[pct-l] stoveless menu tips?

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good morning,

My cookless menus don’t often include soft tortillas or bagels. Soft
tortillas are great for wrapping various other meal constituents, but
approximately 40% of their weight is water making them too heavy for most
of my meals.  Dried tortillas, or their many cousins in the form of corn
chips, are one of my staples if volume is not a big consideration.  Similarly,
soft bagels are relatively heavy, plus they are bulky so I never consider
them for the bear ‘can.  Bagels are so bulky they often aren’t carried
inside the pack.  The sight of a large plastic bag of bagels tied to the
outside of a pack is often iconic, even PCT-chic.

I like to have some kind of spread or dip with my various dry chip, cracker
and bread products.  One of my favorites is reconstituted dehydrated
refried bean powder and cheese powder.  I used to carry them separately but
now I mix the bean and cheese powders in equal amounts at home to save time.
A quarter-cup of each powder in a snack-size Ziploc suits me for a meal.  At
mealtime I add water, re-zip the bag, then kneed it a few minutes until
it’s smooth.

Both powders are available in the bulk-foods section of several
stores.  Recently
instead of plain dehydrated refried beans I found a similar product:
Dehydrated tortilla soup mix.  It’s mostly bean powder, but it also has
little chips of tortilla plus some mild spices that measurably add to the
taste.

Steel-Eye

-Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965

http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye

http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09/