Reverting to the Ways of Our Ancestors

    My plum tree grew from a pit I threw out the widow one year, or maybe it sprouted from compost. At any rate, it chose a fortuitous place to grow, and I have enjoyed its frosty white blossoms every spring, its dark bronze-red leaves during the summer, its scarlet-red leaves in the fall. Usually its fruit is too small to harvest because when a tree grows from the pit of a domesticated plum it reverts to its ancestral form, back to the wild. This year, however, some madness took hold of my plums. They grew as big as ping-pong balls and just as round. They are sweet, juice, and very, very tasty. Last week, with a long hook in my hand, I climbed the plum tree, pulled branches to my perch, and plucked plums into a basket.

    The next day I made plum jam, and that night I took both plums and jam to my host and hostess at a dinner party. They said, "Mmm. How delicious." I blushed with pride, but I'm not sure my blush was deserved. Maybe I can take credit for having made a good jam, but why should I take pride in the plums themselves? I did nothing to make them good. It seems false to feel proud of my plums, apples, cherries, and grapes when I have very little to do with how good they are. They just grow and are good.
    I think this pride comes from the connection we feel with our life force when we grow our own food, a connection we don't have when we buy food from the supermarket. When we grow, harvest, and preserve food, we are connecting with our ancestors, reverting to the wild, as it were. When else do we have that connection in so stark a form? Our water comes out of a faucet, not a spring; our shelter comes ready-made, and we don't tan our leather to make our shoes anymore. 

    But in growing, harvesting, and storing food, we know the elemental connection of our actions to our lives. That tie, I think, is a good thing. As Robinson Jeffers says, "It is time for us to kiss the earth again." It is time for us to remember what is essential in life and to reach back to a time when what was essential was all there was. Harvest may not be as essential to me as it was to my ancestors, for whom it meant a way to keep life and limb together, or even as it was to my grandmother, for whom it was a matter of economics, but not of life or death. For home gardeners today, harvest is more a joy in goodness than a necessity. There is Safeway to take care of our food needs, but life would be sadder without these good, full-flavored fruits from our gardens.
    Maybe in the end I was right that pride is the wrong emotion. Humility seems more justified, humility in the face of plenty, gratitude for the harvest, and thanksgiving for life.

Next week: "The Queen of Hearts, She Made Some Tarts"
Recipe from this post: Plum jam



PLUM JAM

yield: 4 half-pints

Ingredients
4 cups plums
1 3/4 cups honey
Preparation
Wash and pit the plums. Chop finely.
To make
Combine the chopped plums with the honey and let sit for an hour. Bring to a boil over medium heat and boil rapidly for 10 to 15 minutes. Spoon into hot sterilized jars. Seal. Process in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

Ice Cream Memories

      The kitchen door of the house where I grew up, in the countryside north of Atlanta, was, when I was very little, a Dutch door, with a top half that opened to let hausfraus lean out and gossip while keeping children in and dogs and chickens out. When my parents added on to the house after the birth of their third child, they moved that door to the basement, where it opens onto the driveway. Before that, though, it opened to the back yard. Around the corner of that door, stone steps led into the old basement dug into the hard, rough, earth walls of Georgia red clay where the house met the slope of the hill. The earthiness of those walls gave that part of the basement an eerie, cave-like feeling that half fascinated and half frightened me as a child. Today my father keeps his bottles of homemade wine on shelves built into the hard, dry, clay bank of the basement, his cave de vin. But the winemaking was a long time away when I was three or four, and what I remember about the basement—my earliest memory—was not of making wine but of making ice cream.    

    I remember my tiny hand in my father's big one as he helped me down the outside steps. I remember the dank smell of the basement and the cold concrete floor, how good it felt to be in such a cool place, away from the sultry Georgia heat. Most of all, I remember squatting beside a small wooden tub, watching with great excitement as my father turned a churn at the top of the tub. It was making a nice crunching sound. My father let me take a turn with the handle before it got too hard to push. 

