No Cook: How Do You Get Your Veggies?

I've seen lots of meal plan lists that include lots of fatty foods (nuts, chocolate, fritos) and dried fruits. One of the things that seems lacking in most of these lists, though is vegetables. If you're cooking on the trail, I know you can dehydrate/rehydrate pretty much anything, but what do you no-cook folks do for veggies?

When I go “no cook” it’s for a single night or at most a two nighter. I just don’t worry about the lack of fruits and vegetables in my diet for that short of a time span. If I were planning to go for longer without cooking I would probably add some vegetable puree when I make fruit leather and some freeze dried vegetables are tasty to eat without rehydrating.

I'll bring carrots, celery, radishes, broccoli, depends on what I can scrounge from the kitchen but I eat all of those raw more often than cooked and they all travel well for a couple days or more when it's cool out.

If I'm going to be doing a lot of hiking and want to go lighter I'll turn more to dried fruit for fiber. Raisins, cranberries, prunes, cherries, etc. and fresh apples are always good.

You can eat "Just Veggies" raw.

Great tip Gershon. This just spawned a mad googling session about freeze-drying foods at home.

"Another Fork in the Trail" is a good book on dehydrating vegetarian food. The book is a bit expensive at $9.99. I think the author has a website with many of the recipes.

You could look on the lite food section of this forum for more recipes.

I know freeze drying is technically a type of dehydrating, but for the rest of this post, I'm going to use the term "dehydrating" exclusively for the warm air method...

I've got a dehydrator, which I've been using to make all kinds of stuff, and I tested the food out on my car camping trip last weekend. It was great, but not exactly gourmet. That's fine, I'm just trying to keep things easy. There're just some things that do better freeze-dried than dehydrated. I know some campers had trouble with peas getting rock hard, for example, yet peas is one of the ingredients in "just veggies". After reading the description carefully, I saw that the peas and corn are freeze-dried instead of dehydrated like the other ingredients. My guess is this is precisely to prevent the hard texture. Traditionally, freeze-drying is a very expensive process requiring specialized equipment, but I've seen there're instructions online for doing it with nothing more than a freezer and stuff you'd have in your kitchen anyway; it just takes a while. Now I'm eager to try it out.

Please let us know how your home freeze drying works.

Meanwhile, I've had pretty good luck with dehydrated veggies in such items as pasta salad, even cold mashed potatoes. (Think of them as potato salad with a different texture.) Shredded cabbage, carrots, celery, parsley, zucchini, cukes, etc., all worked well for me. Peas I run through the blender a bit to chop so they can rehydrate more easily. Consider other other options in addition to pasta and potatoes, even tuna/chicken salad with veggies on crackers. Cucumber or zucchini "chips" with sun or home dried tomatoes, string cheese, and pepperoni make a decent no-cook trail lunch, maybe with some crackers for filler carbs. I also make "walking salads" which basically are versions of slaw, carrot, or Waldorf salads w/o mayo (sub applesauce for binder), and dehydrated into patties or rolls. Cook some potatoes, onion, and celery, maybe a little corn, in the liquid from a can of salmon, blend until mostly smooth, then dehydrate. Add the salmon to the blender and dehydrate all together or separately, adding the salmon to your packaged soup bundles. Add hot or cold water as your mood and the weather dictates. (Think vichyssoise.) Bacon bits, green onion, chives, dried leek, parsley, lots of things can be added as your mood and available items dictate. I was going to have salmon chowder for supper one cold, soggy hike, but came upon a shelter mid-day, so stopped to boil water and had salmon chowder while I warmed up and dried out. It was a memorable experience. Another particularly hot day, I decided my salmon chowder needed to be cold salmon potato salad. It could just as easily have been "salmon vichyssoise," had I been in the mood for spooning up soup.

CamperMom

Wheatgrass powder. Find one that taste good (most do). It is an above average nutritional punch I think. Take carrots and cucumbers. Munch on dried porcini (yummy) or kelp (crazy about it, it is crazily salty just so you know). Oh, kelp powder is amazing. Vegetable chips (if you got to eat chips better make it nutritionally worthy). The best thing to do is to keep yourself well nourished in adventure travels; I skip many things but definitely not veggies, eggs and nuts.

