Some great sites out there feature homemade recipes that rehearse a pretty cool formula for backcountry cooking: freeze-dried and dehydrated components vacuum sealed/packaged and then reconstituted with boiling water in either an insulated cozy or cup of some sort. Essentially zero cleanup, the storage space is also typically smaller than the larger Mountain House meals. Tricks to customize the recipes include adding things like butter powder and milk (look for Nestle’s “Nido” for whole milk powder) to jack up the calories and help hold you on a hike.

After reading  Hyperlight Mountain Gear’s great blog and trying out a couple of recipes, I decided to experiment with a coconut beans and rice recipe, adapting it for the backcountry. You can use a cozy and either rehydrate in an oversized vacuum seal bag or a quart-sized Zip-Lock bag, or dump the contents into an insulated twist-top container. The first two options are optimum for no cleanup. Antigravity gear sells both the cozy pouches themselves, which fit a standard quart Zip-Lock bag, and kits to convert Zip-Lock’s Twist-top containers into insulated containers. Other sites probably do, too, but Antigravity Gear is a great place to start — I actually have their pouches but used double-backed tape, Gorilla Tape, and a roll of (looks like silver bubble wrap) duct insulation to make my own insulated Zip-Lock twist-top container.

 

 The Recipe

 You’ll need to get some components; Amazon is a great place for that — be sure to store anything with fat in it in the freezer.

 

• 50g Instant Uncle Ben’s White Rice (they make instant brown rice, too, but I could never get it not too chewy — your results may vary) 
• 25g Dehydrated Beans 
• 16g Coconut Cream Powder 
• 5g Veggie or Chicken Stock Powder 
• 1 Tbsp Dehydrated Bell Peppers 
• 1 Tsp Butter Powder (more to bump up the calories than anything else) 
• 1 pinch salt (to taste) 

That’s it — just package these in a bag and rehydrate with boiling water (“eyeballing it”–I’m not sure how much). It takes about 7 minutes to get the chewiness to go away, and it runs about 420 calories. It packs up great and is a healthy option to the some of the sodium bombs out there.