    We were making ice cream. That's the first thing I life that I can remember.

    My son, Ela, has told me that his first memory is of running with a horse in a field, that free-as-the-wind feeling, a sort of wildness very different from the inwardness of the dark basement. But he, too, has memories of making ice cream by hand. Elsewhere in the country, people who still made ice cream at home had diluted the memory potential by using electric ice-cram makers, but here on the mountain we still did many things the old-fashioned way. Sometimes it made for better memories.

    One August day my land-partner, Lyn, came home from town with a hand-churned ice-cream maker. 

The next day, Ela and I and Lyn's daughter, Mahara, went off with buckets, sun hats, and long-sleeved shirts to pick blackberries. We picked and picked, trying not to eat so we could fill our buckets faster and save our appetites for what was coming. When our buckets were full, we returned to my house, where Ela and Mahara washed the berries and picked out the stems while I made a batter of flour, milk, and honey and melted a stick of butter in a pan in the oven. Then we poured the batter over the melted butter and the tumbling black berries onto the batter, and I stuck the cobbler in the oven. Soon hot-berry smells floated through the room. As soon as the cobbler was done, I carried it in thick hot-pads through the woods to Lyn's house with two excited children hopping alongside. While the blackberry cobbler sat steaming on Lyn's kitchen counter, the four of us took turns churning the handle of the ice-cream maker until the cream thickened into ice cream. I cut the cobbler into four dark red, thick-juicy pieces. Lyn scooped generous gobs of vanilla ice cream on top of each piece, and we ate what we had made.

    Though I don't remember anything more about the ice cream I helped churn when I was four years old, I still remember that sweet-tart cobbler made from blackberries only two hours from the vine, and the ice cream as creamy rich as only hand churning can produce, just melting onto the warm cobbler, and two little children of the mountains thinking they were in heaven.

Next week: "Reverting to the Ways of Our Ancestors"

Recipes from this post: Blackberry cobbler

BLACKBERRY COBBLER

serves 6-8

Ingredients

1/2 cup (1 stick) butter

1 cup flour

1 cup sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 cup milk

4 cups blackberries

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 400º. Let the butter melt in the oven in a 9"x13"x2" pan while the oven is heating.

To make

Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and milk. Pour the batter over the melted butter, and the berries over the batter. Bake at 400º for 30 minutes or until the batter has formed a golden-brown crust where it has bubbled around the berries. Serve with ice cream.

A Thief in My Apple Tree

     One September night I awoke abruptly. Something had gone bump in the night. I heard it again and thought, "That's the sound of my cat jumping down from my desk." Then I heard it again, louder, and I thought, "And that's the sound of—a bear in my apple tree!" I flung the covers off, scampered down the ladder, and dashed to the deck just above the apple tree. A big lack bear—a big, bad, black bear—was lumbering around on the lower deck under the tree. I yelled angrily at him, and he fled like the guilty thief he was.

    Mine are the most delicious apples in the world, blemish-free, completely organic, as large as grapefruits, juicy, yellow-green, and tart-sweet. Every day for lunch I pick an apple and eat it with cheese and dates. I wasn't about to let a bear eat my crop or ruin my tree. He had gotten half the apples that night and had broken four branches. About two dozen apples remained. These, I vowed grimly, would be mine.

    My neighbor told me to shoot a gun after him—not to hit him, but to scare the veejeebers out of him. "He knows that sound," Joe told me, handing me his shotgun. "He'll never come back if he hears it." I took the gun a little reluctantly. I have shot a gun before, with my brother and his friend in Georgia. They showed me how to hold the rifle, how to aim, how to shoot. Then we took turns shooting at the target. To everyone's surprise, I was a crack shot. Again and again and again I hit the bull's eye, impressing the socks off the two guys. Finally my bother put a bottle cap on a tree trunk. Whoever hit the cap first, he said, would end the shooting for the day. I tried and missed. Jeff missed. Lee missed. On my next shot I hit the cap square in the center.