Next to your veggies might be interesting to take roasted chickpeas from a Turkish shop (leblebi), believe me, they are one of the yummiest goodness snacks I ever ate (they come with and without salt). I feel pretty loaded with them, would dare to say more than with nuts.

I just buy freeze dried veggies from the store. Here are some online.

Freeze dried peas

Broccoli slaw or cabbage makes a great Asian coleslaw, which lasts several days. I just bring a bottle of dressing (rice vinegar, soy, garlic, ginger, sesame oil, hot pepper, a little honey or sweetener) and cilantro to mix in when I eat it.

I'm brand new here, so apologies if I'm restating common knowledge...

I was thinking the same thing this morning, as I'm currently committed to a diet that includes 6-10 ounces of veggies with lunch and dinner. I did some googling, and there's a huge variety of freeze-dried and dehydrated veggies out there:
http://shop.honeyville.com/freeze-dried-green-beans.html
http://shop.honeyville.com/freeze-dried-broccoli.html
http://shop.honeyville.com/dehydrated-carrots.html

The freeze-dried stuff will likely re-hydrate with cool water... although I've never tried it. This place also has lots of stuff like diced ham, turkey, beef, as well as a bunch of flavored textured vegetable protein (TVP) that I'm curious about. I ran some numbers, and based on what they quote for broccoli (5 pounds of fresh broccoli per can), it's only about $3.25/lb of reconstituted broccoli. That's not too bad!

I can't have flour or sugar, so I'll likely be assembling my own dried meals from ingredients like these. Should be interesting!

-Rodney

Bags of frozen chopped spinach dehydrate very well in the dehydrator--just spread the spinach on parchment-paper-covered trays. It's a good idea to break up clumps when it's halfway dried. Choppped dried spinach reconstitutes quite quickly so should be just fine using cold water (with a longer soaking time).

I've gotten to the point that I add a tablespoon of dried spinach to nearly all my dehydrated meals to boost the veggie content.

Do note that dehydration destroys vitamin C. For longer trips, a Vitamin C supplement (unless, like me, you take a multi-vitamin/mineral supplement daily anyway) is an excellent idea.

I like Emergen-C, but it does have sugar.

Just learn to identify the most abundant wild greens in your area. During much of the summer you can forage for your greens. Bring a salad dressing. This does not need to involve hours of work - I just pick flowers and greens during the day or camp near a patch of edible greens. My favorite salad is miner's lettuce topped with columbine.

Now that you mention it, I do love fresh dandelion greens.

If you want stuff dehydrated from the grocery store, Hungry Jack dehydrated cheesy hash brown potatoes are Yummy, sun dried tomatoes (technically a fruit), dried minced onion, dry veggie soup mixes for mainstream foods. There are also dry veggie snacks and chips. Some places have freeze dried veggies but not everywhere.


I go through the trouble of dehydrating because my own food is less salty and tastes better. But you can't beat the convenience of freeze dried food from the gear shop. If you're going to go this route, may I suggest just getting meals. Otherwise you'll pay almost as much for the veggies as for a meal. If you look carefully, you can find some meals with alot of veggies. My husband and child love for example Mountain House Beef Stew. It is full of peas, carrots, and potatoes. With these meals, there's little clean up after. You can cook them by dumping boiling water in the bag, sealing, and waiting some minutes. The foil liner in the bag keeps them good and hot when sealed. Then you just have the bag to carry out. If you are alone and eat directly out of the bag, only have to wash your utensil, don't even have a bowl or pot to wash.

I have something on 11 low cost easy grocery store foods for the pack if you want to take a look (but it's not veggies focused). http://mamasbasecamp.blogspot.com/2014/09/backcountry-eats-tips-for-11-easy.html

Timely topic. I was just wondering today how I can increase my vegetable intake on my hiking trips. I tend to get constipated for the first few days and thought eating more veggies might help with that.

Thanks for sharing the info.

