I hate carrying extra weight … and I hate double humping portages, so I try to dry as much food as I can, even for quick overnighters. Leftovers are good, but with a couple of teenagers, often there is not much left over to dry up. So I had to look to other sources of food. Enter TV dinners.

Cook ’em and dry ’em. Works great.

I’ve been experimenting with some of the old standards, and this is what I’ve found.

Stouffer’s Diner Classics – Meatloaf and Mashed Potatoes (with gravy.)

• Love this one. Cooks well. Dries well and tastes great!
• It takes 3 dinners to make one good camp meal
• Dries from 813 grams down to 179 grams
• Unfortunately this only provides 780 calories

It reconstitutes well making a kind of mashed potatoes with meat stew. Love it. Need to add a bit of extra calories for this meal though, especially if sharing with someone else.

NOTE: I’ll be adding to the post as I record other meals.

Swanson Beef Pie

This one is not one I would normally have chosen to dry up. I saw Xander using them though, and figured I’d give them a try. These take a long time to dry out for some reason. Probably because they are so wet after cooked? Again I did 3 of them to get the amount of food that I would be looking for in a meal.

• 1260 calories for 3 pies together
• 600 grams dried down to 202 grams (for 3 pies)
• The crust kinda disappears and thickens everything. Flavour is good.