    So I took Joe's shotgun, but I didn't really want to use it. Later that day the bear came round again, but as soon as I opened the door, he was off through the woods. The gun was next to the door. "All you have too do is pick it up and shoot it after him," I told myself, but I didn't. That might I dragged the foam pad off my couch and squeezed it onto the upper deck between the flower boxes and the side of the house. I laid my sleeping bag on it and snuggled in. The air was delightfully sharp. The stars sparkled brilliantly through the trees until the moon, just past fullness, came over the mountain with a glaring white light. I wondered why I didn't sleep out there every night. Before I went to sleep, I glanced reassuringly at the apples hanging just out of reach. I was their heroic guard.

    On the third night the bear returned. I heard him come up through the woods then stop. I didn't have to see in the dark to know that he had risen on his hind legs and was sniffing the air. He knew I was there, and passed by.

    The next night I had to leave the house for a yoga class and would be gone at least four hours, plenty of time for the bear to eat his fill. The time had come to harvest the remaining crop. Regretfully, I did. I gave apples to friends. I sent a box to my son and daughter-in-law in Seattle. I mailed four apples to my sister in Georgia, making them, at a cost of $2.00 per apple, the most expensive apples in the country. I put the rest in a cooler on the back porch and returned the gun to Joe.

    But wait a minute. The cooler is outdoors. Bears have the most powerful smelling apparatus in the animal kingdom. Could a bear smell apples inside a cooler? If I wake up in the middle of the night hearing something go thump on the back porch, I'll be out there in a jiffy, and then I'll spend every night sleeping on the back porch until, one day at a time, I've eaten all my apples. That's the kind of thing a heroic apple guard will do.

Next week: "Ice Cream Made the Old-fashioned Way"

Recipes from this post:

    Some favorite ways to eat apples

    Waldorf salad

    Ordinary apple pie

    Apple pecan upside down pie

SOME FAVORITE WAYS TO EAT APPLES

(1) Just picked off the tree, apples are good with a hard, sharp cheese, such as Emmentaler, and good, dark dates.

(2) Shakespeare suggests we eat pippin apples along with caraway seeds, as Justice Shallow, in 2 Henry IV, talks about "a last year's pippin, with a dish of caraways." According to the wisdom of the day, things that "breed wind" (such as apples) should be eaten with things that break wind, such as caraway.

(3) When I was a child, we used to make walking salads: core an apple with an apple corer. Stuff the hollow with a mixture of peanut butter and raisins. Eat walking.

(4) Apple pie, in many variations

Waldorf salad

Servings variable

Ingredients

Good eating apples

Raisins

Celery (optional)

Walnuts

A good mayonnaise

Fresh lemon juice

Preparation

Cut the apples (peeled if not organic) into pieces. Slice the celery on the diagonal. Chop walnuts. Mix mayonnaise and lemon juice.

To make

Mix all ingredients. Sometimes, adulterating the real Waldorf salad, as I see it, you could add, to good effect, pieces of pineapple, other kinds of nuts, maybe bananas (but not really; don't do it), or pears.

ORDINARY APPLE PIE

serves 6

This is my mother's recipe, amended during the period of my dietary life when I wasn't eating refined sugar, though I had no qualms about honey, maple syrup, date sugar, and so forth. I copied the recipe onto a plain piece of paper that I tore from a little spiral notebook. The chads from the spirals have long since fallen away, leaving a ruffled edge on the left side of the paper, which is well stained and has been folded and unfolded so often the writing is just about obliterated at the fold. The recipe is written in pencil.

Photo by Justine May

Crust

Ingredients

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup cold water (or more)

To make

Cut the butter into small chunks. Using a pastry mixer or two knives (or electrical gadgets for this sort of thing), cut the flour and salt into the butter until mixture resembles cornmeal. Add the water all at once and mix till dough clumps. Mound into two balls, wrap with plastic wrap, and chill well.

