I just finished making up another batch of boat food. I've been
making it for three years now. After a couple of gastronmic
failures I came up with something which is close to uncooked fruit
cake (Christmas cake) without the candied fruit. The nuts, dates,
and raisins are chopped up in a blender so the boat food has the
consistency of meal. They can be chopped without clogging the
blender by putting some of the corn meal, rolled oats, or flour in
the blender at the same time. I use whole wheat flour. There's no
picking the nuts out of the boat food and leaving the rest because
its all copped up to the consistency of meal.

I did a nutrition analysis on a spreadsheet adding up the various
ingredients and got a complete diet if I take a daily vitamin and
mineral pill. I store the boat food in empty plastic peanut butter
jars which have been made waterproof by the addition of a closed
cell foam liner on the underside of the lid cut from a foam meat
tray. A floating plastic spoon is put in the jar to eat with. I
try to be careful not to break the plastic spoon. I take a water
bottle and a jar of the boat food with me whenever I go out for a
paddle, bike ride, to the beach, to garage sales, etc. The problem
I have now is trying to save it for outings and not eating it at
home. There's no cooking or refrigeration required. It would keep
indefinitely but it doesn't stay around very long. I wasn't keen
on the taste and texture at first but think it's great now.

The recipe is in the food section of my website. The nutrition
spreadsheet is there too but you have to drop the /top.htm to get
the index of files and scroll down to the bottom to copy the
spreadsheet files. The spreadsheet is a DOS program.

I've found the boat food to be a good cheap energy source. Try it
if you like, or experiment with something more suited to your
taste. For smaller quantities it's easy to just reduce all the
amounts proportionally.

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"William R. Watt" wrote:

I just finished making up another batch of boat food. I've been
making it for three years now. After a couple of gastronmic
failures I came up with something which is close to uncooked fruit
cake (Christmas cake) without the candied fruit. The nuts, dates,
and raisins are chopped up in a blender so the boat food has the
consistency of meal.

Sounds revolting. Do you keep it around in case you get really really
hungry?

I've got a friend who always carries a can of sheeps brains in his
backpack as insurance against starvtion - it's actually quite
nutritious, but you'll never ever be tempted to eat it until things get
really desparate.

--
//-Walt
//
//

Walt wrote:

"William R. Watt" wrote:


I just finished making up another batch of boat food. I've been
making it for three years now. After a couple of gastronmic
failures I came up with something which is close to uncooked fruit
cake (Christmas cake) without the candied fruit. The nuts, dates,
and raisins are chopped up in a blender so the boat food has the
consistency of meal.



Sounds revolting. Do you keep it around in case you get really really
hungry?

I've got a friend who always carries a can of sheeps brains in his
backpack as insurance against starvtion - it's actually quite
nutritious, but you'll never ever be tempted to eat it until things get
really desparate.



There's no accounting for taste.

Pete H

--
If you don't like the answer, you
shouldn't have asked the question.
C. C. Abbott

"William R. Watt" wrote in message
...

I just finished making up another batch of boat food. I've been
making it for three years now. After a couple of gastronmic
failures I came up with something which is close to uncooked fruit
cake (Christmas cake) without the candied fruit.

Ugh. Not that its unreasonable to want to simplify your diet while on trips,
but WHY so extreme, in god's name?? I find the abundance of interesting and
tasty things I can cook up to be one of the highlights of the trip. I
suppose I could imagine carrying 4 months of breakfasts and dinners in a
single pickle pail, no dishes, no stove...the ultimate in minimalism, but
what would I do with all the rest of my day? I think even the old trappers
and explorers got sick of pemmican after a very short while, and I bet its a
lot tastier than fruitcake without fruit....

--riverman

....stuff deleted (hopefully)!
Sounds revolting. Do you keep it around in case you get really really
hungry?

I've got a friend who always carries a can of sheeps brains in his
backpack as insurance against starvtion - it's actually quite
nutritious, but you'll never ever be tempted to eat it until things get
really desparate.


In an emergency, you club a fellow backpacker with the can and now have 160
lbs. of fresh, stringy, but edible mean. The can is then emptied and used as
a ladle for the resulting stew. Right?

Rick

there is a tradition of eating gourmet food on canoe trips (and fishing
trips) which originated with George Simpson when he was governor of the
Hudson's Bay Co. He started a dining club in Montreal called teh Beaver
Club for people who made a lot of money off the fur trade. He gave the
Prince of Wales a grand tour in canoes and shipped a couple of gift canoes
(birch bark naturally) to the Prince in London where he started a canoe
dining club which, fashion being what is was in those days, lead to a
widepspread interest in canoes in Britain. The dining clubs had nothing to
do with canoes or canoeing outside of canoes brining the furs to Montreal
where the diners could live well of the profits.

I've never held to that sort of social climbing tradition. I favour the
actual paddling tradition of a simple cheap diet of pemmnican, tea, and
pea soup. The boat food I make was initially intended as a vegetarian
version of pemmican to save the cost and trouble of drying and pounding
buffalo meat,or any otehr kind of meat. Bit I also hold to the old
scottish tradition of going to war with a bag of oatmean and a pinch of
salt. Simple is best when travelling light IMHO. I like to travel light,
keep the cooking simple, and spend my time enjoying the environment
instead. I do buy frozen fish fillets and hang them to dry to carry when
paddling. That's more of a native tradtion. Dried fish is a very light and
nutritious snack. All boating, and especially padding, is abut saving
weight. You'll find the trail food spreadsheet on my website calcualtes
both the weight and volume of the food it analyses. That's for portaging
and backpacking.

The sheep's brains may have originated in Scotland. Their favourite
outdoor passtime is hiking to the top of hills and back down again. The
practice would be of the later post-clearances perod. I don't know if I'd
call it traditional.

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