Blue
PS No wild vegetables growing out here in the desert sadly

The experiment is on-going, but here's what's happened so far. The simplest instructions say to just leave the food, cut into small pieces and spread out, exposed in an otherwise empty freezer for a week. After a week, check it, and if it's not ready, give it another week. I wanted to do this without buying or building anything extra, so I decided to go this route and picked out some frozen peas to try. I divided them evenly between two paper plates and put them in the freezer at work, since it wasn't being used. After a week, they still had a long way to go. I tested them at about two weeks and again after three. After that, I kinda forgot about them. I'm not sure how much time passed, but I checked them again, probably about two weeks ago. I wanted to give them a little extra time to be completely sure, and I also need a bag to repackage them into so they don't absorb moisture from the air, so they're still in the freezer for now. Once I get them out and packaged up, I'll report again on how they turned out. So far, I'm thinking, yes, it does technically work, but it takes too long and uses too much freezer space to be practical.

Interesting. Sometime I may try vacuum-sealing a small amount of veggies in a Mason jar, then placing the jar into the freezer to see if water vapor crystals form inside the jar. Dumping the veggies into another dry jar and repeating may eventually give me "freeze-dried" veggies. This would be time-consuming and take up freezer space, as you mentioned. I can only see doing this with something like peas that don't rehydrate easily. it would be far easier to buy dehydrated peas or do as I've been, which is to break up dehydrated peas in a blender of food processor.

On short trips I just bring vegies...in fact on day 1 those premade salads in a bag hold up just fine til dinner. On longer trips I don't stress over the vegies...but I do still bring some oranges. Oranges hold up great in your pack.

If you're able to put them under a vacuum, simply put some desiccant in the jar with them, and they should dry out very quickly. That's what this person did.

Thanks for sharing that. I want to try green peas and sliced, cooked meat sometime.

I crave salads when backpacking so I make my own by dehydrating cabbage, carrots, beets etc and bringing a tiny bottle of vinaigrette.

Did you ever get to try this out, CM?

Too many other things going on right now, so no. Also, I just tried to use my hand-held vacuum pump on some jars of (fresh) chopped onions. Either the charger is the wrong match or the battery is going bad. Rats!

I like to mix shredded cabbage with salsa and dehydrate it. Once it's dry, I mix it with a bit of hummus powder. On the trail, I add cold water to the mix a few hours before I want to eat it. It makes a spicy veggie/hummus spread that's perfect on a tortilla. Yum!

I've also been known to simply dehydrate chopped vegetables and add them to commercial freeze-dried meals.

Carry

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My dehydrated dinners are one-dish meals and include veggies. I also dehydrate chopped frozen spinach by itself (lots of nutrition for less weight and bulk) and add it to any dinners that appear short of veggies. Even if you're rehydrating with cold water, the dried spinach (almost powdered by that time) will rehydrate.

Caution--when I tried dehydrating peas, I discovered--unfortunately while out on a trip--that they remained the consistency of buckshot. After 20 minutes of cooking, I had a gluey-looking chicken casserole mush with buckshot pellets in it! I now buy freeze-dried peas and add them after dehydrating the rest of the meal. It's always a good idea to dehydrate something new in very small amounts and try it out at home. That's even more important when you'll be rehydrating in cold water.

Re nutrition--dehydrating or freeze-drying fruits and veggies destroys vitamin C. If you're out for a long trip, it's a good idea to take supplemental vitamin C. You won't get scurvy symptoms in a week, but several weeks is a different story unless you're out there in berry season "grazing" your way down the trail with purple hands and mouth. If, like me, you take a multi every day, you'll get more than enough C with that.

I pack fresh veggies in. For trips lasting up to five days all the time. Spinach, kale tomatoes, celery , cucumbers , carrots to name a few the beautiful thing about fresh veggies is there shelf stable.

Hey, Samoset - welcome back! It's been a while - sounds like your cooking skills are undiminished. Good to see you posting again.

Hey buddy,
I was In the neighborhood, so I figured I'd stay a while

Another note about the fresh veggies is they are by no means lite weight . Which will usually ensure there consumed rapidly. On the plus side they make you feel good .