The pie

Ingredients

Photo by Justine May

Unbaked crust for two layers

4-6 apples

2 tablespoons cornstarch

2 tablespoons cold water

1/2 cup honey

(1 teaspoon cinnamon, optional)

(1 tablespoon lemon juice, optional)

Milk

Preparation

Flour a working surface and a rolling pin. Peel and slice apples thinly. (To prevent apples from browning, you could put them in a bowl of cold water with a squeeze of lemon juice.) Preheat oven to 450º.

To maker

Roll pie dough into two 10-inch rounds. Place one in a 9-inch pie pan (preferably metal). Do not trim edges. Mix honey and cornstarch and mix into apples thoroughly. If your apples aren't very tasty, add the cinnamon and lemon juice. Pour apples into pie crust, mounding high in the center. Cover with the other rolled-out pie dough and pinch edges together, sealing well. Trim excess dough. Brush pie with milk to glaze. Cut several slashes in the top crust to allow steam to escape. Bake at 450º for 10 minutes. Lower the oven temperature to 350º and bake another 35-45 minutes till apples are tender but not sauced and crust is crusty and golden.

Ordinary apple pie. Photo by Justine May

APPLE PECAN UPSIDE DOWN PIE

serves 6

The crust

Ingredients

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 sticks unsalted butter

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon sugar

1/3 cup cold water

Preparation

Cut butter into small pieces. Flour a working surface and a rolling pin.

To make

Mix the flour, salt, and sugar, and cut the butter into that mixture with a pastry cutter, two knives, or your fingertips. (Or use a food processor.) When the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, add the cold water until mixture forms a ball. Divide dough into two balls, one slightly larger than the other. Dust with flour and wrap with wax paper or plastic wrap. Chill for 1 hour. Roll into two rounds of 1/4-inch thickness, one 12 inches, the other 10 or 11 inches in diameter.

The filling

Ingredients

6 tablespoons unsalted bvutter

2/3 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed

1 1/4 cups chopped pecans

2 1/2 pounds good cooking apples

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon all-purpose flour

Preparation

Chop the pecans. Peel, core, and thinly slice the apples. Put them in a bowl of water with a squeeze of lemon juice to keep them from browning while you prepare the pie. Preheat the oven to 350º.

To make

Heat 6 tablespoons of butter over low heat. Add brown sugar and pecans; stir 1 minuet. Pour into a 9-inch pie plate and cool slightly. Place 12-inch round of dough over the pecans, leaving 1/2-inch overhang. In a bowl, toss apples with cinnamon, sugar, and flour to combine well. Spread this mixture on top of dough in pie pan, mounding the apples high in the center. Brush one side of the 10-inch dough with water and place it over the apples, wet side down. Press edges of dough together and trim. Slash the top of the crust several times with a sharp knife to allow steam to escape. Bake at 350º for 45-55 minute. Cool for 5 minutes. Invert onto a serving plate and serve at room temperature.

Upside down pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner

The Worst Job I Ever Had

    Decades ago the smell of catsup hung in the air around Medford the way a fresh-sawdust smell wafts through open car windows when we drive past a mill today. [An updated note in 2020: or the strong smell of marijuana when you drive past one of the Applegate's many large hemp farms, these days.] When I moved to the Applegate in the early seventies, tomatoes had just toppled as king crop of the Rogue Valley. Messinger's Farm in Provolt was still a big tomato farm. One summer, not for a lark but out of financial necessity, I joined a friend to pick tomatoes at Messinger's. We enjoyed gardening, the work was close to home, and we could take our children to work, so, we thought, why not? And our employees thought, "If Mexicans, why not hippies?"

    At first it was fine. The two children played hide-and-seek or hopscotch in the fields or hunted for grasshoppers and potato bugs while Lyn and I stooped from plant to plant picking tomatoes, discarding those with bottom rot, and setting the others carefully into our buckets. The shiny red tomatoes lay plump as pregnant spiders along the stems and under the leaves of the plants. They fell smooth and warm into my palm as I plucked them from their vines. A tart, green smell lingered after their broken stems. The early morning sun pleasantly warmed the back of my neck, and from time to time I glanced up at the blue mountains above green fields picturesquely dotted with Mexican workers.

