramels. Reses Pieces. Lorna Doone shortbread cookies. The rare piece of really good chocolate. Grape nuts. One of the more nutritious things in our snack arsenal, plain dry grape nuts quickly became one of my favorite snacks (most easily eaten by burying my face in the ziploc and munching directly out of the bag). More dense than most cereals, it ends up being cheaper for the weight and lasts longer in a pack. In Port Heiden, I bought 6 boxes (their entire stock), eating some right away, and sending some ahead to Perryville.

Raiding Kulik Lodge

Never Again

A lot of the food we had was OK. Plain potato chips, ginger snaps, lemonade powder, peanut butter…

Some things, I vow to never eat again. Betty Crocker lemon frosting, which is a little bit worse than Betty Crocker chocolate frosting, which I also will never eat again. Rancid buttery goodness (stored in a warm building for several weeks). Those little red and white striped peppermint candies. Safeway-brand gingersnaps. Store-bought chocolate chip cookies. In fact, it would take a lot to get me to eat any store-bought cookies. Pre-packaged trail mix. Mountain House, or any other instant backpacking dinners. We only occasionally had these, mainly when we had to raid Kulik Lodge for food in the middle of April. And I still don’t understand why people pay so much to eat food that’s so tasteless, overpackaged, and hardly contains any calories. Same goes for any instant oatmeal (for a tenth the price and ten times the taste you can buy the regular kind). Any energy bars (also something we rarely had due to expense and availability – but plain old candy bars are much better).

The Wonders of Home Food

Dinner with hosts

Most of the time we were hiking, we were hungry enough to eat pretty much anything. Even frosting. But when we got to a town, our hosts would ask us “What would you like to eat?” or “What do you eat?”. Our answer, every time, was “Food.” “We eat food.” Universally, it was excellent, and we quickly proceeded to eat them out of everything in the house, amazing all with the great quantities of food disappearing into two not-so-large people.

Tonight, as I write about the logistics of expedition food, I’m happily full from a meal of fresh halibut, salmon head soup, salad with greens from Dede’s garden, and rhubarb-strawberry crisp with the last of the frozen fruit from last year’s crop. It’s good to be home.

Air-dropped pizza

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