    Before long the sun became furnace-hot. My hands itched from the prickly stems. My eyes stung with sweat. My nostrils plugged with dust. My hair escaped my hat, stuck to my face, tickled my chin. The sun hung motionless, obliterating the hours. My back ached. I gave up stooping and leaned on my knees, but tiny rocks cut into my flesh, and getting to my feet to move to the next plant slowed me down. My back hurt. I tried squatting, but my thighs ached. I half-waddled from plant to plant, stooping, kneeling, squatting, stumbling, wiping the sweat out of my eyes, trying to pick faster. The sooner I filled my bucket, the sooner I could stand upright and walk to the edge of the field to empty my tomatoes into the bin, counting: one more bucket, two more dollars.

    The Mexican workers slid down the rows like picking machines, their hands moving with rhythmic regularity and quickness. Each Mexican emptied three buckets for every one of mine. I thought about slaves in the cotton fields, became the black woman in her bonnet standing for a moment to arch her back before stooping again to fill her bag with cotton bolls. I cursed the tomato that stuck to the vine, jerking it free and flinging it into the bucket, where it lay, split and useless. Meanwhile, the Mexican in the next row had picked ten tomatoes.

    I lasted two days. Then, to no one's regret, I went home to hoe my own garden and pick its tomatoes at my own pace. I didn't know how I was going to make my land payment that month, but I knew one thing: it would not be by picking tomatoes.

Next week: "A Thief in My Apple Tree"

Recipes from this post:

    Gazpacho

    Tomato-avocado soup with corn

    Green tomato or pear relish

    Tomato apricot chutney

    Stuffed tomatoes

GAZPACHO

serves 8

Ingredients

5-6 cups cold tomato juice

1 small onion

1 clove garlic

2 cups diced fresh tomatoes

1 cup green pepper

1 cucumber

2 scallions

1/2 lemon

1 lime

1 teaspoon honey

1 teaspoon tarragon

1 teaspoon basil

dash of ground cinnamon

dash of tabasco sauce

dash of red wine vinegar

1/4 cup parsley

2 tablespoons olive oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper

yogurt (optional)

Preparation

Mince the onion, garlic, and bell pepper. Dice the tomatoes and cucumber. Chop the scallions and the parsley. Juice the half lemon and the lime.

To make

Combine all the ingredients. Chill well for at least 2 hours. Add a dollop of yogurt atop each bowl of soup.

TOMATO AVOCADO SOUP WITH CORN

Serves 6-8

Ingredients

2 ears fresh corn (or frozen, if you must)

4 cups tomato juice

1 cucumber

2 ripe avocados

4 tablespoons fresh lime or lemon juice

1 large clove garlic

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin seeds

1/4 teaspoon ground red pepper (optional)

salt

chopped fresh cilantro (optional)

Preparation

Peel and cube the cucumber. Cook the corn and cut off the kernels. You should have about 2 cups. Juice the lemon or lime. Mince or press the garlic. Peel, pit, and cube the avocados.

To make

Combine all ingredients and chill till very cold.

GREEN TOMATO RELISH

(My mother's recipe—also works with hard pears)

yield 10-12 pints

Ingredients

1 peck green tomatoes (12-15 tomatoes)

1 cup salt

6 green peppers

5 red peppers

6 medium onions

3 quarts vinegar

8 cups sugar

2 tablespoons celery seeds

2 tablespoons mustard seeds

1 tablespoon whole cloves

Preparation

Grind the green tomatoes with the salt. Drain in a cloth bag overnight. Chop the peppers and onions.

To make

Combine the vinegar and the sugar with the celery seeds, mustard seeds, and cloves. Add the drained green tomatoes and the chopped peppers and onions. Cook about 15 minutes. Seal in hot sterilized jars.

TOMATO APRICOT CHUTNEY

yield: 2 cups

Ingredients

1 tablespoon minced garlic

1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger root

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 cup chopped dried apricots

3-5 firm, ripe tomatoes

2 tablespoons honey

2 tablespoons cider vinegar

1/4 teaspoon salt

Preparation

Mince the garlic. Peel and grate the ginger. Chop the dried apricots. Chop the tomatoes to yield 2 cups.

To make

Sauté the garlic, ginger root, and other spices for about 1 minute in the oil, stirring. Add other ingredients and simmer uncovered on low heat until apricots are soft and the mixture is thick, about 30 minutes. If the chutney tastes like it needs more honey or more vinegar (it depends on the sweetness of your apricots and the tartness of your tomatoes), add more honey or vinegar. Chill.

STUFFED TOMATOES

This is a summer recipe only if you are as picky about good tomatoes as I am. Bland, out-of-season tomatoes gain no flavor by being baked. Most of the time we don't know the variety of supermarket tomatoes we pluck off the shelf into our baskets, but if you have a choice, either the brandywine or Ponderosa tomato does well being stuffed and baked because both are fleshy and tasty and hold their shapes well. This recipe can be made with peppers instead of tomatoes, unless you're allergic to peppers, too, in which case you'll be glad to know that it's better with tomatoes, anyway.

The stuffing

Ingredients

10 ounces fresh spinach (Don't substitute frozen spinach. It is greatly inferior in both taste and texture.)

4 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature

1 14-ounce can artichoke hearts

1/2 cup minced scallions

1/2 cup grated sharp cheddar cheese

1/2 cup chopped pecans (walnuts also work well)

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation

Set out cream cheese to soften. Drain and chop the artichoke hearts. Wash and stem the spinach. Mince the scallions, grate the cheese, and toast and chop the pecans. Preheat oven to 350º.

To make

Steam the spinach in the water that adheres from the rinsing, then drain it well. Chop it, then mix it together with the cream cheese. The warm spinach helps the cream cheese soften, though you should begin with the cheese at room temperature. Stir in the rest of the ingredients.

Assemblage and baking

Ingredients

4 medium firm, ripe, summer tomatoes

The prepared stuffing

Preparation

Butter a baking dish. Core the tomatoes and scoop out the pulp, leaving a shell.

To make

Stuff the tomatoes with the filling and put them into the prepared baking dish. Pour 1/2 inch of water into the bottom of the dish to help steam the vegetables. Bake, covered, at 350º for 20 minutes or until the vegetables are tender and the filling is firm. Uncover the dish and bake a few minutes more to brown the top. Serve in a shallow bowl or a rimmed plate to catch the juices.

Three and a Half Pounds of Food

         Backpackers generally agree on the basic equipment for a backpacking trip: sleeping bag and pad, camp stove, fuel, tent. What clothes to take is a matter of season, climate, and personal choice. What food to take is more variable. Though I felt I had worked out a good regimen years ago, I began to doubt my choices when I was packing for my first trip with Bob Cook, who had been hiking in Yosemite National Park for twenty years and was a backpacking "pro." He, I thought, no doubt walks with a light pack, leaping up mountains with the alacrity of a mountain goat—graceful, lithe, and unencumbered. I didn't want to be trundling up the mountain behind him like a lumbering turtle, so I tried to lighten my pack by adjusting my trail menu. I was pleased that, in the end, I trimmed my week's food supply to three and a half pounds, but when Bob told me his food weighted nine pounds, I began to worry that I would get hungry. Bob was worried that I would want to start eating his food.

    The differences were great. Bob carried ready-to-eat, freeze-dried dinners: chicken a la king, beef stroganoff, three-cheese lasagna. My one-cup dehydrated meals—mushroom soup, miso with seaweed—sounded pitifully plain. And small. But one packaged gourmet trail dinner (two servings, but some of my hiking partners eat one package per dinner) weighs 4 3/4 ounces, provides 520 calories, and costs $6.50. One cup of soup weighs 1.2 ounces, provides 140 calories, and costs $.99 on sale. So who comes out ahead?

          For breakfast Bob invariably has oat bran. I usually carry muesli, but muesli isn't light, so on one trip, years ago, I carried bran flakes instead. But light in weight also means "lite," as in no calories, no fat, no sustenance. On the first strenuous climb after my bran flakes breakfast, my energy flagged. I began stumbling behind my hiking partner and had to call for a snack stop. On the Yosemite trip I would carry muesli again, but, for variety and to lighten my pack, I would alternate muesli with a powdered protein drink for breakfast.

          Bob's trail lunch is, invariably, six Triscuit crackers, two ounces of cheddar cheese, and a small bag of M&Ms. One of my backpacking partners carries peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which by the third day look very unappetizing. Another partner carries cucumbers. That's too much weight for me, but I like the idea of fresh food so sometimes I'll take six or eight cherry tomatoes to eat with the dehydrated hummus that, reconstituted with water, serves as my lunch. On short trips I'll also dribble on a little olive oil, but for the Yosemite trip I left behind both cherry tomatoes and olive oil, augmenting the hummus only with cutup bits of sun-dried tomatoes for a lunch much lighter than two ounces.

          Because trail snacks are important, even when I'm keeping weight to a minimum, I have thoroughly explored all possibilities, carefully comparing trail mixes and different brands of energy bars for weight per grams of protein, calories per grams of protein, and cost. Luna Bars won. I take enough Luna Bars for one a day, half of a bar for each midmorning snack and the other half at midafternoon. Other extras include enough tea bags for one cup of tea a day and some dried mango or apricots for vitamin C. And that's it. Three and a half pounds. Seven days.

          As it turned out, I wasn't hungry. I kept up with the fast-footed Bob, I didn't gawk enviously at his gourmet meals, and I ended the hike without the extra weight of unused food in my pack. I was well satisfied with my three-and-a-half-pound, seven-day menu, even though the first thing I did when I got off the trail was go straight to a restaurant and eat. But so did Bob.

          Since then I have made one major adjustment in my backpacking menu thanks to the dinner my son and daughter-in-law made for me on my sixtieth birthday. They and I had backpacked into the Mt. Jefferson Wilderness Area, in the Oregon Cascades. To celebrate the occasion, on the day of the birthday itself Leah told me she and Ela would make me dinner that night—no trail food for me on such an important day! Dinner was superb: angel hair pasta mixed, while hot, with cream cheese, cutup pieces of Monterey Jack cheese, Parmesan cheese, and dried tomatoes along with the bit of water they soaked in. (The augmentation of artichoke hearts that Ela and Leah enjoyed was, alas, not included in my dinner because of my peppers allergy.) The meal was so good and so easy it has become, with adjustments, a variation to my trail dinners. Instead of artichoke hearts (too heavy) and the Jack and cream cheeses (too heavy and too susceptible to heat on longer trips), I add bits of tuna from a vacuum-sealed tuna package that is easy to carry in a pack, weighs only seven ounces, lasts for three meals, and can be used for lunches or dinners. Later in the same summer that I was in Mt. Jefferson Wilderness with Ela and Leah, on another trip to Yosemite, with Bob, I sat at the edge of 9200-foot Smedberg Lake, fresh from a long swim in its blue, blue water under white-granite, gray-and-orange streaked peaks, enjoying a meal of angel hair pasta topped with a tuna-Parmesan-dried-tomato sauce. I thought nothing could have been finer had it come out of my own kitchen in my own little house in the faraway Siskiyou Mountains.

Next week: "The Worst Job I Ever Had"

Recipes from this post: 

          Backpacking breakfasts (muesli and protein drink)

          Backpacking lunches (hummus, tuna, torta)

          Backpacking dinners (easy dinners; angel hair pasta)

Breakfast #1

Ingredients

Muelsi

Nonfat instant powdered milk (Not Carnation. Health food stores carry much better-tasting milk powders.)

Preparation

Measure 1 serving muesli (1/2 cup) and 2 tablespoons powdered milk. Mix together. Depending on how good your eye is at measuring proportions, put one, two, or all servings in separate zip-lock bags.

To make

Add 1/2 cup water. If it's boiling water, you have an instant hot cereal.

Breakfast #2

Ingredients

One package instant protein mix, such as Spiru-tein

1/4 cup instant nonfat milk powder (See note in Breakfast #1)

1 cup water

Preparation

Put the measured milk powder in zip-lock bags.

To make

Put the protein powder and the milk powder in a container. Your empty hiker's water bottle works great. Mix them together. Then add the water and shake or beat well.

Backpacking lunches

Lunch #1

Ingredients

Dehydrated hummus

Sun-dried tomatoes (not packed in oil)

Olive oil (optional)

Crackers (optional)

Cherry tomatoes (optional)

Preparation

Cut up the dried tomatoes into the hummus and divide hummus into individual servings of 1/4 cup or more, depending on appetite. Place two servings each into a zip-lock bag. Put olive oil in a tiny plastic bottle if you're going to carry it. Put crackers and cherry tomatoes in hard plastic containers, condensing the space as much as possible.

To make

At lunch, squeeze half of the hummus out of a bag into t cup and add enough water to make a paste of the consistency you like. Let it sit for a few minutes to thicken and to let the hummus granules melt and the tomato bits soften. Olive oil improves the taste immensely, if you've carried some along, and crackers are always nice, though not necessary. Cherry tomatoes stay remarkably fresh on the trail and are great fresh food, especially with hummus.

Lunch #2

Ingredients 

Tuna 

Cherry tomatoes

To make

There's not much to it. Just flake a meal's worth of tuna out of the foil bag into your Sierra Club trail cup, add 2-3 cherry tomatoes, and eat tuna and tomatoes together. It's a yummy trail lunch.

Lunch #3

Ingredients

Your favorite whole-grain crackers

Torta (cream cheese with dried tomatoes, gorgonzola with walnuts—there are many choices.)

This works well if you are on a short trip. It is too heavy and needs too much refrigeration if you are gone more than two nights. Otherwise, it's a superb option.

Backpacking dinners

The easy dinners

Ingredients

Big Soups provide more food than Nile products per carton, but, of course, take up more room in the pack. Try couscous and rice mixtures in a cup (the kinds that only take boiling water to make—no cooking) as well as conventional soups. Take the dehydrated soup out of its carton and put it in a zip-lock bag to save space. Far East couscous meals are also good because you don't need to cook them, only to pour boiling water over them. They usually come packaged for four servings. Divide the ingredients carefully into one-serving meals and put in zip-lock bags. A piece of dried mango makes a great dessert.

To make

Boil 1 cup of water. Pour over the soup or couscous, cover, and wait five minutes.

More elaborate: Angelp-hair pasta dinner

Ingredients

Angel-hair pasta

Cream cheese

Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese (or substitute vacuum-packed tuna for these two cheeses)

Parmesan cheese

Dried tomatoes

Preparation

Break the pasta small enough to fit into a backpacker's cooking pot. Cut the Jack or cheddar cheese into small pieces with your Swiss Army knife. Soak the dried tomatoes in enough water to cover.

To make

Bring a pot of water to a boil, not paying any attention to the directions on the package of the pasta suggesting lots and lots of water. Backpacking pots are small; just fill the pot about 3/4 full so the pasta won't boil over while it is cooking. Add the pasta and cook till done, about 3 minutes. Drain the pasta and add all the other ingredients, including the water of the soaking tomatoes. Mix well. The hot pasta will melt the cheeses into a thick sauce or heat the flakes of tuna. No dinner could be finer on the trail, under the high peaks, by the side of a beautiful lake.